5 4 July 2017
Transformers is typical: a
critic-panned superhero
blockbuster sequel of
furiously-paced and
incomprehensible ‘chaos
cinema’: without any content
by Cormac Deane
‘T
RANSFORMERS’ CAME out ten years
ago this month. It’s not exactly a
milestone event in the history of
film, but it has left its mark. For those who
have not seen it, it is a highly kinetic science-
fiction action movie featuring a war between
rival races of shape-changing robots, with
Earth as their main battlefield. There have
been four more instalments in the franchise
since 2007, with ‘Transformers: The Last
Knight’ on multiple screens across Ireland
this summer.
The ‘Transformers’ concept grew out of a
line of children’s plastic toys of the same
name, and the experience of watching the
movies gives more or less the same pleas-
ures as watching a four-year-old smash a
couple of pieces of coloured plastic together.
Critics have panned the films in this way (i.e.
mercilessly) from the start, but they are
extremely popular, the first four of them
amassing a profit of almost $3bn
worldwide.
We can use ‘Transformers’ as a good lens
for understanding a set of very rapid devel
-
opments in cinema and media more
generally over the ten years since it came
out. First, it typifies the strong trend towards
large-scale blockbuster sequels, often
based on superhero franchises, that have
come to dominate the box office. Think
‘Batman’, ‘Spiderman’, ‘Superman’, and ‘The
Avengers’, all of which are in their sixth, sev-
enth or later versions, depending on how you
count the core stories and their spin-offs.
Other multiply-sequelled titles of the past
decade or so include ‘Pirates of the Carib-
bean’, ‘The Fast and the Furious’, ‘Alien’ and
there is plenty of evidence that the testoster-
one-fuelled trend will continue in the form
of, to name a few, Lego toy spin-offs, ‘Cars’,
and ‘Wonder Woman’.
What ‘Transformers’ shares with all of
these is its furious pace, especially in the
action scenes. The 2007 film is often pointed
to as the first notable example of a frenetic
editing style that produces ‘chaos cinema’.
Traditional editing techniques for main-
stream movies put a lot of effort into making
sure that the viewer maintains a coherent
sense of the space of the action. If moving to
the right in one shot, a character had better
be moving to the left in the next shot if the
camera has moved to the opposite side.
‘Transformers’ junked this convention. Not
only is its Average Shot Length (ASL) around
the frenetic three-second mark (as opposed
Movies
transform into
media events
Transformers’ junked the
convention that if moving
to the right in one shot, a
character had better be
moving to the left in the
next shot if the camera has
moved to the opposite side;
its Average Shot Length
(ASL) three-seconds not the
average 8
MEDIA
July 2017 5 5
to the average ASL of about eight seconds), but
many of the shots are literally incomprehensible.
In chaos cinema, objects, characters, vehicles
and debris fly across our vision in practically any
direction, producing a hectic sense of energy
that exhausts many (mostly older) viewers and
draws in millions of thrill-seeking, distracted
and distractable viewers. The soundscape is
also packed with content, much of it also mean-
ingless, if you are looking for sound that contains
usable information, but meaningfully exhilarat-
ing if you are looking for a sonic rush.
The notion that there is such a thing as ‘chaos
cinema’ arguably became established with the
release of a two-part video essay, titled ‘Chaos
Cinema’, by Matthias Stork in 2011. The develop-
ment of the video essay itself is part of the
broader story of what has been happening to
visual media in the ‘Transformers’ decade. Video
essays generally consist of multiple clips from
movies accompanied by a voiceover exploring a
certain theme, filmmaker or trope. They can be
high- or low-brow, are usually amateur, and
often grow out of fan culture. They are posted
online and occasionally go viral, the most suc-
cessful garnering hundreds of thousands of
views. As such, the video essay as a genre in
itself is highly distinctive of this last decade,
during which a great many of us have barely
lifted our eyes from our screens.
The popular style among video-essay practi
-
tioners (should we say ‘filmmakers?’.
‘Essayists?’) is typified by Tony Zhou, an Ameri-
can editor who presents snappy analytical
pieces, often with a pedagogical edge. The style
is the NPR-mode, akin to (for you podcast listen-
ers out there) ‘99% Invisible’, ‘Radiolab’ or ‘This
American Life’. There is a taste for the quirky, for
a studied, homespun relaxedness that makes
the content come across as a series of interest-
ing titbits to stimulate the viewer-listener. The
content is thought-provoking, observational,
supposedly serendipitous, and positions itself
as intellectually sophisticated but is usually
rather lightweight and carefully apolitical. In
other words, it is clickbait for hipsters.
Despite my cynicism, it is clear that the video
essay is full of exciting possibilities, including
what are called ‘desktop documentaries’. An
excellent example is by the prolific video-essay-
ist Kevin B Lee, whose 2014 ‘Transformers: The
Premake’ accompanied the cinema release of the
fourth Transformers movie, ‘Age of Extinction’.
Without using voiceover, Lee guides us around
his computer desktop, featuring various videos,
maps and other sources of information about the
making of this film. But this is more than a
behind the scenes sneak preview.
His account is a fascinating demonstration of
the pop-will-eat-itself circularity of modern
media. ‘The Premake’ shows how the makers of
‘Transformers 4’ co-opted the videos taken by
fans and bystanders as part of their publicity
campaign before the film was released. That is,
the studio used online footage of scenes being
shot in public places that people had posted of
their own volition. Not only was this an extremely
clever way of fanning the flames of already exist-
ing fandom, but it was cheap too. The work that
people were willing to put into their social media
profiles was harnessed by the studio without
needing to pay for it.
When filming moved to Hong Kong and else
-
where in China, the amateur camera-phones
were there ready for them, expectantly hoping
for a glimpse not only of A-lister Mark Wahlberg
but also of the Chinese star Li Bingbing. The
attention that blockbusters get from local media
during the filming process is now integrated into
the marketing campaign, and the work of gener-
ating the content is almost exclusively done by
regular people. The rest is done by public-rela
-
tions companies that simply direct media outlets
towards the relevant content with hashtags and
media postings. They follow this up by supplying
copy and images to local press and TV, which
hoover them up, glad of the free, pre-edited,
glossy, and business-friendly content. Local
press and TV are themselves starved of revenue
because of the shift to ‘free’ online content, so
they take any free content they can get, effec-
tively forced to participate in the very trend in the
mediascape that is destroying their business
models.
All of this takes place under the aegis of
tourism initiatives, tax breaks and photo-shoot-
hungry city officials. The Bollywood extravaganza
‘Ek Tha Tiger’, which was filmed partly in Trinity
College Dublin in 2012 exploited exactly this phe-
nomenon. Two major non-state revenue streams
that Trinity increasingly relies on, as the prospect
grows dimmer of any real improvement in govern-
ment spending on higher education, are tourism
and international students, who pay enormous
fees. At the time of filming, Trinity’s Provost for
Global Relations, Jane Ohlmeyer, welcomed the
opportunity to tap into both of these simultane
-
ously: “The College currently boasts a wide array
of teaching and research relating to India along
with growing numbers of students from South
Asia. ‘Ek Tha Tiger’ not only gave Trinity a chance
to showcase our magnificent campus to a huge
Bollywood audience but also gave our Indian stu-
dents a chance to catch a glimpse of two of
India’s biggest stars in action here at Trinity
College”.
Finally, it is telling that nothing in this article
so far has addressed the content of ‘Transform
-
ers’. The movie is as much a media event as a
story made up of pictures and sounds. This is
apparent in the way that underage children con-
sume blockbusters as media events (in the form
of toys, trailers, pyjamas, stationery, stickers,
animated versions, television adverts and so on)
without ever seeing the movies themselves. Just
as children who never see football nevertheless
participate in its market as consumers of celeb
-
rity-endorsed clothing and footwear and of
player-card collections such as Match Attax, the
contemporary media consumer will ‘see’ or ‘read
about’ or ‘know about’ any number of films,
news stories or celebrity gossip without ever
needing to see, read about or know anything
about the source event or product. If you haven’t
seen Transformers or any of its sequels, you
don’t need to. This article has told you all you
need to know.
Cormac Deane lectures in film and media at the
Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
There is a taste for
the quirky, for a
studied, homespun
relaxedness that makes
the thought-provoking
but lightweight content
come across as a series of
interesting titbits to stimulate
the viewer-listener

Loading

© 2015 Village Magazine

Back to Top