A Companion to the Action Film

James Kendrick

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119100591, 9781119100492
• eBook ISBN: 9781119100768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

An authoritative guide to the action-packed film genre

With 24 incisive, cutting-edge contributions from esteemed scholars and critics, A Companion to the Action Film provides an authoritative and in-depth guide to this internationally popular and wide-ranging genre. As the first major anthology on the action film in more than a decade, the volume offers insights into the genre's historical development, explores its production techniques and visual poetics, and provides reflections on the numerous social, cultural, and political issues it has and continues to embody.

A Companion to the Action Film offers original research and critical analysis that examines the iconic characteristics of the genre, its visual aesthetics, and its narrative traits; considers the impact of major directors and stars on the genre's evolution; puts the action film in dialogue with various technologies and other forms of media such as graphic novels and television; and maps out new avenues of critical study for the future. This important resource:

• Offers a definitive guide to the action film
• Contains insightful contributions from a wide range of international film experts and scholars
• Reviews the evolution of the genre from the silent era to today's age of digital blockbusters
• Offers nuanced commentary and analysis of socio-cultural issues such as race, nationality, and gender in action films

Written for scholars, teachers and students in film studies, film theory, film history, genre studies, and popular culture, A Companion to the Action Film is an essential guide to one of international cinema's most important, popular, and influential genres.

Part I
History

1
Origins of the Action Film: Types, Tropes, and Techniques in Early Film History

Kyle Barrowman

Even though most movies are only marginally concerned with the art of the cinema, the notion of quality is difficult to grasp apart from the context of quantity. Comprehension becomes a function of comprehensiveness. As more movies are seen, more cross‐references are assembled. Fractional responsibilities are more precisely defined; personal signatures are more clearly discerned … The trouble up to now has been not seeing the trees for the forest … therefore the first task of a theory of film history is … taking the moviegoer out of the forest and into the trees.

—Andrew Sarris ¹

Introduction

Assessing the responsibilities of scholars interested in film history, Tom Gunning has stressed the importance of maintaining a “shifting focus” when attempting to reconstruct the past horizons of films from a contemporary perspective (Gunning, 1991a: 290). To Gunning’s mind, the addresses of films throughout the history of cinema extend “beyond their original historical horizons to our own contemporary reception of them.” However, the task of studying film history is a delicate one, for the attempt by the film historian to forge “a sense of tradition, of history which relates the present to the past,” requires the recognition of both “the temporal distance these films have from us and our own historical position in reaching across that gap to understand them” (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 “serious art” and relegated instead to the meager realm of “mindless entertainment.” 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 scholars—a number of whom have authored chapters in this volume—who 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 Jean‐François Lyotard’s words, “change the rules of the game” for film studies.²

Miriam Hansen once tantalizingly postulated that the exact coordinates of the fractured histories of film are still “very much a matter of debate, if not invention” (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 ever‐increasing profits the promise of a once‐noble artistic medium.³ Encouragingly, many scholars are beginning to acknowledge that this “accepted position” is, quite frankly, unacceptable. One of the most convincing arguments against this position was made by Tom Shone (2004). In an attempt to counter “the ‘Magic Bullet’ theory of modern film history” according to which “all it took was a single shot from [George Lucas’] laser cannons to bring down the Camelot that was American film” (9), Shone attacks the hyperbolic manner in which critics and scholars have eschatologically lamented the “death of film” at the hands of the blockbuster action film. For Shone, the problem with such “death of film” arguments is that “they have an uncanny ability to resemble accounts of the birth of film.” Indeed, as Shone asserts in no uncertain terms, “all silent movies were, by definition, action movies,” and many were “straightforward thrill rides” (61). As he elaborates:

In The New York Times in 1915, Alexander Woollcott wrote, “It is easy to predict that the cut‐back, and similar evidences of restlessness, will fade gradually from the screens, to be used only on special occasions.” It didn’t, of course; the restlessness spread further, and movies got faster still … All in all, it hadn’t taken long—just under 25 years—for the cinema to discover speed, for speed to give way to size, size to spectacle, hype to hoopla … To anyone who has sat through the last 25 years of American film, in fact, the first 25 years offer a strangely familiar landscape, a land of speed freaks and hucksters, teenage kicks and sensation merchants, all running to familiar rhythms and following much the same course. All the keys to the blockbuster era are to be found here. (62)

In this chapter, I will follow the path charted by Shone and search out the keys to the action genre in the first half‐century 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 Altman’s (1984) advice and endeavor to avoid the false sense of security that comes from spending time in the “seemingly uncomplicated world of Hollywood classics” where scholars are ostensibly protected from having to “reflect openly on the [generic] assumptions underlying their work” (6). Instead of taking the generic category of “the action film” 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, last‐minute 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.

Genre, Medium, Automatism

Embarking on a historical survey of the action genre necessarily raises the question, “What is the action genre?” I take the project of this volume as a whole to be a step toward an answer to that question. Even before that difficult question presents itself, however, a far more unsettling question precedes it: “What is a genre?” Leland Poague (1982) once postulated that “no concept in film study is more central or more problematic than the concept of film genre” (57), and this sentiment has been expressed by innumerable scholars over the years in a variety of critical contexts.⁵ Interestingly, an avenue of thought that has yet to be explored despite its potential to fundamentally alter the ways we think about genres in film—and, indeed, the ways we think about film as such—is the avenue sig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the Editor
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: History
• Part II: Form and Aesthetics
• Part III: Auteurs
• Part IV: Social and Cultural Issues
• Index
• End User License Agreement