Introduction
Assessing the responsibilities of scholars interested in film history, Tom Gunning has stressed the importance of maintaining a âshifting focusâ when attempting to reconstruct the past horizons of films from a contemporary perspective (Gunning, 1991a: 290). To Gunningâs mind, the addresses of films throughout the history of cinema extend âbeyond their original historical horizons to our own contemporary reception of them.â However, the task of studying film history is a delicate one, for the attempt by the film historian to forge âa sense of tradition, of history which relates the present to the past,â requires the recognition of both âthe temporal distance these films have from us and our own historical position in reaching across that gap to understand themâ (Gunning, 1991a: 292). In this chapter, I intend to reach across a gap that spans three different centuries in an effort to identify key developments in early film history that provided the means for the development of what we call, at present, the action film.
Despite the fact that its roots go all the way back to the birth of the medium and its reach extends all the way to the present day, the action film has long been the black sheep of the film family. From the blogosphere, to journalistic reviews, to estimable academic publications, the action film has been perennially denied access to the exalted realm of âserious artâ and relegated instead to the meager realm of âmindless entertainment.â True to the spirit of the genre, the action film has nevertheless fought tirelessly to earn its academic stripes, and over the years it has won over a handful of influential scholarsâa number of whom have authored chapters in this volumeâwho have succeeded in elucidating many of the pleasures of viewing and analyzing this dynamic and evolving cinematic realm. The attempt to study the action film in anything resembling a systematic manner, however, is fraught with methodological danger, not least because the conspicuous absence of scholarship on the genre in the film studies literature requires the establishment of a new field of research, one with the potential to, in JeanâFrançois Lyotardâs words, âchange the rules of the gameâ for film studies.2
Miriam Hansen once tantalizingly postulated that the exact coordinates of the fractured histories of film are still âvery much a matter of debate, if not inventionâ (Hansen, 1995: 362). This is an exhilarating and encouraging premise for scholars interested in the neglected genre of the action film. At the same time, however, the effort to identify a tradition of action runs the risk of, again borrowing from Lyotard, destabilizing an accepted position, namely the juvenile triviality of the ostensibly recent development of the action genre, a genre said to have been born of Reaganite capitalism and to have betrayed in pursuit of everâincreasing profits the promise of a onceânoble artistic medium.3 Encouragingly, many scholars are beginning to acknowledge that this âaccepted positionâ is, quite frankly, unacceptable. One of the most convincing arguments against this position was made by Tom Shone (2004). In an attempt to counter âthe âMagic Bulletâ theory of modern film historyâ according to which âall it took was a single shot from [George Lucasâ] laser cannons to bring down the Camelot that was American filmâ (9), Shone attacks the hyperbolic manner in which critics and scholars have eschatologically lamented the âdeath of filmâ at the hands of the blockbuster action film. For Shone, the problem with such âdeath of filmâ arguments is that âthey have an uncanny ability to resemble accounts of the birth of film.â Indeed, as Shone asserts in no uncertain terms, âall silent movies were, by definition, action movies,â and many were âstraightforward thrill ridesâ (61). As he elaborates:
In this chapter, I will follow the path charted by Shone and search out the keys to the action genre in the first halfâcentury of film. Over the course of my investigation, I will discuss a number of the most important and influential character types, narrative tropes, and visual techniques that came together in American cinema to form the foundation of what is now known as the action film.4 From a methodological perspective, I will take Rick Altmanâs (1984) advice and endeavor to avoid the false sense of security that comes from spending time in the âseemingly uncomplicated world of Hollywood classicsâ where scholars are ostensibly protected from having to âreflect openly on the [generic] assumptions underlying their workâ (6). Instead of taking the generic category of âthe action filmâ as given or immutable, I intend to discuss in detail the most notable types (the cop, the gangster, the cowboy, the swashbuckler), tropes (foot and car chases, lastâminute rescues, fight scenes), and techniques (camera movement to dynamize space, parallel editing to intensify time) in their original historical and generic contexts propaedeutic to a comprehensive understanding of the action film.
