Highways through the void: chase sequences and the built environment

Abstract

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.