15 reasons to take Twitter seriously

Just watched The Guardian's editor Alan Rusbridger deliver this year's Andrew Olle Media Lecture and was impressed by everything he said in general but particularly about Twitter - that form of social media at which I once foolishly snickered before signing on as @lyndenbarber and becoming an overnight convert.

Here's an extract - the full speech is up at the ABC website.

Rusbridger:

Here, off the top of my head, are 15 things, which Twitter does rather effectively and which should be of the deepest interest to anyone involved in the media at any level.

1. It's an amazing form of distribution: it's a highly effective way of spreading ideas, information and content. Don't be distracted by the 140-character limit. A lot of the best tweets are links. It's instantaneous. Its reach can be immensely far and wide. Why does this matter? Because we do distribution too. We're now competing with a medium that can do many things incomparably faster than we can. It's back to the battle between scribes and movable type. That matters in journalistic terms. And, if you're trying to charge for content, it matters in business terms. The life expectancy of much exclusive information can now be measured in minutes, if not in seconds. That has profound implications for our economic model, never mind the journalism.
2. It's where things happen first. Not all things. News organisations still break lots of news. But, increasingly, news happens first on Twitter. If you're a regular Twitter user, even if you're in the news business and have access to wires, the chances are that you'll check out many rumours of breaking news on Twitter first. There are millions of human monitors out there who will pick up on the smallest things and who have the same instincts as the agencies - to be the first with the news. As more people join, the better it will get.
3. As a search engine, it rivals Google. Many people still don't quite understand that Twitter is, in some respects, better than Google in finding stuff out. Google is limited to using algorithms to ferret out information in the unlikeliest hidden corners of the web. Twitter goes one stage further - harnessing the mass capabilities of human intelligence to the power of millions in order to find information that is new, valuable, relevant or entertaining.
4. It's a formidable aggregation tool - You set Twitter to search out information on any subject you want and it will often bring you the best information there is. It becomes your personalised news feed. If you are following the most interesting people they will in all likelihood bring you the most interesting information. In other words, it's not simply you searching. You can sit back and let other people you admire or respect go out searching and gathering for you. Again, no news organisation could possibly aim to match, or beat, the combined power of all those worker bees collecting information and disseminating it.
5. It's a great reporting tool - Many of the best reporters are now habitually using Twitter as an aid to find information. This can be simple requests for knowledge which other people already know, have to hand, or can easily find. The so-called wisdom of crowds comes into play: the 'they know more than we do' theory. Or you're simply in a hurry and know that someone out there will know the answer quickly. Or it can be reporters using Twitter to find witnesses to specific events - people who were in the right place at the right time, but would otherwise be hard to find.
6. It's a fantastic form of marketing - You've written your piece or blog. You may well have involved others in the researching of it. Now you can let them all know it's there, so that they come to your site. You alert your community of followers. In marketing speak, it drives traffic and it drives engagement. If they like what they read they'll tell others about it. If they really like it, it will, as they say, 'go viral'. I only have 18,500 followers. But if I get re-tweeted by one of our columnists, Charlie Brooker, I instantly reach a further 200,000. If Guardian Technology pick it up it goes to an audience of 1.6m. If Stephen Fry notices it, it's global.
7. It's a series of common conversations - Or it can be. As well as reading what you've written and spreading the word, people can respond. They can agree or disagree or denounce it. They can blog elsewhere and link to it. There's nothing worse than writing or broadcasting something to no reaction at all. With Twitter you get an instant reaction. It's not transmission, it's communication. It's the ability to share and discuss with scores, or hundreds, or thousands of people in real time. Twitter can be fragmented. It can be the opposite of fragmentation. It's a parallel universe of common conversations.
8. It's more diverse - Traditional media allowed a few voices in. Twitter allows anyone.
9. It changes the tone of writing - A good conversation involves listening as well as talking. You will want to listen as well as talk. You will want to engage and be entertaining. There is, obviously, more brevity on Twitter. There's more humour. More mixing of comment with fact. It's more personal. The elevated platform on which journalists sometimes liked to think they were sitting is kicked away on Twitter. Journalists are fast learners. They start writing differently. Talking of which...
10. It's a level playing field - A recognised 'name' may initially attract followers in reasonable numbers. But if they have nothing interesting to say they will talk into an empty room. The energy in Twitter gathers around people who can say things crisply and entertainingly, even though they may be 'unknown'. They may speak to a small audience, but if they say interesting things they may well be republished numerous times and the exponential pace of those re-transmissions can, in time, dwarf the audience of the so-called big names. Shock news: sometimes the people formerly known as readers can write snappier headlines and copy than we can.
11. It has different news values - People on Twitter quite often have an entirely different sense of what is and what isn't news. What seems obvious to journalists in terms of the choices we make is quite often markedly different from how others see it - both in terms of the things we choose to cover and the things we ignore. The power of tens of thousands of people articulating those different choices can wash back into newsrooms and effect what editors choose to cover. We can ignore that, of course. But should we?
12. It has a long attention span - The opposite is usually argued - that Twitter is simply a, instant, highly condensed stream of consciousness. The perfect medium for goldfish. But set your Tweetdeck to follow a particular keyword or issue or subject and you may well find that the attention span of Twitterers puts newspapers to shame. They will be ferreting out and aggregating information on the issues that concern them long after the caravan of professional journalists has moved on.
13. It creates communities - Or, rather communities form themselves around particular issues people, events, artifacts, cultures, ideas, subjects or geographies. They may be temporary communities, or long terms ones, strong ones or weak ones. But I think they are recognizably communities.
14. It changes notions of authority - Instead of waiting to receive the 'expert' opinions of others - mostly us, journalists - Twitter shifts the balance to so-called 'peer to peer' authority. It's not that Twitterers ignore what we say - on the contrary (see distribution and marketing, above) they are becoming our most effective transmitters and responders. But, equally, we kid ourselves if we think there isn't another force in play here - that a 21 year old student is quite likely to be more drawn to the opinions and preferences of people who look and talk like her. Or a 31-year-old mother of young toddlers. Or a 41-year-old bloke passionate about politics and the rock music of his youth.
15. It is an agent of change - As this ability of people to combine around issues and to articulate them grows, so it will have increasing effect on people in authority. Companies are already learning to respect, even fear, the power of collaborative media. Increasingly, social media will challenge conventional politics and, for instance, the laws relating to expression and speech.

Now you could write a further list of things that are irritating about the way people use Twitter - it's not good at complexity though it can link to complexity, it can be frustratingly reductive, it doesn't do what investigative reporters or war correspondents do, it doesn't, of itself, verify facts, it can be distracting, indiscriminate and overwhelming.

Moreover, I'm simply using Twitter as one example of the power of open, or social media.

Twitter may go the way of other, now forgotten, flashes in the digital pan.

The downside of Twitter also means that the full weight of the world's attention can fall on a single unstable piece of information.

But we can be sure that the motivating idea behind these forms of open media isn't going away and that, if we are blind to their capabilities, we will be making a very serious mistake, both in terms of our journalism and the economics of our business...

Rusbridger extract ends

Wasted on the Literal-Minded

Writing recently on the Stephen Fry imbroglio, in which the web exploded with righteous indignation over the polymath entertainer's comment to a gay's men's magazine that men seemed to be more sexually driven than women, I observed:


"Fry is a comedian and all-round literatus who likes to employ hyperbole. IT'S A RHETORICAL DEVICE, PEOPLE. IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY."


Now here's Fry, addressing the matter on his blog, The Fry Chronicles:


"I should have known that comic exaggeration, so much the chief mode of a humorist, can easily be made to look bad when wrenched from context and nailed up as a proclamation.

"I admit that I do have a sometimes disastrous tendency, when asked a question, to answer it, often jokingly, or in the interests of ventilating a new thought that has struck, or more or less as the mood takes me but certainly too much without any consideration of the possible consequences.


"I am not, after all, a politician who has to weigh every syllable and its chances of giving offence. Maybe I should be more aware that those who wish me ill are always likely to seize on such instances and use them as a fly-whisk with which to spank me."


Next week: volunteers working on behalf of disadvantaged youth crucify Oscar Wilde for his "grossly insensitive", "clearly reactionary" and "idiotic" remarks that "youth is wasted on the young."

Jafar Panahi's Defence Statement

Jafar Panahi's Defence Statement - presented this week at his first court appearance since leaving jail.

In the past few days I have been watching my favorite films

again, though I did not have access to some of them, which
are among the greatest films of the history of cinema.

My house was raided on the night of March 1st, 2010 while my
colleague Mr. Rasoulof and I were in the process of shooting
what we intended to be a socially conscious art house film.

The people, who identified themselves as agents of the Ministry of
Intelligence, arrested us along with other crew members without
presenting any warrants. They confiscated my collection of
films as well and never returned them to me. Subsequently, the
only reference made to those films was by the prosecutor in
charge of my case, who asked me: "What are these obscene
films you’ re collecting?"


I have learned how to make films inspired by those outstanding
films that the prosecutor deemed obscene. Believe me I have
just as much difficulty understanding how they could be called
obscene as I do comprehending how the activity for which I was
arrested could be seen as a crime? My case is a perfect example
of being punished before committing a crime.

You are putting me on trial for making a film that at the time of our arrest was only thirty per cent shot. You must have heard that the famous creed "There is no god, except Allah” , turns into blasphemy if you only say the first part and omit the second part. In the same vain, how can you establish that a crime has been committed by looking at 30% of rushes for a film that have not been edited yet?

I do not comprehend the charge of obscenity directed at the
classics of the film history, nor do I understand the crime I accused of. If these charges are true, you are putting not only
us on trial but the socially conscious, humanistic, and artistic
Iranian cinema as well, a cinema which tries to stay beyond
good and evil, a cinema that does not judge nor surrender to
power or money but tries to honestly reflect a realistic image of
the society.

One of the charges against me is attempting to encourage
demonstrations and incite protests with this film. All through
my career I have emphasized that I am a socially committed
filmmaker not a political one. My main concerns are social
issues; therefore my films are social dramas not political
statements. I never wanted to act as a judge or a prosecutor. I am
not a film maker who judges but one that invites other to see.

I don’ t get to decide for others or to write any kind of manual for
anybody; please allow me to repeat my pretension to place my
cinema beyond good and evil. This kind of belief has caused
my colleagues and my self a lot of trouble; many of my films
have been banned, along with the films of other filmmakers
like me. But it is unprecedented in Iranian cinema to arrest and
imprison a filmmaker for making a film, and harass his family
while he is in prison. This is a new development in the history of
Iranian cinema that will be remembered for a long time.


I have been accused of participating in demonstrations. No
Iranian filmmaker was allowed to use his camera to capture the
events but you can not forbid an artist to observe! As an artist
it is my responsibility to observe in order to get inspired and
create. I was an observer, and it was my right to observe.olitic conside

Eyeswired interviews Isabelle Huppert

Above I give a brief overview of Isabelle Huppert's fabulous and fascinating career in a video recorded as a plug for my interview with her which ran in The Australian this weekend. Thanks to Christine Nestel for her clip selection and editing.


The article was granted to mark next weekend's Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF) premiere of her latest film, Copacabana (the film will screen in major cities in limited release towards the end of the month).

Due to a production error, only part of the a feature was initially posted but the entire story is now online here.

A brief extract:


Her Copacabana character, Babou, adds a glorious new side to the Huppert screen persona. Apart from being upbeat, this woman is indomitably extroverted, a word we're not used to seeing in the same sentence as 'played by Isabelle Huppert'. Where the actor's signature roles have tended towards introversion and passivity, Babou is a riot of colour and minor outrage...


....while Huppert's delicious performance is in a strikingly new register, the character's extremes are very much of a piece with her body of work. They're just different extremes.

Asked about her approach to her performance when she gets a role such as this -- her process, to used a favourite actor's term -- she initially insists that she never thinks too much about the character. 'I think much more about taking the decision to do it (the film). This is the most thinking part of my work.

'Once I have established the reasons why I really want to do a movie, you know how you are going to do it. Then comes the good part, which is more intuition. It's like a whole series of images starts to build up in my consciousness, and then when I have to do the film these images are there, and they just have to come out.'

Yet that is slightly at odds with the observation of Copacabana writer-director Marc Fitoussi that reading through the script with Huppert the first time was very helpful because she was so analytical; it was almost as if she were a professional script doctor...

Extremist gender politics - the Trotskyism of the 21st Century

As a decades-long, right-on supporter of genuine gender equality, I've been finding it increasingly distressing to realise that ultra-PC gender politics has become the Trotskyism of the 21st century - the extremist political fashion of the moment.

All that self-righteous Leftist rabble-rousing had to go somewhere with the collapse of industrial society in the west and increasing irrelevance of trade unionism and for a while it was left in the wilderness getting sour.

Now it has become increasingly clear that in place of the 20th Century's working class and strikes and agitation and selling Socialist Worker outside the factory gates and "no free speech for Fascists" we have "No free speech for even mild deviations from the PC line on wymmyn's or gay issues".

See polymath (and now ex-Twitterer) Stephen Fry being fried alive this week for daring to point out that gay women are generally not as promiscuous as gay men. Disseminated of course via Twitter and Facebooks and blogs - the demo placards of the digital age.


The Fry quote:
''If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: 'God, I've got to get my f------ rocks off', or they'd go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush. It doesn't happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it.''

Somewhat bluntly expressed, and obviously a vast over-generalisation (clearly women do enjoy sex other the human race would not have lasted) - but then Fry is a comedian and all-round literatus who likes to employ hyperbole. IT'S A RHETORICAL DEVICE, PEOPLE. IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY. (Oops, sorry for shouting).

As my friend Marie Ryan, a staunch feminist of the non-extremist kind, wrote in a comment on a post by blogger Mike Stuchbery, "I don’t think Fry was saying women don’t enjoy sex, merely that they don’t have the same need for it as men, which I reckon is fairly accurate – on average. Sure there are women with high sex drives but, on the whole, men outdo us in the amount of time they think about sex, masturbate and generally feel the need for it.

"I think Fry does have a problem with women and is much more comfortable in the company of men but the vilification he’s been subject to for essentially expressing his opinion is ridiculous. What happened to free speech?"

In suggesting that lesbians are less promiscuous and sex-obsessed than male gays, as evidenced by the absence of gay women's beats, Fry was stating the obvious. Like the proverbial Emperor's new threads, the obvious can be a little hard to take for those invested in keeping it suppressed. Which is one reason why it was greeted with screams of outrage from the blogosphere.

There is an ideological reason behind all this noxiousness: 21st Century Gender Trotskyism is less concerned with equal opportunity and women being oppressed around the world and stoned to death in Iran and prevented from driving in Saudi Arabia than upholding the ideological shibboleth (and biological idiocy) that men and women are exactly the same.

What do we want? "All humans to have cocks and vaginas and wombs." When do we want it? "Now!"

How action scenes are disappearing up their own backsides

Setting out to research a major feature on the changing aesthetics of action scenes in mainstream movies, I started off by wondering if I was relatively alone in querying the trend towards incoherently constructed sequences. Using super-fast editing, violently shaking camerawork and deliberately imprecise framing, these too often seemed to me to be successful at disorienting the viewer and giving an unmistakable impression of kinetic energy, while leaving behind the comprehension, excitement and suspense that actually help an audience emotionally engage.

Film academic David Bordwell, critic Roger Ebert and his website editor, blogger Jim Emerson at Scanners, have raised these questions (click on the links to take you directly to some their pieces on the topic), but what did experienced industry practitioners, especially editors who've worked on action sequences, and film school educators think?


By the time I'd interviewed a number of specialists including the editors of The Dark Night, Inception and the forthcoming Mad Max: Fury Road, it was clear I was far from alone. Many professionals remain equally critical of this tendency and offer various reasons for it, including increasing shooting ratios and lack of planning.



Though as Salt director Phillip Noyce eloquently pointed out, incoherence is often a deliberate strategy designed to catapult the viewer into the centre of the action, especially in the films of Paul Greengrass including the Bourne sequels and Green Zone). If you feel confused at times, that's good, according to the Noyce viewpoint, because it means you're experiencing the sensations being experienced by the characters on screen.

Here's  the story, which ran in The Weekend Australian:

A drive away from coherence in action films is leading to an aesthetic best labelled 'new confusion'

THRILLERS by definition have always aimed to excite the viewer, using a battery of techniques. Classics such as Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and the early Mad Max, Die Hard, Alien and Terminator films were constructed around brilliantly structured sequences that amounted to miniature symphonies of tension and release, full of excitement, suspense, relief and shock.

In the late 1980s and the 90s, Hong Kong films, especially the bullet ballets of John Woo, revolutionised the genre using multiple camera set-ups, elaborate choreography and slow-mo, a style given a further twist in the first Matrix film.

But a very different aesthetic has swept Hollywood action that leaves those earlier schools far behind. Not so much enabled by digital editing and hand-held cameras as pushing these technologies to the max, the new stylistics use a barrage of ultra-rapid edits, often semi-random close-ups, partial framing and violently shaking cameras.

The intention, in at least some cases, is to pitch viewers into the middle of the action, giving a visceral experience, in the words of Australia's Phillip Noyce, who directed the recent hyper-kinetic Angelina Jolie thriller Salt. But at its worst it can amount to over-the-top, incoherent filmmaking, sound and fury signifying nothing: an approach seemingly designed to excite the retina and disorient the viewer.

Examples of what we might call the "new confusion" style include:
(a) Human commandos battle a gigantic robot, or maybe several, using transporters, cars, motorbikes and -- don't ask -- an ice-cream van, but it's almost impossible to figure out where the vehicles and the robot(s) stand in relation to one another.

(b) In a frantic chase on a mountain road, a vehicle arrives out of nowhere to ram the hero's car and gunshots are exchanged. What ought to be a thrilling start to a movie is filmed and edited so chaotically, with so many lightning-fast edits and unclear shots, that it feels like you've been watching a non-narrative music video that pastiches action films.

(c) During hand-to-hand combat in an office the viewer can't tell who's gaining the upper hand during a vital central segment, because both combatants are filmed in silhouette against bright light coming through a window behind them.

The scenes described above occur respectively in last year's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, directed by Michael Bay; the most recent James Bond movie Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster); and the first of Paul Greengrass's two Jason Bourne sequels, The Bourne Supremacy. They're hardly alone.

"Action sequences seem to have been getting less coherent in the last few years, which I would attribute to a couple of factors," says Karen Pearlman, president of the Australian Screen Editors Guild, head of screen studies at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and author of Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit. "A big one, of course, is that speed is associated with excitement; movies are not just thrillers but fast-paced thrillers. So cutting is faster and it is harder to tell what is going on.

"But there are other things going on, too. The trickiness level of chase scenes is also inflated." Pearlman cites Salt, "where we are treated to the sight of Angelina jumping from the roof of one moving truck to another, a trick no real human, not even a Russian-trained evil super spy, could possibly ever do. So, either the fantastical nature of the trick gives the filmmakers a licence to be fast and loose with factors of realism such as time, space and gravity, or the filmmakers are thinking that to pull this off they will have to dazzle our eyes with movement from all directions and cut very fast so we can't get our bearings: they are deliberately disorienting us.

"For a chase to be well cut, in my view, it needs to move elegantly and dynamically: there actually have to be rises and falls in the pace and energy, otherwise I just get numbed to the action. The other thing they need is to keep the stakes firmly planted in my thoughts and emotions. This is accomplished by sufficient use of the shots that show me what is at stake."

Film academic David Bordwell, whose work includes a celebratory study of Hong Kong action cinema, is an outspoken critic of what he calls the "blur-o-vision" style, writing that Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables "might be a new summit in over-busy, incoherent, inconsequential action".

He adds that it "isn't an absence of craft that leads to these aimless bouts. The filmmakers actively want the action to be hard, even impossible, to follow. Sometimes I think that this blurred bustle is there to secure a PG rating; if you could really see the mayhem, we might be moving toward an R. But filmmakers don't say that they're self-censoring. They seem to think that making the action illegible is creative because it promotes realism."

Noyce is an enthusiastic proponent of the new aesthetic, adapting its methods in Salt, although in this writer's view he still makes it possible to follow what's happening throughout the action scenes. Asked if incoherence is now a problem in Hollywood action thrillers, he replies: "Not to me, but then I'm not necessarily looking as an audience member -- and I don't necessarily think the audience member is looking for coherence; they are looking for a visceral experience. If they want coherence they can watch television."

Noyce admits to being influenced by Greengrass (especially the last two Bourne sequels), but more directly by Chris Doyle, the revered Hong Kong-based Australian cinematographer he worked with on Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American. Doyle showed Noyce "the human shoulder is as good as any tripod. Our daily experience corresponds much more to that than it does to a tripod. Chris is a master of the handheld camera and started me on the process of breaking down what was an outdated aesthetic."

Greengrass's style was influenced by his background in TV investigative documentary and began to impress other filmmakers with his Northern Ireland docudrama Bloody Sunday. "When it hit the mainstream in the second of the Bourne films, it was seen very much to be revolutionary and appreciated by audiences, who felt there was extra oomph," Noyce says. "It was much more experiential. It felt like they [the viewers] were inside the action.

"The classic example of the new aesthetic was the final chase through the autobahn tunnel in Moscow, in I think the third Bourne film, where Greengrass also reinvented framing, using a lot of the time what we used to call off-cuts: the ends of shots where the camera was used for its visceral possibilities rather than its literal ability. We felt the chase from the inside, where sometimes disorientation becomes an asset because it's all about the velocity. Sometimes the pursuer and pursued don't know where they are in relation to each other.

Not all directors or film editors share Noyce's enthusiasm. Jason Ballantine, the editor on the hit Australian horror film Wolf Creek and soon to be co-editor of the upcoming Mad Max sequel Fury Road, says that "more and more I go to the cinema and get disappointed and somewhat frustrated at films that don't allow you as an audience to participate. With the older school, you always had a sense of who the good and the bad guys were and how many bullets they had left, where they stood in relationship to one another, and what the objective of the scene was. Films are now chasing their own tails in terms of one-upmanship, particularly the Bond films."

Ballantine fingers digital editing systems as one of the causes of "over-editing". Where editors used to have to physically cut the film to make an edit, it now can all be done and undone instantly, "rather than having to make the decision inside my own head and carefully considering how the sequence will come together".

Ben Ferris, director of the Sydney Film School, says his students have to learn editing on an old analog editing system in their first semester because it forces them to think carefully about the reasons behind every edit. "With the younger generation going straight to digital, the experience can get in the way of the story," he says. "I've seen this happen a lot. The young digital wizards, the last thing they have on their mind is the film itself. People who are particularly gifted at computing and therefore technically proficient editors "can seem to inexperienced filmmakers like they are a good editor".

Ferris continues: "But the technical aspect of editing is just one element. You end up with a film that's very showy, with a thunderous collection of effects and cuts that are effective in themselves, but they can tend to service themselves rather than the narrative as a whole. It can become an editing of 'spectacle'."

Ballantine adds that on some films, budgets don't allow enough time to properly plan and execute the action sequences. "It's more 'get on location and work it out on the day' . . . there's no time allowed for complex tracking moves [with smoothly moving cameras] and cranes." Cheaper cameras mean directors often set up multiple cameras -- up to 10 -- for a sequence rather than conceiving how the sequence is to be filmed beforehand.

He adds that films are getting out of control in terms of the amount of footage being shot. In the past, a ratio of 12:1 was normal (12 times as much material shot as ends up in the final movie). "Now 50:1 or even 100:1 is considered normal. That's a big strain, and I don't know that that's better filmmaking, either."

Australians Lee Smith and his assistant John Lee edited director Christopher Nolan's recent hit films Inception and The Dark Knight, which featured elaborate action sequences. They stress that while editing elaborate scenes they have lots of private screenings for small groups -- friends and family -- and then quiz them to check they've understood exactly what going on.

"It's very important to film the action scene so it has some meaning," Smith says. "It sounds simple but it's not really. It's quite easy to over-cut a sequence: make it visually exciting and lose track of what is happening and who the characters are. Sometimes the logical ability of the audience to know what's going on is lessened."

Inception, with its ultra-byzantine narrative about dreams within dreams, presented a special challenge. "The action has to be exciting but we didn't want to make it any more complicated than it needed to be," says Smith. "The action has to have cause and effect, to make the audience stay with us and not to wonder why something was happening.

"Where you can't follow action, it's not just action, it's the whole movie you can't follow. Action is very difficult, it has to be very carefully planned and conceived," Smith says, adding that he and Lee work hard to avoid "pointless cuts" or try to give a scene "colour and movement using shots of camera-waggle and blurring. It's a trick, and I'm guilty of using it [on other movies] where the action hasn't been planned as well. Those are never as good as a well-conceived sequence."

So where are action movies headed; is this it for the next 20 or so years? Perhaps not. It may be significant that not all recent big-budget action movies have followed the same path, including the world's biggest-earning film, James Cameron's Avatar. This may be partly because 3-D films require a slightly slower editing pace; as Ballantine points out, the human eye requires time to adjust to different depths of field from shot to shot. But it might also be because, having so carefully created an exotic world, Cameron wanted to make sure his audience drank it in.

In a different mode, Alfonso Cuaron's science-fiction film Children of Men contained two of the most pulse-rating action scenes of recent times, each shot virtuosically in a single, extended take (the polar opposite of the Bay and Greengrass styles). These allowed viewers to believe they were at the centre of action that was unfolding in real time around them. And Steven Spielberg's rightfully celebrated D-Day landing scene in Saving Private Ryan used a barrage of techniques to plunge the viewer into a sense of danger and confusion without losing track of the geography of the scene or the objectives of the characters. So there are plenty of cues here for the next generation of action directors to pick up.