Suspenseful situations: Melodramatic narrative and the contemporary action film

Cinema Journal

Volumn 47, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 74-96

  Higgins, Scott ^a  

^a WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 58149334655     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2008.0010     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. Annabelle Vilaneuva, "Action Dissatisfaction," Cinescape 4, no. 1 (1998): 46
2. The films are Star Wars: Episode 1, Jurassic Park, Star Wars: Episode III, Spider-Man, Independence Day, Spider-Man 2, Star Wars, The Matrix Reloaded, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Star Wars: Episode II according to BoxofficeMojo.com. If one includes the Lord of the Rings films in this tally, the total jumps to thirteen action films. http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/ world/
3. See Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994)
4. Wheeler Winston Dixon, "Twenty-Five Reasons Why It's All Over" in The End. of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, ed. Jon Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 356-66
5. For a thorough overview and criticism of this position, see David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
6. James Cameron's T2, with its use of computer morphing, helped crystallize the strategy of using a particular special effects technology to define an event picture's market identity. Other examples include the use of CGI in the Jurassic Park series, or Bullet Time in The Matrix
7. James M. Welsh, "Action Films: The Serious, the Ironic and the Postmodern," in Film Genre 2000, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 169
8. Dixon, Film Genre 2000, 4-5
9. Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I. B. Traubis & Co., 2000), 36
10. Jose Arroyo, Action/Spectacle Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: BFI, 2000) vii, 2, 22
11. Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde" Wide Angle 8, no. 3/4 (1986): 70
12. Murray Smith, "Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History," in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neal and Murray Smith (New York: Routledge, 1998), 13
13. Yvonne Tasker makes a similar point when she notes that "the 'action' of action cinema refers to the enactment of spectacle as narrative." She also extends her definition of spectacle beyond effects and stunts, and views "visual display" as "a defining feature of the genre." My argument, by contrast, prioritizes the narrative structures that might enable a less generalized kind of spectacle. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies (London: Routledge, 1993), 6
14. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19-29
15. Georges Polti, The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations (Boston: The Writer Inc., 1977), 123
16. Polti, Thirty Six Dramatic Situations, 120, 121
17. Brewster and Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema, 24
18. Polti, Thirty Six Dramatic Situations, 131
19. Yvonne Tasker's important anthology Action and. Adventure Cinema collects essays on early film melodrama by Jennifer Bean and Ben Singer, along with Steve Neale's useful overview of the action-adventure genre. In her introduction, Tasker notes that action films "are typically melodramatic." Though none of this work dwells on connections between the contemporary genre and the nineteenth-century theatrical tradition, it very much affirms the need for further investigation. Yvonne Tasker, Action and Adventure Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 5
20. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15
21. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 44-50
22. Brewster and Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema, 26
23. James Ryan, Screenwriting from the Heart (New York: Billboard Books, 2000), 75
24. Michael Rabinger, Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics (Burlington MA: Focal Press, 2003), 171
25. Brewster and Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema, 21
26. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 111, 112
27. Warren Buckland, "A Close Encounter with Raiders of the Lost Ark: notes on narrative aspects of the New Hollywood blockbuster" in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, 166-77
28. Kristen Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 348
29. Brewster and Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema, 215
30. Elizabeth Cowie, "Storytelling: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Classical Narrative" in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, 184
31. Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 210
32. Rudy Behlmer, "High Style on the High Seas," American Cinematographer (April 1992): 28
33. Contemporary cinema is often described as self-aware, but this moment is a reminder that playful knowingness and irony are by no means new methods covering melodramatic contrivance. Indeed, the use of self-aware humor may in part distinguish main-stream sitnational construction from more marginal, "naïve" forms like the serial
34. Cowie, "Storytelling," 178
35. Smith, "Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History;" 12-13
36. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood tells It, 105, 109
37. The development of inner conflicts to parallel the hero's external struggle is also a strong convention of contemporary screenwriting according to Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 29-31
38. In his manual for action screenwriting, William Martell proclaims: "What makes John McClane the perfect protagonist for DIE HARD is that the external conflict forces him to confront and solve an internal conflict, leading to a single solution which solves both problems and brings peace to the protagonist." William Martell, Secrets of Action Screenwriting (Los Angeles: First Strike Productions, 2000), 229
39. Noel Carroll, Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990), 138
40. Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of the American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 95, 106