Action and Adventure Cinema - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415235073 ISBN 13: 9780415235075

Publisher: Routledge, 2004

Synopsis

This exciting collection addresses action and adventure from the silent to the contemporary period exploring diverse questions of aesthetics, industry and ideology. Action has established itself as one of the leading commercial genres of the New Hollywood cinema, generating extensive debate in the process.

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 melodrama; authorship and action; national and transnational action-adventure traditions; action aesthetics; spectacle and narrative; stars and bodies; class; gender; race and ethnicity.

Attempting to evaluate the significance of this type of filmmaking for both popular cinema and film studies, the book underlines the central place of action and adventure within film history.

About this title

About the Author:

Yvonne Tasker is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is author of Spectacular Bodies (1993), Working Girls (1998) and Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers (2002), all published by Routledge.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0415235073
• ISBN 13: 9780415235075
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Tasker Yvonne