The Action and Adventure Cinema

Yvonne Tasker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134564934
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This exciting collection addresses action and adventure from the silent to the contemporary period exploring diverse questions of aesthetics, industry and ideology. Action has established itself as one of the leading commercial genres of the New Hollywood cinema, generating extensive debate in the process.

Contributors consider how action might best be defined, how it has developed historically, and how it works formally. The critical reception and standing of action and adventure cinema is considered in relation to questions of national culture, violence and the 'art' of cinema.

Themes explored include genre and definitions; early action, sensation and melodrama; authorship and action; national and transnational action-adventure traditions; action aesthetics; spectacle and narrative; stars and bodies; class; gender; race and ethnicity.

Attempting to evaluate the significance of this type of filmmaking for both popular cinema and film studies, the book underlines the central place of action and adventure within film history.

PART I: History, criticism and style

Chapter 1: ‘TRAUMA THRILLS’

JENNIFER M. BEAN

Notes on early action cinema

THE MOST NOTABLE CHARACTERISTIC of the action cinema is its dynamic tempo: rapid editing at once articulates and accelerates the breathtaking pace of the stunting human body. It is also true that the body takes primacy over voice in the genre, that the action film ‘speaks’ through visual spectacle, that spectacle, in fact, takes precedence over narrative meaning. The humorous pith verging on bald contempt with which these ‘mindless spectacles’ are so often received reinforce what we already presume to know: action cinema is bad cinema; its aesthetics (if we can use that word) are rude, its pleasures suspicious. Such hubris turns on a serious critical impasse, at once subordinating the body to the mind and reinforcing their structure as binary opposites. The time has come for us to engage the sheer corporeal effects of film action, to reflect on the genre’s propensity for placing the spectator in the balance, for putting the body at risk.

Such a project cannot be conceived outside of the action cinema’s historical locus, its overlap with a modernity in which the accelerated motion of transportation technologies and that of optical devices linked together to create fundamental perceptual and psychic changes in human subjects. The wounding effects of modernity’s tempo are well known. Pummeled by too much, too fast, the modern subject succumbed to an array of pathologies – nervous tics, psychic blockage, alienation, fatigue – collectively understood in terms of shock and trauma. Yet familiar ‘trauma-tocentric’ accounts of modernity, to borrow from Jeffrey Schnapp, miss the era’s key aesthetic premise, which is to say, ‘trauma thrills’.¹ The conjoining of a medical term with a form of entertainment is more than rhetorical play. Its employment underscores the fact that representations, visual or otherwise, have direct consequences for the body. It also suggests that cultural distress regarding the subject’s instability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided the historical conditions for the emergence of a distinctively modern aesthetic mode, one that theorists such as Walter Benjamin understood as pre-eminently cinematic. In recent years of course we have assimilated cinema’s historic affair with speed, shock, and irrational mechanistic power under the rubric of a pre-narrative ‘cinema of attractions’.² Yet we have for too long overlooked the fact that the aesthetic privileging of sensational movement, aggressive energy, and unsettling form – in short, a trauma that thrills – over character psychology and meaningful content, was (and is) inextricably hinged to complex narrative techniques through which they found their most sustained expression.

In what follows, I isolate the Kalem company’s blockbuster railway series, The Hazards of Helen (1914–17), as a particularly compelling instance of American cinema’s action aesthetic. Initially released on November 14, 1914, and focusing on what one reviewer described as the ‘strenuous existence’ of a young female telegrapher, the series promised situations that would compel its eponymous heroine ‘to leap off high railroad spans into swiftly running rivers, and even to become involved in railroad smash-ups’.³ Later press releases offered more precise descriptions of action scenarios, as when Helen ‘pursues a train by automobile and then leaps to the car where a struggle with an escaped convict ensues’; or when she ‘slides down a construction-camp chute in a small carrier and shoots across the top of a speeding freight train’.⁴ Vaunted as sheer sensationalism, the Helen films were wildly successful, their appeal officially proclaimed in December, 1915, when Kalem celebrated ‘Helen’s’ one-year anniversary and announced that ‘due to exhibitors’ demands’ the series would be ‘continued indefinitely’.⁵ In 1916 one writer for the New York Dramatic Mirror gaily predicted that the ‘far famed series … would run on forever’.⁶ To be more precise, it was on February 18, 1917 that The Hazards of Helen reached the end of its epic run. Tallying a remarkable 119 episodes in toto, the series garnered applause among domestic audiences of diverse constituencies, while playing a significant role in extending the reach of US markets abroad, especially the relatively new markets opening in the Far East and South America.

Before proceeding to discuss the textual dynamics at work in the series, my use of the label ‘action’ for classifying an early narrative film cycle demands some clarification. Billed as a ‘thrilling railway drama’, Kalem’s series arguably belongs more properly to the array of Cowboy and Indian pictures, detective, mystery, jungle, and espionage films that, as Richard Abel recounts in this volume, were categorically assimilated by the trade press as ‘sensational’ or ‘thriller melodramas’.⁷ Yet a critical uneasiness is felt when we comply with the vagaries of such a category, a gesture that sacrifices the variables of iconicity, characterization, and narrative structure in favor of a perspective oriented solely to thrilling affect. Nor need we travel far to find that exclamatory adjective – thriller-sensation! – run amok in the period, its marketing value as capacious for newspaper dailies as for amusement parks, for stage productions as for film. Of course as Ben Singer has eloquently demonstrated, the relationships among these modern forms of expression are critical. He also demonstrates that part of the burden we shoulder in recovering cinema’s generic past is the need to impose finer categorical distinctions than the purview of trade discourse immediately allows. Isolating the variables of form (seriality) and character (active female protagonist), Singer claims categorical integrity for a group of films in which the violent aggression associated with sensational thrills is infiltrated by a discourse on female emancipation, giving way to a peculiar but distinctive version of the ‘woman’s film’. This he calls the ‘serial-queen melodrama’, films in which fantasies of ‘female power’ take precedence, the representations of which Singer links to a ‘pervasive and codified discourse on the New Woman’.⁸ Moreover, by situating early serials within an intertextual matrix of related forms of popular entertainment (stage melodrama, dime novels, suffragette discourse, fashion advertisements, newspaper stories, etc.), Singer emphasizes the industry’s strategy of tapping into an already existing, and rapidly expanding, female readership.

Insofar as Helen’s gamble on the railway permits a stunning array of spectacular stunts, the series would seem the ‘serial-queen melodrama’s’ perfect illustration, as feminist historians Miriam Hansen, Lynn Kirby, Eileen Bowser, and Shelley Stamp have recently declared it to be.⁹ I, too, have few doubts that The Hazards of Helen – as with the array of mystery, patriotic, and jungle-adventure-style films listed in Singer’s taxonomy – appealed to the notoriously high numbers of female filmgoers emerging in the 1910s.¹⁰ But I also believe that these films’ horizon of reception stretched across a vast cross-market, even transnational, public, and that their appeal hinged on a cinematic register that sensationalized, agitated, and unsettled the very ground of meaning on which distinctions between male and female, and beyond that the logic of subjectivity more broadly, traditionally depends. It is this narrative whimsy that Singer’s ‘sociological analysis’ cannot accommodate, but which his thinking on The Hazards of Helen bumps up against. Noting the frequency, intensity, and salience of Helen’s ‘dare-devil’ antics, he speculates thus:

Helen … may have less to do with an earnest stake in a progressive ideology of female emancipation than with the utter novelty and curiosity value of a spectacle based on the ‘category mistake’ of a woman taking death-defying physical risks, getting filthy, brawling with crooks in muddy riverbanks – in short, of a woman acting like a man.¹¹

If the aggressive iteration of physical risk justifies Helen’s exclusion from the ‘serial queen melodrama’, then it is precisely this excess that grants the series special status in what I refer to as early action cinema.

I begin with the premise that risky maneuvers by definition imply a non-normative domain, the category of mistake. Another way of saying this is to note that risk ‘carries uncertainty with it, an uncertainty intrinsic to it’ as Kathleen Woodward claims; or to state, following Mary Russo, that risk ‘belongs properly to the discourse of probability and “error”’.¹² These descriptions get at the excesses of risk, its propensity to gamble with cultural scripts, to mock stability in any form. These terms also hint at risk’s antagonistic relation to an ethos of rationalization with which bourgeois-patriarchal (industrialist) culture sought to regulate a ‘norm’, to eliminate differential flux and contingency of all sorts. It is the early action film’s ‘reflexive’ relation to the modernity of which it is both symptom and part that interests me here, and for two reasons, neither separable from the other. To begin, taking seriously the function and appeal of an action narrative means that accounts of American cinema’s form and style, its premises and organizing principles, must be rethought. It also means rethinking the heuristics of our critical practice, and the formulations we at once critique and reproduce between the aesthetic pleasures afforded by mass-media and the machinations of ideology.

Our pursuit of these goals can begin with a provisional account of the series’ narrative system more broadly, noting in particular its proclivity for technological caprice. Set exclusively on the railway, The Hazards of Helen showcases a modern-industrial universe on the brink not of progress, but of catastrophe: skewed tracks, broken safety lines, dangling wires, spontaneous explosions, and, especially, failed breaks assemble a recognizable iconography. We could readily accumulate examples from elsewhere in the period, among them the whirring, circling, imploding vehicles that dictate the hilarious indirection of Keystone’s slapstick shorts, or the flattened tires, jerry-rigged airplanes, and warped steering mechanisms that punctuate the action of serialized crime thrillers like The Exploits of Elaine (1915) and The Iron Claw (1916) among others. Unique to The Hazards of Helen, however, is a plot structure that systematically depends on industrialism’s malfunctioning, calibrated to explore the ‘hazardous’ effects of technological failure.

Each of the 119 episodes reiterates a simple, basic scenario: Helen arrives at the station (or is on her way to work); a situation arises that threatens the railway line (alternately in the guise of bandits, human error, or mechanical breakdown); Helen learns of the dangerous situation (her position as telegrapher, and occasionally her proximity to the accident, enables her to receive knowledge instantly); and she leaves her office to ‘race to the rescue’ (typically by leaping onto the car of a speeding train, airplane, or automobile). Although each film ends when Helen restores the railway to its proper working order, suggesting a tight fit between formal (narrative) and thematic (industrial) equilibrium, what we in fact have is a radically unbalanced plot, warped in the middle, blasted out of proportion. One of the more axiomatic sequences involves an extended chase scene, as in The Open Track in which an incrementally rapid cutting pattern that volatizes Helen’s successive leaps from horseback to motorbike to automobile to train constitutes almost the entirety of the drama. Similarly, in the latter half of The Wrong Train Order, Helen finds herself ‘alone on a runaway train’, and the narrative sequencing follows her ‘breath-taking ride’ through ‘open switches, an open drawbridge, and an oncoming train on the same track’.¹³ The length and incredible pace of these sequences privilege action as the series’ organizing principle, action pitched to a degree that movement becomes sensate, visible. The aggressively repetitive posture of the plot warrants comment as well, for it indicates the degree to which these films displace the narrative hermeneutic – the what does it mean? – onto the how, onto the velocities and vicissitudes of the moving image. Indeed the runaway engine which provides the series’ most emblematic icon may also be seen as the mise-en-abîme of its narrative system.

If to what we are saying of narrative structure more broadly we add a consideration of plotting effects, we find a dramaturgy motivated by industrialism’s deep instability, its potential to backfire, to generate a world of blind chance in which time is not standardized but relativized – reduced to a series of instants that explode the system’s meaning-making economy. Consider, for instance, The Wrong Train Order, the 58th episode of the series, which opens as Helen, returning from a vacation, arrives at an unnamed station and boards a train that will take her to her office at Lone Point. A long shot framing the front of the engine as it pulls away is interrupted by a cut to the interior of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: History, criticism and style
• Part II: Theorising action aesthetics
• Part III: Gender, stars, bodies
• Part IV: Nation, ethnicity and stardom
• Part V: Action, authorship and industry