The Evolution Of Action Films
Article by Samantha Bennett
Action films highlight spectacle at the expense of narrative: now, with the genre crossing into a new medium, the narrative has been superseded entirely. Action films and adventure films have tremendous cross-over potential as film genres.
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Hong Kong action films, which specialize in precisely this kind of juxtaposition of corny romantic melodrama with stylized and hyperbolic violence, have one of the biggest cult followings for films made outside of the American mainstream. A Better Tomorrow, one of the most commercially successful films in Hong Kong cinema, represented a new approach to action films. In other words, the type of heroes found in Woo's action films seem to represent the kind of responses available within the Hong Kong imagination to the colony's reunification with China in 1997, a situation clearly understood and represented as a problematic time. Of course, they miss by a mile and, despite being milked for ironic humor, this scene nevertheless represents the exemplary moment of heterosexuality within the world of Hong Kong action films.
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With the collapse of the Production Code in 1968 and the introduction of a ratings system, Hollywood action films of the 1970s begin to push acceptable boundaries with respect to screen violence. Arthur Penn's stylish gangster film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah's elegiac western The Wild Bunch (1969), both controversial at the time, have been read as important markers in a move toward a clearly differentiated, adult form of violent cinema in which scenes of dramatic and bloody death are vividly portrayed. The series of films initiated by Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971), featuring Clint Eastwood as the eponymous rogue cop, routinely feature shocking images of death, violence, and torture. For Romao, films such as Bullitt (1968) work to harness the counter-cultural associations of rebel masculinity signaled by the automobile, rendering old forms (the car chase) exciting for a new generation (pp. Paranoid traditions continued well into the 1970s with such films as The Parallax View (1974) and Winter Kills (1979). Many critics regard blaxploitation as a problematic mode of film production because it typically employed familiar but unwelcome racial and sexual stereotypes. Significantly, though, black action films of the 1970s strongly evince the influence of Hong Kong filmmaking on American cinema. Although some of these films have critical or cult status, it is worth noting that many black action films, and other films that potentially troubled traditional configurations of American heroism, were associated with low-budget production and/or restricted in their theatrical distribution. Yet from the end of the 1970s to the present day, action and adventure films have been associated with some of the most costly, highly promoted, and highly profitable Hollywood films and franchises.
Lucas and his contemporary Steven Spielberg, director of adventure hits such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park (1993), have come to represent a commercially lucrative yet culturally conservative vision of the action-adventure film, one which remains enormously influential. Action, as distinct from adventure, was significantly redefined once more in the American cinema of the 1980s: "action" became a widely used term to promote films as generic, rather than for describing one element of a film's repertoire of pleasures or a type of sequence.
Samantha Bennett is a successful Webmaster and publisher of
www.MovieInfluences.com. She provides more information about
Movies and what has influenced them over time that you can research in your pajamas on her website.
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