Action/Spectacle Cinema: a Sight and Sound Reader
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Action/Spectacle Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader By José Arroyo (ed. London: BFI, 2000: ISBN 0-85170-757-2, xvi + 272 pp., illustrations. £12.99 (pbk) Screening Violence Edited by Stephen Prince Screening Violence Edited by Stephen Prince London: The Athlone Press, 2000: ISBN 0-485-30095-8, viii + 275 pp., illustrations. £17.99 (pbk) A review by Mark Gallagher, University of Oregon, USA Amid the many missteps of the 2000 U.S. Presidential campaigns, both leading candidates tried to outdo each other in their condemnations of Hollywood studios marketing violence to the nation's impressionable children. Unwilling to be seen as soft-hearted pacifists, both candidates, of course, also endorsed gun ownership, increased military spending, and government-sponsored executions. Political issues surrounding media violence, though, operate in a particular moral domain, at a remove from social reality and its attendant human conflict. Fictional representations aside, violence remains an overwhelmingly visible and consequential component of human activity worldwide. Despite, or perhaps because of, the prevalence of real violence in human cultures, fictional treatments of violence and destructive spectacle raise thorny questions of industrial responsibility and social reception. Academics in many fields have had much to say on the subject. Two new film studies anthologies offer a substantive overview of media representations of violence: Screening Violence deals specifically with film and television violence, and Action/Spectacle Cinema analyzes popular cinema's most consistently violent film metacategory, the contemporary Hollywood action film/thriller/blockbuster. Screening Violence, edited by Stephen Prince, offers a historical assessment of film violence beginning in the late 1960s, devoting much attention to the groundbreakingly violent Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Many of these analyses, from Prince and MPAA President Jack Valenti, among others, should be familiar to many film scholars, as most of the book's material has been published previously (indeed, one essay is simply a slightly condensed chapter from Prince's 1998 book Savage Cinema, a study of Sam Peckinpah's films). Editor Prince here locates the disparate contributors' perspectives within a specific thematic framework. Perhaps the collection's most useful feature is its assembly of diverse commentaries on violence, including not only film scholars such as Prince, Carol Clover, and Vivian Sobchack, but also Valenti, the Hollywood cinematographer John Bailey, and two sociological studies of violence. In addition to its breadth of viewpoints, the book provides a strong historical context, though it sacrifices currency to do so. The inclusion of pieces written in the late 1960s Valenti's speech to a national commission on violence, and essays reprinted from The New York Times, Newsweek, Variety offers readers a useful overview of contemporaneous responses to films of the era, but it does little to advance current understandings of film violence. Popular film, the industry that produces it, and the cultures that receive it, have changed significantly over the last three decades. The tone of moral outrage in some of the 1960s pieces, notably those from the late Times reviewer Bosley Crowther, attests to gradual shifts in critical tastes and public attitudes toward violent media. The essays grouped in a section labeled as "The Historical Context of Ultraviolence" raise awareness about the gulf between critical perceptions of past and present. Other pieces, in the book's "Aesthetics of Ultraviolence" section, show their age if applied to contemporary film texts. Sobchack's fine essay, which here appears with a new postscript, first appeared in 1974; Clover's contribution is a reprint of the 1987 Representations article that expanded into her influential 1992 book Men, Women and Chainsaws; and aside from Prince's own selections, the book reprints articles first published in the early- to mid-1990s. The book serves well as a historical collection or as a convenient compilation of disparate articles - it would make a versatile text for a college course on film violence - but it provides no new direction for those interested in the subject. Even the introduction, in which Prince incisively addresses questions of aesthetics and reception, itself repeats entire pages (albeit with slightly different prose) from the chapter on Peckinpah that appears later. The sociology entries are vexing for those approaching film violence from a humanities perspective, studying films as specific texts that both construct and distill cultural tensions, rather than as links in a tidy causal chain of violent representations and responses. Attention to social-science data necessarily aids film scholars in understanding media reception, but methodological differences generally impede academic cross-pollination. While non- sociologists may hesitate to question the essays included here because of inexpertise with social-science methodology, a few concerns readily spring to mind. One of the pieces, originally published in 1984, cites previous studies as early as 1963, the present-day applicability of which seems questionable. Moreover, this study, by Leonard Berkowitz, resolutely ignores social causes for violent behavior, using "mass media" as the sole variable. Given the social unrest, wartime conditions, and economic malaise of much of the 1970s, a narrow focus on media violence that makes few distinctions between depictions of real or fictional, staged events yields inconclusive results. Again, trained sociologists may better assess the nuances of the experimental data Berkowitz compiles. More useful to the lay reader may be Richard Felson's thorough review of numerous sociological studies of media violence. Felson's essay, which first appeared in 1996, effectively critiques inconclusive studies and calls attention to methodological shortcomings. The utility of both essays depends partly on readers' willingness to examine approaches to the subject from outside traditional film studies disciplines. Interdisciplinary dialogue ultimately will broaden the thinking of those in disparate fields, but the sociological material sits uneasily in this volume. Overall, Screening Violence fails to grapple effectively with the changes in the production and consumption of film and television violence in the 1980s and 1990s, during which time film has cycled from the paramilitary anguish of First Blood (1982) and Rambo (1985), to the ironic savagery of Reservoir Dogs (1991), Pulp Fiction (1994), and the Scream films, to the patriotic hyperbole of Armageddon and Saving Private Ryan (both 1998). U.S. television in the 1990s, meanwhile, simultaneously celebrated authoritarianism and chaos with cheaply packaged surveillance-video footage of police chases and drug busts. In a further conflation of violence, cartoonish spectacle, and putative reality, U.S. cable networks' wrestling stars perform in crudely scripted and deliriously inauthentic bouts but gain legitimacy by "writing" best-selling autobiographies. Such recent trends make for a very different cultural climate than the historical one that Screening Violence scrutinizes. Prince's introductory essay presents convincing but brief arguments regarding "the social disconnect of many contemporary filmmakers" (33), a compelling idea to which the overall volume devotes scant attention. Prince's formal dissection of the aesthetics of violence in Peckinpah's films supplies an instructive vocabulary for critical viewing, but the increasing ubiquity of film bloodletting and destruction in the last two decades calls for a new critical approach. In Hollywood film, the twentieth century concluded with the hugely popular Zen arsenal on view in The Matrix (1999), a runway show of hyperviolence that makes the diagnostic tools proffered by Screening Violence appear somewhat obsolete. The other volume under review supplies a helpful corrective to Prince's work. Action/Spectacle Cinema compiles Sight and Sound articles written throughout the 1990s, and it is to be lauded for its currency - its final entries date through July 1999, impressively defying the glacial pace of academic publishing. Editor José Arroyo adds new introductory material, including a succinct prefatory essay that defines the action/spectacle "mode" (his term, and a useful one) in terms of critical denigration (both in journalism and in the academy), the industrial climate of contemporary Hollywood (in a word, mergers), and the films' formal properties (he highlights the Steadicam and computer-generated effects; Dolby- and THX-equipped theatres might be added to this short list). The book then delves into sections on the so-called "Big Loud Action Movie," including thoughtful pieces from Larry Gross, who coined the phrase, and Richard Dyer; action heroes and directors; special-effects technology; neo-noir; 90s serial-killer films; and a "Critical Perspectives" section, its vague title denoting a series of smart but hazily-connected pieces from J. Hoberman, Yvonne Tasker, and others. As a collection of already published material, the work sometimes struggles to maintain its coherence. It includes over thirty essays, most of them fairly short, and nearly as many reviews of individual film. Many pieces were written without specific attention to the "action/spectacle" meta-category Arroyo identifies, and consequently, they exhibit a disparity rather than a unity of tone. Such variances can constitute