action movies
so I’ve been reading all day. In fact, I think I’m turning into a book.
My dissertation is gonna’ pose some excising challenges as I’m sure a lot of you guys are thinking about your own extended essays, research projects and if you’re at Leeds Met; macaroni collages1. Point is, pretty quickly I’ve come to what I think is going to be my first wall. The make or break point in the text. If it were a screenplay; as increasingly most things are to me now, we would call this the inciting incident, the bit that sets the film really going, the first major plot point, twist or possibly; hole.
It’s like when Harry meets Sally, like when Harry meet Lloyd, when Dirty Harry foils that bank robbery, its just like when… oh actually it’s nothing like when Dirty Harry foils the bank robbery utters those most awesome of words:
HARRY
...do you feel lucky? Well do ya’, punk?
And here’s for why2 .
I’m going to have to give some plausible definition of what an action film actually is. That doesn’t sound so hard right? But my definition has to work with the rest of the work and most importantly; it’s got to make sense.
I’m tackling Hollywood action movies coming out of ‘new Hollywood’ and how the genre has reacted and reflected a changing society. New Hollywood is actually a fairly uncommon way to talk about contemporary North American Cinema however I’m making historical distinction between old Hollywood and New Hollywood. We’ve got feminism in there, hippies, sex, racism, violence, war, over consumption, over population, in fact, you name it, its in there and it’s all got to come off of a working definition.
I might have found one.
Come with me into your mind and think about what an action movie actually is. Sweat? Explosions? Car chases? Well yeah I guess so. The phrase ‘action’ gives us an idea of what to expect from a movie and these expectations would, in the real world3 would look like a collection of the staple action sequences of the genre. These could range from car chases, explosions, fights, fast paced direction and photography and visual and audio effects turned up to 11…
At it’s simplest we can postulate that action suggests a sort of film-making (in effect, technique) and a specific set of pleasures4 .
That’s great, thanks Yvonne. What caps that off is José Arroyo who states that the best way to define what an action movie is, is by thinking about it like a musical. Well he doesn’t quite make that link but he does say that your classic set piece action sequences are:
woven through the film like songs and dances … in old-fashioned musical: it isn’t so much that they don’t tell us anything about the characters, but that their function as spectacle exceeds their function as narrative5 .
wow. And someone said all the Spanish gave us was bull fighting and San Miguel. José drives that way back into the stands. Incidentally I watched an ESPN documentary on Jairo Miguel the ‘legendary’ baby bullfighter who was almost gored to death at the age of fourteen. I bet its on YouTube. It’s horrific. It’ll definitely be on ‘el YouTubo”.
So you see how the bank robbery in Dirty Harry is a great example? It tells us very little about Harry that we already didn’t know from the “I don’t work with a partner” bit in the police station and what’s more, in true Arroyo style; does nothing for the narrative and tells us nothing about the story what so ever. That ladies and gentlemen is action cinema.
Of course Dirty Harry is a cop film…
Ben
- That’s right, I went there! Ha ha! [↩]
- That’s grammatically incorrect [↩]
- or in fact the celluloid one [↩]
- Yvonne Tasker (2004). Action and Adventure Cinema. New York: Routledge. 7. [↩]
- Action/Spectacle: A Sight and Sound Reader London: BFI Publishing, 2000 [↩]
