Instructor:  C N Blakemore
 

A strong argument can be made for the action film as the most vital  and visually adventurous genre of our day.
The genre has attracted fascinating new talent:  Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, From Dusk To Dawn), David
Fincher (Seven, The Game, Fight Club) and John Woo (The Killer, Broken Arrow, Face/Off), among many. Even
such unapologetically popular  entertainment as the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series and the Schwartzenegger
and Stallone catalogues open up the screen with moments of great cinematic energy, verve and abandon.

Action films are, at heart, fantasies of motion, with a kind of unjaded purity.  Cinema has been about action from its very outset, about the irresistible movement of objects through space and time: moving pictures, as distinct from still photography.  And film has always been about a certain kind of fantasy, or  illusion at least, whether the illusion of the Lumières’ train entering a station, or that of Méliès’s nymphs and moon-rockets.  In the past, when movies were less self-conscious, they were often art in spite of themselves.  Now, however,  in
our age of pop culture, we automatically assume that film is art; by corollary, the action film occupies the high ground of the avant-garde.  The modern “art” film struggles to appropriate the conventions, the anxieties and thrills, of the action film (witness Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, one of the most “artsy” and self-conscious films in recent memory) while the action film flows seamlessly  into art (e.g., “Beat” Takeshi’s Fireworks).

The genre itself is of fairly recent vintage, an incorporation of several moribund genres (the war film, the western, the gangster film, the cliffhanger serial) with some newer forms: modern sci-fi and nineties noir (a very different animal from its precursor).

This course will examine the historical precedents of the modern action film, then seek to understand its strengths and its weaknesses as cinema, and its meaning in the larger, cultural context.  And, since this course will likely be an introduction to film studies for most students, we will also consider the basic mechanics of
filmmaking and -viewing.  We will read the few critics who have written on the action film: 

• Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema by Yvonne Tasker;
• Action: the Action Movie, A - Z by Marshall Julius,
• Heroes in Hard Times : Cop Action Movies in the U.S. by Neal King and
• Hong Kong Babylon : An Insider's Guide to the Hollywood of the East  by Fredric Dannen and Barry Long.

1.       Les Vampires (1915-16) by Louis Feuillade
2.      Thief of Bagdad (1924) by Raoul Walsh
3.      The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley
4.      The Big Heat (1953) by Fritz Lang
5.      Goldfinger (1964) by Guy Hamilton
6.      Point Blank (1967) by John Boorman
7.      The Wild Bunch (1969) by Sam Peckinpah
8.      The French Connection (1971) by William Friedkin
9.      Dirty Harry (1971) by Don Siegel
10.      Alien (1978) by Ridley Scott
11.      The Road Warrior (1981) by George Miller
12.      Die Hard (1988) by John McTiernan
13.     The Killer [Die xue shuang xiong] (1989) by John Woo

 
14.      Desperado (1995) by Robert Rodriguez
15.     Fallen Angels [Duoluo tianshi] (1995) by Wong Kar-Wei

 
16.      Fireworks [Hana-bi] (1997) by Takeshi Kitano
17.      The Matrix (1999) by the Wachowski Brothers
18.      Fight Club (1999) by David Fincher

Assignments: Two  5-page papers and a final essay exam.