Paul, thanks for this great post, which raises several very interesting questions. I'd like to comment on two aspects that occur to me, and hopefully you can say a few more words about them.

The first is the distinction between being "about" future technologies and "incorporating" them, which you offer as a way of thinking about the difference between the cinematic and post-cinematic. While there is certainly heuristic value in this perspective, it remains problematic in that a genre like science fiction film has always gone beyond science fiction literature in precisely this way: if future tech was a thematic feature in the latter, it was always incorporated, highlighted, and displayed in the former (e.g. in special effects, which invite attention to images and interrupt the narrative). According to someone like Brooks Landon, this gets underway well before the 1950s birth of a dedicated SF film genre, as early as Lumieres' La Charcuterie Mecanique.

Which makes me think, coming to the second point, that a prioritization of effect over affect is already at the center of this perspective on the difference between the cinematic and post-cinematic. More to the point, it seems that the "many affects" you describe are not the same affects meant by people coming from a Deleuzian (Bergsonian, Spinozan, etc.) background. To ask about your reading of the images' affective meaning vs. that of the director is already to personalize affect, to appropriate or subjectivize it as emotion, for example, while the affects of the tradition mentioned are pre-personal. I understand that there are reasons to be skeptical of that understanding of affect, as it is always vague and conceptually indeterminable. The reasons for advocating it are aesthetic/ontological, though, and would have to be refuted on those grounds. I don't see that understanding of affect as somehow singular, though, so I see no contradiction with the multiplicity of effects. Instead, it seems to me that emphasizing effects over affects is precisely in line with postmodern theory, identity politics, etc., whereas affect is perceived by advocates of this line of thinking as a way out of there: as a reintroduction of a messy experiential realm that is categorically bracketed out of postmodern textualism and its exclusive interest in textual effects (including subject-positions and the like).

Thanks again for a great presentation!

Shaviro has a post up at The Pinocchio Theory blog  today on his notion of “post-continuity” cinema ( http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1003)which makes me wonder about Paul’s fight scene clip from Old Boy and whether this is continuity cinema or post-continuity.  In his longer description of the fight sequence Paul makes a distinction between the precisely choreographed fight scenes of The Matrix which incorporates the post-cinematic “sharpness and precision” of arcade games and the more traditional “two-dimensional” plane of the fight scene in Old Boy. While this makes Old Boy a film which draws on post-cimematic technologies, Paul also claims that this is counterbalanced “with the inclusion of all of the scrappiness, imprecision, stumbling, gasping, moaning and, indeed, messy brawling, that almost all action films exclude or repress”. In a response to Mattias Stork’s formulation of “chaos cinema” Shaviro expands on his own notion of “post-continuity” which first surfaced in Post-Cinematic Affect. He explains that the “stylistics” of post-continuity (mostly in action films but also horror and other genres) involves “a preoccupation with moment-to-moment excitement, and with delivering continual shocks to the audience” which “trumps any concern with traditional continuity, either on a shot-by-shot level or in terms of larger narrative structures”. He makes a sharp distinction between his own understanding of these (mostly Hollywood) film-making practices and David Bordwell’s well known concept of “intensified continuity” which features “more rapid editing … bipolar extremes of lens lengths … more close framings in dialogue scenes…[and] a free-ranging camera.”. For Bordwell this is an intensification (rather than a breakdown or discarding) of traditional continuity but Shaviro claims that there has been a perceptible shift in the stylistics of continuity in the 21st century. And it is worth considering the fight scene in Old Boy and Paul’s discussion of its effects and affects in the context of these changes. Does Old Boy intensify traditional fight segment techniques? Or, does it make a radical break with them?

MOR

Shaviro asserts that in recent action cinema “the expansion of the techniques of intensified continuity, especially in action films and action sequences, has led to a situation where continuity itself has been fractured and devalued, or fragmented and reduced to incoherence”.  He suggests that “Bordwell himself implicitly admits as much, when he complains that, in recent years, ‘Hollywood action scenes became “impressionistic,” rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it”. Paul is getting at precisely this impressionism and “blurred confusion” when he talks about Old Boy’s “inclusion of all of the scrappiness, imprecision, stumbling, gasping, moaning and, indeed, messy brawling” that other action films have routinely sanitized. Shaviro says that “in mainstream action films ... as well as in lower-budget action features ... continuity is no longer ‘intensified’; rather, it is more or less abandoned, or subordinated to the search for immediate shocks, thrills, and spectacular effects by means of all sorts of non-classical techniques. This is the situation that I refer to as post-continuity”. So, we might ask whether Old Boy is an exemplar of “intensified continuity” in Bordwell’s sense or “post-continuity” in Shaviro’s? 

MOR