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With 24 incisive, cutting-edge contributions from esteemed scholars and critics, A Companion to the Action Film provides an authoritative and in-depth guide to this internationally popular and wide-ranging genre. As the first major anthology on the action film in more than a decade, the volume offers insights into the genre’s historical development, explores its production techniques and visual poetics, and provides reflections on the numerous social, cultural, and political issues it has and continues to embody.A Companion to the Action Film offers original research and critical analysis that examines the iconic characteristics of the genre, its visual aesthetics, and its narrative traits; considers the impact of major directors and stars on the genre’s evolution; puts the action film in dialogue with various technologies and other forms of media such as graphic novels and television; and maps out new avenues of critical study for the future. This important resource: Offers a definitive guide to the action film; Contains insightful contributions from a wide range of international film experts and scholars; Reviews the evolution of the genre from the silent era to today’s age of digital blockbusters; Offers nuanced commentary and analysis of socio-cultural issues such as race, nationality, and gender in action films. Written for scholars, teachers and students in film studies, film theory, film history, genre studies, and popular culture, A Companion to the Action Film is an essential guide to one of international cinema’s most important, popular, and influential genres.

Action and adventure films --- History and criticism.

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Here for the first time is a book that defines the historical adventure movie, one of the most enduring, ever-popular, and mythically significant American film genres. Despite the popularity of historical adventure from the early days of filmmaking, never before has this Hollywood genre been analyzed in a comprehensive manner. Brian Taves's The Romance of Adventure includes an array of subgenres - swashbucklers, tales of pirates, the sea, exploration, and the building of empires - in films as diverse as The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Buccaneer, Mutiny on the Bounty, Moby Dick, Captain Horatio Hornblower, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Gunga Din, and The Man Who Would Be King. The author's definition of the historical adventure film emphasizes setting, consistent characterizations, and precise codes of behavior. He illuminates its many branches and shows how such activities as exploration of the world's remote regions and individualistic, armed rebellions for freedom are impelled by the adventurer's values - patriotism, chivalry, and honor. Taves finds that such movies reflect an idealistic world view and present history more as myth than as factual re-creation, with adventure belonging to an era long past, when morality was drawn in sharp relief. In romance adventure films the fight for liberty may occur in the castles of Europe, on board a ship on the high seas, or in colonies extending from the Spanish Main to India and Africa. In this way Taves believes that these films metaphorically depict the American Revolution, even though the conflict's essential issues are set in various times and places and indicate the timeless, universal need for liberty and freedom.

Action and adventure films --- History and criticism

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Music in Action Film is the first volume to address the central role of music and sound in action film - arguably the most dominant form of commercial cinema today. Bringing together fifteen essays by established and emerging scholars, the book encompasses both Hollywood blockbusters and international films, from classic works such as The Seven Samurai to contemporary superhero franchises. The contributors consider action both as genre and as a mode of cinematic expression, in chapters on evolving musical conventions; politics, representation, and identity; musical affect and agency; the functional role of music and sound design in action film; and production technologies. Breaking new critical ground yet highly accessible, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of music and film studies.

Motion picture music --- Action and adventure films --- History and criticism.

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Since the 1960s, Hong Kong cinema has helped to shape one of the world's most popular cultural genres: action cinema. Hong Kong action films have proved popular over the decades with audiences worldwide, and they have seized the imaginations of filmmakers working in many different cultural traditions and styles. How do we account for this appeal, which changes as it crosses national borders?Hong Kong Connections brings leading film scholars together to explore the circulation of Hong Kong cinema in Japan, Korea, India, Australia, France, and the United States, as well as its links with Taiwan, Singapore, and the Chinese mainland. In the process, this collection examines diverse cultural contexts for action cinema's popularity and the problems involved in the transnational study of globally popular forms, suggesting that in order to grasp the history of Hong Kong action cinema's influence we need to bring out the differences as well as the links that constitute popularity.

Action and adventure films --- Action-adventure films --- Action cinema --- Action films --- Action movies --- Adventure and action films --- Adventure films --- Adventure movies --- Motion pictures --- Swashbuckler films --- History and criticism. --- Film --- Hong Kong

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"At a time when technological advances are transforming cultures and supporting new automated military operations, action films engage the senses and, in doing so, allow viewers to embody combat roles. This book argues that through film the viewer adapts to an ecology of fear, one that reflects global panic at the near-constant threat of conflict and violence. Often overwhelming in its audiovisual assault, action cinema attempts to overpower our bodies with its own through force and intensity. In this book, Steen Ledet Christiansen identifies five aspects central to how action films produce such physical movements and responses through vectors, droning, kinetics, telesomatics and volatility and in so doing unveils new modes of perception that acclimatise us for warfare. Drawing on theories from film-philosophy and a consideration of the aesthetics and phenomenology of war, this is an innovative study of the evolving action movie and its role in the targeted address of battle. Chapters investigate new modes of cinematic experience through in-depth case studies of Iron Man, Avatar and the Jason Bourne trilogy, through to The Hurt Locker and Mad Max: Fury Road." -- Publisher's description.

Action and adventure films --- Technology in motion pictures. --- History and criticism. --- Motion pictures --- Action-adventure films --- Action cinema --- Action films --- Action movies --- Adventure and action films --- Adventure films --- Adventure movies --- Swashbuckler films