How to direct an action sequence, part 2

In his appreciative review of Ben Affleck's "The Town" this week, Roger Ebert perfectly describes the feeling of disengagement I often notice in modern action sequences: "... I persist in finding chases and gun battles curiously boring. I realize the characters have stopped making the decisions, and the stunt and effects artists have taken over."

That is precisely the way I feel about those sections of obligatory, unfocused movement in most movies. They're almost like little intermissions shot by the B-team to give you a snack and potty break ("Let's all go to th lobby..."). We know nothing consequence is going to happen. The movie has entered cruise control and for the next few minutes we'll be watching one near-miss/narrow escape after another.

But this wasn't (and isn't) always so. David Bordwell looks to Hong Kong, and compares James Bond and Jackie Chan (by way of Sly Stallone), to show us how it's done.

Stallone told American Cinematographer Magazine that he wanted to put his cameras into the middle of his action scenes so they would feel as chaotic as they would to the participants:

"I thought, 'This is not supposed to hang in the Louvre.' I wanted it to be disjointed and rough, not choreographed. If you really were filming a big battle with five cameras, [their footage] would not all flow together, so we set up the [cameras] to film the action we'd scripted and told the operators they were on their own. We said, 'Do the best you can, and we'll use the interesting shots from the characters' perspectives.'"

Of this "multi-camera craziness," operator Vern Nobles says: "Sly likes bumps on zooms and is stylized about camera movement. There really is no A or B or C camera in that sense. Everybody's running an A camera, for the most part."

Or everybody's running around with a C camera. Depends on how you look at it. DB points out that just about any any approach can be justified in the name of "realism" -- whether objective or subjective. Either you show what's happening, or you immerse your audience in the chaos of the moment. So, perhaps directors who invoke "realism" are not looking closely at the real challenge:

Forget the realist alibi. What do you want your sequence to do to the viewer? Do you want it to pass along an impression of bustle and flurry? Or do you want to make the viewer wince, recoil, even mildly reenact the movements of the players? Then follow the Hong Kong tradition. Yuen Woo-ping once told me that his goal was to make the viewer "feel the blow." To convey the effort and strain, the impact and pain: that's something worth doing.

It's something that the blur-o-vision tussles lack, but even fights that are more carefully filmed are strangely unmoving....