Yvonne Tasker, Introduction and Steve Neale, Action-Adventure As Hollywood Genre

(In Action and Adventure Cinema)

This is a collection of essays on the genre, all of which look fascinating, but most of which unfortunately are minimally useful for my current research... so many articles, so little time. However, Tasker (who is somewhat of an authority on action cinema) raises some interesting points in her introduction.

I like the idea that the Action genre is the key genre of the blockbuster era - a glance at box office statistics confirms its preeminence - and that its emergence/formalization can be directly linked to the New/post-classical/whatever Hollywood. I think that the unique features of contemporary film franchise can similarly be attributed to the cultural and industrial shift towards high concept and beyond.

Tasker also briefly comments on the impulse among those of us who study and appreciate action cinema to be overly apologetic and defensive on behalf of action films. She advocates a "fair trial" for these films - we should not write them off automatically as trash, nor should we be overly diplomatic in valorizing the genre as a whole. I'm inclined to agree, although I'm certainly guilty of being a notoriously generous viewer.

The analogy between action films and musicals is a fairly common one (I wrote a paper once on the commonalities between musicals and martial arts films), but Tasker suggests a new angle on the critical tool. She proposes that the analogy can be useful in valorizing the genre in spite of its overwhelming violence. If we treat action sequences as spectacular performances, and not as violent images (or worse, as actual violence), then the films seem suddenly more harmless. This does not eliminate the many other ideologically problematic aspects of both the musical and action genres, of course, but it is an interesting notion.

Neale's chapter is a brief excerpt from his Genre and Hollywood, locating what I have come to call Action cinema (the version of the genre which emerges in the 1970s and becomes formalized in the 1980s) within the larger context of action-adventure-type movies and fiction throughout history, as far back as medieval romantic literature. The exercises debunks some of our commonly held ideas about action movies, in particular gender - female heroines seem to pass in and out of vogue throughout the development of the genre, but are very much a part of that development. This contextualization is useful and I must keep it in mind, even as I emphasize the contemporary version of the genre.