Highways through the void: chase sequences and the built environment

ABSTRACT

This essay offers an account of the persistence of the chase sequence. Tracing the histories and theories of the chase as a cine-genre and analyzing its recurrence within Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, I argue that the chase sequence’s continued appeal is rooted in its unique connection to the built environment, and can be seen as a generic form for cinema’s staging of the interplay between the abstract forces that produce this environment and the concrete experiences of a physical world that is overwritten by these forces.

KEYWORDS:

• Chase sequences
• cine-genre
• Siegfried Kracauer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Putting the chase sequence back on its feet has a dual meaning here in that the discussion will largely confine itself to foot chases. Many of my comments and conclusions however could also be applied to cars, trains, and other forms of transportation.

2. The phrase is pulled from Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), references to which appear throughout Theory of Film. On the significance of Whitehead’s thought to Theory of Film, specifically to Kracauer’s understanding of realism and physical reality, see Gertrud Koch ‘A Curious Realism: Redeeming Kracauer’s Film Theory through Whitehead’s Process Philosophy,’ Screen 61:2, Summer 2020, 281–287.

3. In fact, the sequence in Young Karl Marx directly answers an objection to the historical film that Kracauer quotes from Albert Laffay: ‘One cannot help feeling that, if the camera were displaced, however slightly, to the right or left, it would only chance upon the void or the bizarre paraphernalia of the studio’ (78).

4. Ironically, the interior of this factory, where a short chase sequence is staged, was shot in a New York Times printing facility in College Point, Queens.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathan Holmes

Nathan Holmes is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Purchase College, SUNY. He is the author of Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination (2018) and numerous essays and articles on cinema, architecture, and urban space.