> I went to see Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift last night.  (!)

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to follow up on dan's fast and the furious post, i have very briefly 
discussed the mobile thing on my blog in the comments:

http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/2006/06/tokyo-drift.html

I am particularly interested in TFaTF franchise as my research is on 
contemporary modified-car culture.

Motorsport coverage is often talked about in terms of 'action' in 
enthusiast discourse. 'How close were ya to the action?' or 'The 
action's comin' at ya!!'. 'Action' is what motorsport cinematography 
attempts to capture and transmit. I think of this 'action' as an event.

There are at least two main ways that 'filming' is used internal to the 
film -- the mobile phones in the drifting scenes and filming using a DV 
camera of some description in the opening suburb-destroying race scene.

In the first TFaTF film, CGI was largely relied on to 'capture' the 
event of 'action'. The CGI was used to trace the imagined connection 
between driver and car to the core of the car's being -- the combustion 
chamber. (Plus it traced the path of the 'mystical' element -- i mean 
in the sense of enthusiast cultures involving a mythology -- the NOS.)

In this third film the director Justin Lin captures 'action' in a 
different way through the use of mobile phones. In the drifting race 
scenes set in the car parking structure the crowd has mobile phones and 
they are depicted trying to film the cars going around the corners. 
What is weird is that in the middle of the race scenes the cinematic 
camera dwells on the crowd for half a second to show them showing their 
phone-films to each other (signified by the tilting the phone gesture, 
but it happens too quick for them to actually be showing each other). 
Or, as Dan says, even placing the cinema frame roughly around the 
phone's screen.

One is a vertical-depth 'penetration' model (CGI, driver<->combustion 
chamber) and the other literally spreads the event out across the 
*surface of the event* through the phones. The virtualisation of this 
event, within the event by the mobile phones, demonstrates to the 
audience that something is happening that is worth capturing and 
transmitting (by the Japanese spectators to each other in the crowd). 
The virtualisation is a valorisation. It is a rather masterful way to 
capture and transmit 'action' without relying on fantasy CGI elements.

There is another section of in-film filming. In this first instance 
(opening suburb-destroying race scene), the audience never sees any 
post-filming interaction, only the relatively static 'camera guy' 
filming on the back of a truck. It recreates the spectator-spectacle 
relation between what is happening with the race (as spectacle-event) 
and the spectators (us as audience, but also all the other teenagers in 
the film, so we are part of this teenage audience). This is one of 
those moments where the spectacle of racing and enthusiast car culture 
is overcoded almost entirely with a reckless machismo masculinity. The 
Japanese race scenes are also about machismo but there is a certain 
grace to them that this US-based scene certainly does not have. Part of 
this is because of the fluid drift aesthetic.

ciao,
glen.

-- 
PhD Candidate 
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney

Read my rants: http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/

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