It's an interesting question because it points us to recent evolutions in
film style. But I don't think that its sources are to be found in the dogma
film but in television (not to forget that Lars von Triers first use of
handheld camera in his THE KINGDOM was inspired by an US-Crime series whose
name I don't remember).
SYRIANA and TWENTYFOUR as well are using this style. It's quite
entertaining when used in films, in the same way television is entertaining,
although I must admit, that I got completely confused and lost in THE BOURNE
ULTIMATUM. Documentary style action films could be regarded as examples for
what David Bordwells calls intensified continuity used in films such as
Michael Bays ARMAGEDDON or Tony Scotts ENEMY OF THE STATE (you may get
confused from time to time, but the films don't aim at a deconstruction of
cinematic space).
I thought that SYRIANA and UNITED 93 were very good when first seeing them,
but now I am quite alarmed about their film style. This use of handheld
cameras, which is based on the discovery that you can shoot with many
cameras and combine any frame you want as long as the camera is moving,
gives the films some kind of selfsufficient aesthetic gloss, which lead to
artistic disaster like BABEL. The film always look kind of 'important' with
the documentary style and the episodic structure showing us how tragedy and
globalisation go together. But if you look closer, not only the montage of
handheld camera shots comes from television, but also the episodic structure
finds it sources in the 'segmentalisation' (using a concept by John Ellis)
of television story telling in news, commercials and serial TV: Due to the
short attentions spans of their viewers television puts together short
segments which have some kind of narrative closure in theirselves. In
TV-series, segments are followed by other segments, taking over new
narrative threads. I was wondering whether all those ambitious epic films
with episodic structure (a recent exampte is the Fatih Akin's AUF DER
ANDEREN SEITE), confirming their arthouse status with every single frame
(though Akin's film is much better than BABEL), have more to do with
television aesthetics than they might think and know - no problem for me
because I often prefer television to cinema.
Herbert
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