Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/20104

Title

Truth at twelve thousand frames per second: 'The Matrix' and time-image cinema

Author(s)

Tofts, Darren

Abstract

To all appearances it looks like any other movie bust. A dumpy cop, a pair of cuffs in one hand and a flashlight in the other, approaches a spread-eagled perp. The woman in the fetish gear turns swiftly and disarms the cop with a pinpoint succession of blows to the arm and face. Then it happens. She leaps into the air with an impossible elegance and assumes a martial arts vogue, hanging frozen in space several feet above the cop, who also seems to have succumbed to this sudden pause in time. The only thing that moves in the three seconds this maneuver takes to unfold is our viewpoint of the scene, which rapidly sweeps around the tableau in a breathtaking 180-degree arc. The effect is awesome, sculptural, as the woman's body floats as a pure mathematical point in space, a pure instant of attention. The spell of this composite image of intense duration is broken as quickly as it is cast, however, as the woman proceeds to beat to other rhythms, disarming three more cops in rapid succession. This scene occurs three minutes into the Wachowski Brothers' film 'The Matrix' (1999). As an establishing shot it introduces pretty well everything that is important to the development of the film: the high-tech noir aesthetic, a subaltern appropriation of the ICT network, and the messianic pursuit of 'the One'. Its singular moment of action is so dramatic in its impact that we may blink in disbelief at what we think we have just seen, as the spectacular sequence resolves itself into diegesis and the plot ticks over.

Publication type

Book chapter

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Life and Social Sciences

Source

24/7: time and temporality in the network society / Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser (eds.), Part 2, chapter 5, pp. 109-121

Publication year

2007

Keyword(s)

Cinema studies;  Film;  Civilisation;  Computers;  Information society;  Information technology;  Matrix trilogy;  Science fiction;  Time;  Wachowski, Andy (1967-);  Wachowski, Larry (1965-);  Wachowski brothers

Publisher

Stanford University Press

ISBN

9780804751964, 0804751978

Publisher URL

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?isbn=0804751978

Publisher URL

http://books.google.com/books?id=w8iK9eLnCIEC

Peer reviewed