The vision

Rating: Null/10 (22 March 2014)

This was for me an improvement over the second at least in the sense that we finally ask how much Bourne was himself culpable of.
The idea of opposing wits is thus brought to its conclusion. On one hand you have the CIA operatives with their screens, eyes, wires, satellite imagery and systems essentially guiding a film. In it is of course Bourne attempting to wrestle control of that narrative from the inside as means of finding self. Oh he is as usual an action hero, adept fighter and shooter when the moment requires it, but his exceptional skill is a superb cognitive clarity.
So we have the film in similarly lightning-speed perceptions of things that we have to surf if we want to come out on top of the story and not lost in the whirl and this opens up an interesting and more broadly cinematic dimension of the work.
The thing I feel is worth scrutinizing most closely here is the vision itself. Now I don't doubt viewer claims of nausea and what not, the film is a relentless barrage of impressions, but let's not discard the whole right away.
Visual cognition is as much as the body something that you can train and cultivate, it can be stolid or agile. In related jargon there's something called constancy, it refers to the ability to stay tethered to a sense. I may be able to maintain e.g. a constancy of time, an inner sense of its passage. Okay, fun experiment time on how this appears in an awareness of space, look out from the window of a speeding vehicle, does the moving landscape 'drag back' your sight or do you maintain stability? In yoga there are exercises where you have to balance on one leg, do it right now and you'll see it's much easier with eyes open. With eyes closed I can no longer 'lean against' my visual field for balance, there being able to balance involves - surprise - finding my bearings from inside, embodying.
So what happens in film is that I lean on the images, actively attempting to see and center. In a static or slow tracking shot my eyes have room to traverse the image, picking my paths and points of rest. The fundamental difference with a film like this is that it has been designed with the paths already 'seen', in other words the camera is the eye and the image is 'seeing'. Confusion arises when you try to re- orient each time, of course it's going to be exhausting. So if you relax in your own self the film does all the seeing. It's not only perfectly intelligible, you begin to notice some pretty great rapid-eye craft. So a different kind of art that assumes you are the body and wholly trust the 'seeing' to be done for you.
Surprise, this doesn't come from the American visual tradition which focused on clarity in ordered space, cultivated in the western. It were the Soviets who first dismantled the continuity of perceptions and world and constructed the latter solely in the eye, the Soviets in the brief time before Stalin had them essentially film westerns. It was their way of asserting that reality was no fixed stage but a space you could construct to have psychology, the only intelligent interpretation of Marxism I know.
Here it becomes about the uncertainty of perceptions, the inability to reach out to a stable world and balance as a broader anxiety about the extents of certainty. So a film about manipulable and constructed reality and seeing where all the seeing is constructed for you and to disorient.
Unless if, like Bourne, you surf on the visual debris, in which case the film reveals itself to have only physical extremes to offer. Indicative for me that the filmmakers were clueless of the potential is that here we have a film where the eye supplies the space and scenes of memory are boxed separately.
So for me this is only fruitful as gymnastics of perception, it's otherwise mechanic. But ride it just the same, train the eye in the new spacetime, our whole visual imagination is headed in that direction. There will of course good and bad films in this mode, the point is to be able to navigate them as freely as before. Hollywood will tend to push it to loud extremes like here, but just imagine the possibilities for a while.