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Abstract: The mode of production and the visual aesthetic of the digital action cinema represented by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Crank (2006) and its 2009 sequel, Crank 2: High Voltage (both partially shot on Rollerblades at high speed), represent hypermediation as hypermasculinity. Reflecting the development of visual culture and a historically masculinized relationship with technology, the immersive gamespace created in this model of filmmaking indicates the narrational merging of product and process.
I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility. I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them. I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations.
-Dziga Vertov (1923)1
One man runs as hard and as fast as he can down a Los Angeles street while another man, armed with a Sony HDC-F950 camera, his feet encased in Rollerblades, knees bent in a deep crouch, aims the camera upward at the runner and rockets past him at speeds as high as thirty miles per hour (Figure 1).2 This is an image from the DVD commentary for the 2006 action film Crank, which was codirected by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who, collectively, have experience as cameramen and former stuntmen, and are makers of "extreme motorcycle videos."3 They approached Crank as an exercise in how to write a film around their "aggressive camera style," hoping it would give them "dangerous ways to move the camera really, really fast. . . . If we could put the lens in actual peril, then it would feel real to the person watching."4 Their goal: speed. Their tools: lightweight digital video cameras which they wield as extensions of their own bodies, often wearing the camera rigs as they move with their lead actor, Jason Statham, formerly of the British National Diving Team.
On screen, in the finished product, they create a digital aesthetic that combines split screens, black-and-white surveillance-style footage, still photography, animated inserts, title graphics, video-game compositions, freeze frames,...