Notes Towards an Exploration of Space in Contemporary Action Cinema

Space has become fragmented. Blame Jason Bourne. Or possibly Jean Baudrillard. Jittery shots, quick editing, the desired response of dazzled confusion. Renowned (but occasionally doddery) film theorist David Bordwell calls it “intensified continuity” – the phenomenon whereby contemporary films feature a considerably shorter average shot length than ever before. More shots, more cuts, more action. As a result, the environment through which characters move becomes increasingly difficult for the spectator to map.

Some films respond by collapsing their existence towards a singularity. Paul Greengrass, a British director formerly involved in painstaking you-are-there recreations of such tragedies as Ireland’s Bloody Sunday, uses intensified continuity as a precision-tool of great dramatic and artistic effect. The set-piece in Waterloo station in Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum is the nadir of this form, the splintered world created through meticulous but frantic shooting and cutting a demonstration of the protagonist Jason Bourne’s lack of history (thanks to amnesia), but total grasp of his immediate situation even in the face of extreme pressure (thanks to relentless government indoctrination). The train station becomes his entire world, and the film depicts an attempt to grasp this vast space with something close to simultaneity. Attention is fleeting, jumping from this face to that, from the security camera to the exits. Waterloo station is depicted as fragments of vital concentration, not a coherent or meaningful entirety.




This is the postmodern environment as sensory barrage. There is a similar tendency in the television series 24, with its incessant and unenlightening split-screens gesturing towards an awareness of the wealth of incident, character, and information that accompanies the most cursory event. However, the constant pandering to the lowest attention span undoes such efforts – entire episodes seem to consist of a chain of people phoning each other and re-iterating the same conversation, without the creators or writers suggesting an awareness of the ‘Chinese-whispers’ potential of such a scenario. Space for Jack Bauer may not be highly structured, but it is entirely manageable.

Detailed mapping and navigation in this sort of drama seems impossible. Plots packed with incident keep moving, flitting from place to place, offering neither characters nor audience purchase on the surrounding environment. Nowhere better is this trend examined, and indeed parodied, than the most recent outing for James Bond, Quantum of Solace. Concluding in a bizarre hotel in the middle of the desert (indeed, there are few scenes in the film that do not take place in hotel rooms, lobbies, anonymous corridors or sleek performance spaces), the setting is a meaningless, depopulated postmodern space. As the hotel itself is unconnected from a metropolitan, or even rural surrounding, so too the sections of the hotel itself fail to cohere. The central space of the hotel, across which walkways are suspended in mid-air, is like something from a science-fiction film.

Even the destruction of this site by multiple explosions, previously such an easy fallback pleasure of action films in the 80s and 90s, is undercut by the nonsensibility of the devastation. In the finest shot of the film, if not the entire series, the villain flees from an explosion as it bursts through a wall and shatters a room-spanning sheet of glass; the space may be hollow, but the only way to understand it is through action. What was previously inert and functionless (the room, the glass, the hotel itself) becomes dazzling in its beauty and its dynamism. Spectacle and excitement become tools with which to explore the meaning of architecture, and our interaction with it.




This re-examination of a space once inert made ferocious is used to great effect in the thriller The International. Extended sequences in Milan, New York and Istanbul successfully ingrain themselves with the cities they visit without excessive sequences of “local colour”. The centrepiece in Frank Lloyd Wright’s coiled Guggenheim museum (shot for the most part inside a 98% to scale replica built in Germany) offers initially the use of architecture-as-backdrop, as detectives follow an assassin up the rotunda where he is to meet his handler. The installation on display is a plethora of cinema screens showing occasionally stagey, occasionally vibrant scenes. The backdrop of the set itself is littered with further backdrops.

When the bullets start to fly the space is radically transformed. Balconies become shooting galleries, walls become shields, punters become collateral damage, and museum pieces become deadly weapons. The audience is rushed away from the ramp, into a staircase, then back to the rotunda. Our awareness of the environment, previously one of quiet (museum-like?) contemplation becomes one of life-or-death sensory necessity. The last shot of the space is a slow track forward and pan up, asking us to see how our awareness of the building has changed, progressed, clarified. Unlike the shifting mass of people and camera movement of Waterloo, this architecture is built from the ground-up within the structure of the scene and the shots that compose it.



Creating his own environments to explore, James Cameron frequently offers a meticulous recomposing of these spaces as his films cross their halfway point. In The Abyss, set almost entirely aboard an oil platform based on the ocean floor, a tour of the intricacies and layout of the rig is interwoven with the narrative during the first hour and a half. When an accident cripples the vessel, and a visiting Navy SEAL team turn against the blue-collar crew, this knowledge is redeployed as a potential for salvation. Reviewers often term this sort of action “hard-earned” – those who paid attention earlier are rewarded by a comforting feeling of awareness and security. Inversely, it is the cardinal sin of any narrative for a solution to be offered that has no preceding conditions for its existence (the plotting equivalent of the fight scene in which the hero triumphs at the moment their plight seems most dire by kicking their attacker in the genitals). Titanic actually shows the sinking of the ship twice, first in one of the early scenes aboard a salvaging vessel in the modern day, as an aged survivor is lectured using a rudimentary computer program as to what damage the iceberg did, and how the subsequent flooding of the compartmentalised sections of the hull led to the front of the ship sinking, the rising of the rear section, the tearing of the ship in two, then subsequent vertical dragging down of beneath the waves. Later, when a far more advanced computer program depicts the same events, there is no need for an over-calm character explaining what is occurring, or expositional shots of the hull under water. “What’s going on!” asks Rose to her lover: “I don’t know” he replies. But we do. The spectacle of action is only offered after forensic enquiry and two hours of dramatic action exploring every deck, engine room and cabin.

Space, then, does not have to be fragmented to be explored. The Waterloo Station of The Bourne Ultimatum exists in shards, while the hotels on Quantum of Solace seem not to exist at all. The Guggenheim of The International is scrutinised and given a new life, while the self-created spaces of James Cameron films exist as lined-up dominoes for thrilling set pieces. The action film offers a method of dynamically exploring architecture, turning what could be merely a backdrop into a tangible environment which can be mapped in a variety of unexpected ways.