Post Continuity Cinema

Carleton University

“This ain’t Sunset Boulevard”
Post-Continuity “Chaos Cinema” in Domino

Hilary Leachman
Student No.: 100942590
FILM 2608
Professor Malini Guha
April 6th, 2015
There is a certain style of cinema that has become popular in many contemporary action Blockbusters; this style has been described simultaneously (and with various levels of disdain or support) as intensified continuity (David Bordwell), post-continuity (Steven Shaviro), and chaos cinema (Matthias Stork). Regardless of how the style is described, it is certainly recognizable, Bordwell states: “Today’s movie […] plays out like its own coming attraction trailer.” Contemporary action is frantic and full-throttle, a never-ending assault of spectacle

In post-continuity films, this is not necessarily true: “We enter into the spacetime of modern physics; or better, into the ‘space of flows’, and the time of microintervals and speed-of-light transformations, that are characteristic of globalized, high-tech financial capital.” For Shaviro, the fragmented, break neck speed of post-continuity film is expressive of globalization, suggesting a broad cultural scope and reasoning behind the

Other examples he provides are the widespread integration of graphics, sound effects, and footage that emulates video games, as well as what he calls the ‘promiscuous mixtures’ of different styles of footage. Once more, Domino is the perfect support to Shaviro’s argument. Scott continuously plays with graphics and sound design; he inserts surveillance footage sporadically throughout the film; intertitles are inserted with indiscriminate point of views; he rewinds footage to nullify narrative action, etc. Scott also occasionally stops all action to introduce a new character, freezing the frame and throwing their name on the screen, regardless of the size of the role the character will play. A prime example of this style occurs when Domino explains the relationships between the characters and the stolen ten million dollars; the screen turns into a series of charts, mixing stills and moving images of characters and scenes, linking them with a bright green line. The camera zooms into one of the stills and introduces us to the mob boss, Anthony Cigliutti. He sits in a strange plastic globe at the bottom of his pool with a cordless phone (Domino explains in voiceover that this is to avoid the ears of the FBI). His voice is highly