Originally published by Bloomsbury, 2008

Inferring Continuity Across the Cut: Chaotic Style as the Perception of “Wholeness” in Transformers (2007)

The visual and sonic field of Transformers is motivated by a desire for spatial revelation rather than obfuscation; all elements of the spatio-temporal field are directed toward the sensory experience of space, and objects within space, rather than toward sensory stimulation as an experience in itself. Each action sequence is framed in relation to the revelation of bodies within space, and in almost all instances, bodies moving freely through space. Engaging the frenetic action of the several set pieces in Transformers, culminating in the half-hour audio-visual barrage on a city street, is thus not to engage a spatio-temporal field devoid of continuity, but to encounter complex, densely populated spaces carefully framed within a spatio-temporal whole. While Bay has clearly adopted the fashionable action film aesthetic founded on an unstable frame, rapid discontinuous cutting, and a barrage of noise loosely related to a visual source, each set piece of frenetic, disorienting action is punctuated by a sequence of relative stability: a lowering and stripping back of the sound layers, a relatively stable, frequently character-motivated point of view, and the lengthy, distended revelation of what I call impossible images: digital special effects compositions framed in relation to the pro-filmic space. In the Transformers franchise, and particularly in the first film, such digital effects exhibitions are almost always depicted in a wide/extreme long shot, in relatively stable framing, held at some duration (frequently in shots exceeding five seconds), and frequently in highly expressive slow-motion sequences. We see such careful framings of digital compositions in relation to the military base in the first Transformer attack, the desert village of the second attack, the freeway confrontation between Optimus Prime and Bonecrusher, and the visual and aural maelstrom of the city street in the concluding sequence.

In the first Transformer attack (6:02-8:54), (29)Bay’s approach to editing certainly approximates aspects of Stork’s chaos style. The average shot length (ASL) across the sequence is 2.7 seconds. There are a number of frenetic, disorienting movements within the sequence, notably after the Transformer begins its attack. Bay covers the fleeing of the army personnel with a hand-held, jittery style, frequently whip-panning to shift from one field of action to another. Points of view are interspersed with seemingly random shots of destruction: tanks cascading through the air, structures exploding (providing focal points within the space but clearly undifferentiated from the whole), peripheral figures fleeing the scene with little sense of spatial directionality.

And yet the phenomenological experience of this sequence – even the directionless barrage of destruction – is anything but discontinuous, anything but fragmented. Indeed, I would argue that Bay’s style is continuous in precisely the mode indicated by Berliner and Cohen of perceptual continuity of the physical world: the sequence contrasts, and strategically punctuates, movements of disoriented action with movements clearly designed to stabilize perception of the spatio-temporal field. Here continuity is less a matter of formal image aesthetics – the continuity style realised through mise en scène, cinematography and editing – than in negotiating the perception of continuity by the spectator. In the juxtaposition of relative chaos and relative stability, the spectator undergoes what Berliner and Cohen call a “mental transformation” in which she “transforms incomplete information into a mental model of space.” (30)Applied to cinema, this psychological principle of perceptual continuity “can, by exploiting the reconstruction process, trick the perceiver into seeing continuity.” (31)Bay strategically negotiates an aesthetic style founded upon rapid camera moves and restless, unstable camerawork with the elemental desire of the spectator of Hollywood’s mainstream action cinema for spatio-temporal, narrative and existential continuity – what I am calling global Hollywood’s projection of wholeness. (32)

Berliner and Cohen argue that “it should come as no surprise that changes in movie images across cuts do not much disrupt our experience of spatial coherence.” (33) Of course, the principal model of continuity utilised by Berliner and Cohen is the classical Hollywood continuity style, and the authors offer a close examination of George Cukor’s MGM studio classic, The Philadelphia Story (1940), to support their argument. But what happens to perceptually inferred continuity in a contemporary action genre film style founded on ever more frenetic, viscerally charged action, greater stylistic extremes in lensing and camera work, and larger, less obviously differentiated fields of action? Precisely how is this continuity realised? In my opinion, continuity in such chaotic aesthetic fields is even more emphatically realised, approximating an experience of Bordwell’s “intensified continuity” of the contemporary Hollywood film. Perceptual continuity in Transformers is strategically (and emphatically) maintained through the juxtaposition of what I call action spaces and contemplative spaces. While action spaces are formulated through the affect of cutting – literally cutting the field of vision as a sensory charge – contemplative spaces are populated with bodies in relation to space, providing the spectator unencumbered perceptual access to that space as a continuous spatio-temporal field. This negotiation of chaotic, viscerally-charged style within a perceptually continuous spatio-temporal field is a signature of Bay’s action cinema aesthetic.

In the first Transformer attack, Bay sets up the inciting incident of the arrival of an identified military helicopter. The sequence builds a conventional set piece through the parallelism between the helicopter and the drama involving the sequence’s protagonist, William Lennox (Josh Duhamel). While the ASL is a fairly “chaotic” 2.7 seconds, the sequence builds perceptual spatio-temporal continuity through a series of contemplative spaces: at the point of revelation of the Transformer, the image holds in a medium-long shot, then dollies in just as the helicopter begins to transform. [Figures 1-3]

The shot is held for seven seconds, a noticeable, felt duration within the sequence. At this point, the shot is merely a revelation of the Transformer; a close-up on the face of the pilot ripples with digital code, inserting the object into a digital image itinerary familiar to audiences of films like The Matrix (1999). However, the cut from the revelation of the Transformer opens the image into a long shot and a left-right track behind a densely populated image field: vehicles and soldiers preparing for the confrontation. [Figures 4-9]

The low-level of the track further emphasizes the objects in relation to space as the shot strategically now obscures the spectator’s view from full visual access to the Transformer; partially obscured, the spectator instead perceives the Transformer only in relation to the objects situated in various spatial planes blocking the frame. In shifting from the close-up revelation of the Transformer to the wide angle, Bay effectively reveals the object a second time, but the Transformer is now strategically focalised within the spatio-temporal field as whole. The two-shot montage association stitches the revelation of the digital image into its pro-filmic environment, thereby establishing a continuous spatio-temporal field incorporating the Transformer and the environment of the surrounding military base.

Such contemplative spaces abound in Bay’s style, and are most emphatic in the first Transformer’s film. After the attack on the base, the sequence moves into a frenetic concoction of action images. However, again, the sequence re-affirms, or re-composes, spatial continuity through interspersed contemplative spaces: a wide shot in depth of the Transformer clearly situated within the entire field; this image reveals the Transformer as an aesthetic image of attraction in relation to the surrounding field. [Figures 10-12]

Indeed, the attraction of the image derives from the strangeness of Bay’s impossible digital composition juxtaposed with a relatively familiar, even compositionally clichéd, military base mise en scène. Movements of tight, frenetic cutting are strategically rationalized through wide shots in expansive depths of field. Such contemplative spaces interspersed throughout the sequence are achieved through depth of field, duration, and very often, clearly oriented lines of sight, frequently signified through a character’s point-of-view perspective of the spatial field.

In the second Transformer attack, again utilising a very basic spatio-temporal parallelism, Bay establishes an emphatic continuity over and above the experience of chaotic action. Now in the desert, the Transformer attacks a group of marines, allowing Bay free access to his signature hyperbolic image of action. As in the first attack, framing, camerawork, lines of movement within the field, even wide shots of action, are frequently unstable and disorienting. [Figures 13-15]

In this sequence, the juxtaposed contemplative space is perceptually opened for the spectator through a parallel comic interlude, a narrative device Bay frequently uses in his films. The frenetic action sequence is juxtaposed with the striking stillness of a cut to a call centre operator. [Figures 16-17] 

The spectator is both released from the disorienting, assaultive action, and provided the duration of a parallel sequence through which to infer the perceptual continuity of the spatio-temporal field of the desert action sequence. Again drawing on Berliner and Cohen, I would argue that the contemplative space compels the spectator to search for coherence in the spatio-temporal field of the action sequence, appropriating the eye-line point of view, frame stability, and clarity of sound from the parallel sequence in the call centre. Indeed, as an opening into a contemplative space, I read the comic interlude less as a narrative unit than as a ‘framed insert’ into the larger action sequence movement. The stillness of the comic interlude is incorporated within the spatio-temporal field, functioning as creative montage in formulating a continuous experiential field. In this sequence, as in the first attack, the spectator does not require the clarity of continuity style. Rather, Bay’s frenetic action, subject to both continuity and discontinuity cuts, is sublimated by the spectator within the spatio-temporal field of the whole.

The freeway confrontation Stork excerpts in his video essay perhaps best approximates the chaos style, yet here again, the image of disorienting action is always contextualized within the spatio-temporal whole. Rapid editing and a particularly aggressively moving camera are rationalized within the field through establishing shots, wide-angle shots in expansive depths of field, and Bay’s highly expressive use of slow motion. The sequence plays out a marvellous, self-reflexive negotiation of contemporary action aesthetics. Bay utilizes his chaotic style derived through trial and error from the Bad Boys franchise. In a signature style, he frames vehicular chases for radical discontinuity, an aesthetic mode derived from the car-film genre. Framing chaotic car chases is certainly not original to Bay, nor, indeed, to the so-called post-continuity era of the action film. In a film like Mad Max (1979), George Miller breaches continuity through expressive cutting far more radically, and to far greater visceral effect, than Bay has managed in either the Bad Boys or Transformers franchise.

In the freeway confrontation, discontinuous editing is perceptually rationalized through the exhibition of action images held in duration. Again, Bay juxtaposes a montage of chaotic action with an insert framing the action within the whole. As in the action sequence in the desert, a series of frenetic cuts are juxtaposed with wide-angle depths of field, bringing the frame to rest. But in this sequence, the contemplative space within the chaotic action is all the more emphatically composed through the use of slow motion. [Figures 19-22]

Slow motion rationalizes the perceptually disorienting frames, cuts, and soundscapes, revealing the image within spatial surroundings at greater length, providing an extended perceptual duration. Slow motion in depth fixes on the action image, but now, in emphatic depth and duration, the action image is inscribed in relation to the spatio-temporal field; slow motion brings the image into an emphatic relation to spatial and, particularly, temporal continuity. A similar use of slow motion was pioneered within mainstream cinema in The Matrix’s (1999) bullet-time, in which impossible motion was made perceptually “continuous” through the use of extreme slow motion. (34)

In the final sequence of Transformers – a framed action set piece of twenty-four minutes’ duration – Bay constructs a number of contemplative spaces breaking the action. Such inserts include cutaways to parallel narratives (for example, the drama involving Secretary of Defense, John Keller (Jon Voight) at Hoover Dam), and moments of respite from the attack of the Decepticons in which the central characters strategize their defence. Two distinctly contemplative spaces are opened within the action through isolated character movements within the spatio-temporal field. In the classical narrative trajectory toward resolution, it is fitting that such perceptually orienting “journeys of becoming” should be undertaken by the film’s two protagonists, Sam and Mikaela.

Each journey functions as the affirmation of a spatio-temporal continuity within an extended action sequence of great complexity, denseness, and chaos. In a familiar narrative device, the protagonist is isolated from his community – Sam must set out with the cube to ensure that it does not fall into the hands of Megatron. This journey is strategically shot in depth of field, and framed in relation to the chaotic action that swells now as background to the continuity and aggressive directionalityof Sam’s narrative foreground. [Figures 23-26]

In the series of densely populated images depicting Sam’s passage along the street, the spectator infers an overarching continuity beyond the sensory chaos of the action images in the background. Sam’s trajectory toward resolution (and thus the affirmation of continuity) is narrative (his journey brings the dominant narrative field to fulfilment), symbolic (his journey completes the process of transformation, or becoming), and imagistic (his journey stabilizes the chaotic frame composited now as a continuous field).

Another contemplative space within the sequence is perhaps more imaginative: the second protagonist, Mikaela, despairs at the imminent victory of Megatron and the potential destruction of the human race. The camera cuts into a tight profile angle as she rests her head on the steering wheel of her truck. [Figure 27]

The contemplative space is opened through a lowering of the sound – a partial muting of the cacophony of the action within the surrounding field – and, in a shot of noticeable duration, she re-energizes, rediscovers her will, and re-joins the battle against Megatron. As the truck roars off with renewed verve, an instrumental hard rock track suddenly bursts over the isolated soundscape internal to the truck, encapsulating Mikaela’s journey along the street within the contemplative, insular field of the sound-image. The soundtrack, in a literal sense, “contains” Mikaela’s journey along the street. The track hermetically seals the journey as a contemplative space cut off from the surrounding cacophony. Again, Bay’s chaotic method in framing, cutting and populating image fields is perceptually rationalised through a juxtaposed sequence (an insert) in which the spectator is provided access – and time – to contemplate, and perceptually infer, the continuous spatio-temporal field.

In this set of analyses, I have attempted to demonstrate that Bay’s chaotic action style remains firmly grounded within a spectatorial mode of engagement founded on continuity. While I have anchored my analysis firmly within the text – Transformers (2007) – I would contend that contemporary action cinema as a more diversely articulated genre negotiates an aesthetic imperative toward what I have called existential wholeness. This is simply to argue that scholarly and critical discourses surrounding cinematic continuity – and increasingly, the lively speculation on various “post-continuities” within new media regimes – must engage the phenomenology of continuity as it plays out in industrial, aesthetic and global commercial film contexts.

Conclusion: On the Mechanics of Digital Continuity

Bay’s mechanics of continuity are deployed throughout the Transformers franchise. Each film constructs a cinematic diegesis founded on narratives of becoming and accessible, ultimately orienting spatio-temporal environments. As a global commodity, Transformers functions as a brand for consumption and recycling. Deploying a film style increasingly pervasive in the genre of action cinema, its compositional logic is toward the continuity of aesthetic form and existential experience. In his excellent study of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) as exemplary of a “post-cinematic affect,” Steven Shaviro identifies a contemporary image production ethos founded on “the excessive, overgrown post-cinematic mediasphere.” (35)While Shaviro is not talking about the digital image per se, he is clearly describing a digital image production and reception mode underpinning this “post-cinematic mediasphere.” Shaviro seems to be building on Lev Manovich’s speculations on the language of new media forms a decade earlier, in which Manovich argued that digital image production fundamentally altered the regime of film montage, emphasizing spatial simultaneity rather than continuity, a spatial (database) rather than temporal logic. (36)This is one radical possibility of “the digital turn,” theorised by Manovich in 2001 and picked up by Shaviro, now with the fullness of another decade’s evolution of digital image systems behind us. But in the decade following Manovich’s thesis, it has become clear that Hollywood, in the main, has forged a very different path. The possibilities of an avant-garde digital image for Manovich and Shaviro tend toward radically different image experiences: toward new modes of affect generated through new production styles and methods, and new industry formations. For Shaviro, “not only does Southland Tales not follow the method of dialectical montage; it also doesn’t follow Hollywood continuity rules for organizing a narrative in such a way as to maximize narrative flow and impact”. (37) In this model of ‘digitality’, digital films like Southland Tales not only point a way forward, toward an encounter with new images and image experiences, they also distance us from the classical, continuity-inscribed past.

I have argued that the cinema of Michael Bay presents us forcefully with the alternative: digital cinema’s emphatic affirmation of the past. This is a new media industrial practice upholding Hollywood’s continuity system as one critical aspect of a dominant industrial, aesthetic and commercial logic. If Bay’s last three instalments of the Transformers series demonstrate any departure from that model, it is toward the exponential increase in the use of digital production, distribution and exhibition methods. Transformers (2007) revelled in the novelty of the digital special effect: the seamless transformation of the machine as a process of narrative, symbolic and digital-image becoming. Bay’s astonishing image-revelation in 2007 was of a Transformer. But the digital attraction of the Transformer in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) is more complex in form and movement; in digital production and exhibition, it is more seamlessly and invisibly integrated into digital spatio-temporal fields. There is less emphasis on the Transformer as an object in relation tophysical space, than on the digital cinematic space in itself. This stylistic realignment in the franchise has occurred through digital technology’s increased capacity for perceptual realism within densely populated digital image environments. (38) In this way, Bay’s signature style is emblematic of a pervasive logic underpinning the production of the contemporary mainstream digital image.

Bay’s aggressive digital turn has afforded the creation of highly complex, densely populated synthetic environments while maintaining narrative and image fields founded on the perception of continuity. In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the stakes are raised in a final battle at the foot of the pyramids: modern and ancient technologies come together in Bay’s digital image exhibition. The digital effects are larger and more complex, but less clearly differentiated within spatial fields. ‘Chaos’ (to recall Stork’s dismissive terminology) in the two instalments registers less obviously as a system of montage than as an aesthetically innovative design template incorporating a profusion of digital materials within each cinematic frame, in a sense, taking over the frame. In the action sequences in Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon, the digital image of attraction is rationalized not within an actual space, but within a digital environment as whole. These are cinematic fields that, contrary to Shaviro’s new media images that “both multiply and break down entirely,” (39) function as an amorphous digital space in which pro-filmic and synthetic environments are seamlessly integrated into a digitally continuous whole. 

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) allegorises precisely this digital phenomenon, drawing our attention to a cinematic image in a process of becoming. The shadowy corporation, KSI, headed by Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), has learned the secret of the Transformer’s capacity to change: the mysterious element dubbed “Transformium.” Joyce holds a lump of amorphous white matter in his hand as it transforms of its own volition, declaring: “we can change anything into anything.” [Figure 28]

One can’t help reading into Joyce’s megalomaniacal statement of intention the subtext to Bay’s own experiments with spatio-temporal fields in the Transformers franchise from 2007-2014. These are films that demonstrate an astonishing aesthetic and technological virtuosity while affirming the phenomenological continuity (the perception of wholeness) underpinning the mass cultural cinema-going experience.

In his recent study of digital spaces, William Brown suggests that, “by showing space and all that fills it as a single continuum, as opposed to a space fragmented by objects, digital technology suggests the inherently connected nature of those objects and their surroundings.” (40)I would argue that this “inherently connected nature” is fundamentally a question of spatio-temporal continuity in its complex perceptual and affective fields. Against the radical possibility of the digital image as a “discretized object,” (41) Bay recuperates the commercial imperative of Hollywood’s global image commodity form, now all the more emphatically realized through digital technology’s capacity “to change anything into anything,” to become anything it wishes. That a Hollywood franchise such as Transformers ultimately affirms the existential allure of spatio-temporal continuity reveals again the systemic and profoundly historicalfoundations of an extremely large and global Hollywood entertainment industry.

This article has been peer reviewed.