Cinematic Television Countdown, Day Two!

Today is the second day in my five day countdown of the most cinematic moments in recent television. Today I’ll be celebrating:

4. Netflix’s Daredevil, episode two, “Cut Man” :

The idea of cinematic television can encompass a wide spectrum of concepts. Yesterday, for instance, was all about the way that Soderbergh broke with the television convention of shot/reverse shot and elected to instead orbit the camera around Clive Owen during an otherwise mundane scene from The Knick in order to focus our attention away from the procedural dialogue and onto the character. Today I’m interested in a shot from Netflix’s Daredevil, from the second episode “Cut Man.” Anyone who has seen the show will immediately know the shot I am talking about, the furiously kinetic hallway fight scene that closes the episode.

The obvious thing to say about this scene is that it owes a great deal to the Indonesian action classic The Raid: Redemption (2011). This scene from The Raid is, in this reviewer’s opinion, one of the greatest fight sequences in world cinema. It doesn’t take more than a passing familiarity with Gareth Evans’ film to immediately recognize the similarities in the scene from Daredevil. I am far from the only person on the internet to make the observation. Both sequences recognize the requirement in the confined space of the hallway to maximize leverage, and therefore violence. On a visual level the energy continues to mount because there is no place for it to dissipate to, the whole scene seems to crackle. And yet, the sequence from The Raid, as good as it is, fits more squarely with our basic understanding of television conventions. Ultimately, Daredevil is more cinematic than its filmic antecedent. But why?

The answer lies in shot duration. The Raid, while brilliantly kinetic stitches together a series of short shots into a sequence. The execution of the staging and block only needs to be coherent for seconds at a time. As a result, multiple takes are possible. When television ventures into action set pieces at all (this is only lately becoming a trend: see the Cinemax ode to carnage and exposed breasts that is Banshee) it is far more typical to see those sequences in this configuration. Even first tier technical operations like Game of Thrones will prefer frequent cutting for major action scenes (see the Blackwater, Battle of). What Daredevil direction Phil Abraham does, in this sequence, is to break from that tradition. The duration of this shot is nearly as long as Martin Scorsese’s famous tracking shot in Goodfellas (though of course there is far less camera movement). Instead, Daredevil focuses the camera and lets nearly three minutes of highly choreographed action play out in front of it. This is not the normal operation of television, where the “get the shot and move on” mantra of efficiency dominates production. To be able to take the time to execute a single shot at this level of complexity is itself a testament to the changing face of television as a medium. That’s probably for the best.