Sounds, Images

[Addendum to Supercoherence, Revisited]

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Tony Scott, 2009)

Tony Scott is a director often attacked for his "incoherence." Innovation often resembles deficiency.

Sure, his best films lack a clear delineation of space or clear cut-offs for where scenes might end and begin. But the coherence in his films is not between the pages of a script; its between shots, and his greatest asset (both to himself and to cinema as a whole) is his ability to construct scenes out of shots that take place across great distances of space or time, as in his two best movies: Deja Vu (much of whose running time consists of characters watching a past event through a sort of time machine) and his remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (where the two main characters develop a complex relationship despite not meeting until the end of the movie).