Last August Press Play‘s Matthias Stork posted a landmark two-part essay called “Chaos Cinema,” which, as I wrote on 8.22, “articulates and clarifies a lot of things that many of us have been feeling for a long while.”
Today a third “Chaos Cinema” essay was posted, primarily intended to answer a few onliners who criticized the original two essays. (I would post the video but the embed code is ridiculous.)
“Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action films, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload,” Stork wrote/narrated last summer. “[It’s] a film style marked by excess, exaggeration, over-indulgence, a never-ending crescendo with no spacial clarity…chaos cinema. The new action films are fast, forward, volatile, an audio-visual war zone.”
The only art in this form, Stork declared, “is the art of confusion.”