Action Cinema Since 2000

Chris Holmlund, Lisa Purse, Yvonne Tasker, Chris Holmlund, Lisa Purse, Yvonne Tasker

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781839022777
• eBook ISBN: 9781839022791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Action Cinema Since 2000 addresses an increasingly lively and evolving field of scholarship, probing the definition and testing the potential of action cinema to reframe the mode for the 21st century.

Contributors examine a broad range of content, from blockbusters to smaller independent films, originating from China, Korea, India, France, the USA, and Mexico. Ranging from JSA: Joint Security Area (Gondonggeonygbi guyeok) (2000) to Polite Society (2023), they consider the changing modes of action cinema, with streaming assuming global importance and an ever-increasing number of generic blends. They consider under-explored areas of action film, particularly how race, ethnicity, gender, and age figure in narratives and through image and soundtracks.

Overall, the book demonstrates how 21st century action cinema engages with and reflects geopolitical, creative, and industrial developments. Contributors argue that it continues to offer fantasies of empowerment and mobility that say much about how power is understood in diverse contexts today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Action as Mode
• 1 Accounting for Action: Racial Discourse and Chronologies of Genre
• 2 Dirt Research: Contemporary Stunt Work in Action
• 3 Big and Loud: The Sonic Aesthetics of the Fight Scene in Digital Action Cinema
• 4 “French Touch” Action Cinema
• 5 No Exit from “Hell Joseon”: National Tragedy and Heroic Rescue in South Korean Action-Disaster Films
• 6 Mesmerizing Outsiders: Washington, Mackie, and Performance in Action Cinema
• 7 Samuel L. Jackson in Geriaction: “Bad Ass” Black Screen Masculinity, Aging, and Redundancy
• 8 Action Latinas in an Era of Precarity
• 9 Bollywood’s New Action Cinema: The Woman-led Action Film and the Nation
• 10 Anxiety in Action: Jackie Chan, COVID-19, and Brexit along the Belt and Road
• 11 Aging, Disability, Acting: Pam Grier and Sigourney Weaver
• 12 What Does Power Look Like? Women Heroes in Digital Action Cinema
• 13 Beyond the Dark Moment: Seriality and Heroic Failure in Contemporary Action Cinema
• Filmography
• Index
• Copyright