Action and Adventure Cinema
1 Action and Adventure Cinema 1 1 Action has established itself as one of the leading genres of contemporary Hollywood cinema, generating extensive critical debate in the process. This exciting collection addresses action and adventure from the silent era to the present day, exploring 1 diverse questions of aesthetics, industry and ideology. Contributors consider how action might best be defined, how it has developed historically, and how it works formally. The critical reception and standing of action and adventure cinema is considered in relation to questions of national culture, violence and the ‘art’ of cinema. Themes explored include genre and definitions; early action, sensation and melo- drama; authorship; national and transnational action-adventure traditions; action aesthetics; spectacle and narrative; stars and bodies; class; gender, and race and ethnicity. Individual chapters discuss action cinema from early melodrama and serials such as The Hazards of Helen through classic films of the 1960s including 1 Bullitt, The Wild Bunch and The Dirty Dozen up to contemporary blockbusters Die Hard, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The book considers the action genre outside Hollywood, in Greece, Italy and Japan, and also views action and adventure cinema through the work of individual directors including D.W. Griffith, Akira Kurosawa, Sam Peckinpah and Kathryn Bigelow. Essays by: Richard Abel, Jennifer M. Bean, Mary Beltrán, Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Martin Flanagan, Martin Fradley, Barry Keith Grant, Michael Hammond, Christine Holmlund, Leon Hunt, Mark Jancovich, Susan Jeffords, Peter Krämer, Steve Neale, Marc O’Day, Lydia Papadimitriou, Stephen Prince, Tico Romao, Ben Singer, Yvonne 1 Tasker, Linda Ruth Williams, Rachel Williams, Tony Williams, Aylish Wood.
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