Action Cinema Since 2000

by Chris Holmlund (Editor), Lisa Purse (Editor), Yvonne Tasker (Editor)

Overview

Action Cinema Since 2000 addresses an increasingly lively and evolving field of scholarship, probing the definition and testing the potential of action cinema to reframe the mode for the 21st century.

Contributors examine a broad range of content, from blockbusters to smaller independent films, originating from China, Korea, India, France, the USA, and Mexico. Ranging from JSA: Joint Security Area (Gondonggeonygbi guyeok) (2000) to Polite Society (2023), they consider the changing modes of action cinema, with streaming assuming global importance and an ever-increasing number of generic blends. They consider under-explored areas of action film, particularly how race, ethnicity, gender, and age figure in narratives and through image and soundtracks.

Overall, the book demonstrates how 21st century action cinema engages with and reflects geopolitical, creative, and industrial developments. Contributors argue that it continues to offer fantasies of empowerment and mobility that say much about how power is understood in diverse contexts today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781839022791
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/16/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Chris Holmlund is Professor Emerita of Cinema Studies, Women's Studies and French at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA. She has longstanding research interests in action film, stardom, and performance. Her books include Female Trouble (2017) and American Cinema of the 1990s (2208). She is editor of The Ultimate Stallone Reader (2014).

Lisa Purse is Professor of Film at the University of Reading, UK. She is a leading action and digital effects scholar with interests in the politics of representation and the aesthetics of contemporary digital cinema technologies. Her books include Contemporary Action Cinema (2011), and Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013). She is co-editor of Disappearing War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World (2017).

Yvonne Tasker is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. She has written extensively on popular cinema and is author of Spectacular Bodies (1993), Working Girls (1998), and The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film (2015). She is editor of Action and Adventure Cinema (2004), and co-editor of Interrogating Postfeminism (2007).
Chris Holmlund is Professor Emerita of Cinema Studies, Women's Studies and French at the University of Tennessee, USA. She has longstanding research interests in action film, stardom, and performance. Her recent books include Female Trouble (2017) and editorship of The Ultimate Stallone Reader (2014). She is currently writing a book called Action Films, Action Stars.
Lisa Purse is Professor of Film in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading, UK. She is a leading action and digital effects scholar with interests in the politics of representation and the aesthetics of contemporary digital cinema technologies. Her publications include Contemporary Action Cinema (2011), Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013) and (as co-editor) Disappearing War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World (2017).
Yvonne Tasker is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. She has written extensively on gender in popular cinema and television. Her most recent publications are Action Cinema Since 2000, co-edited with Chris Holmlund and Lisa Purse (BFI, 2024) and Jill Craigie: Film and Feminism in Postwar Britain, co-authored with Sadie Wearing (2025).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Action as Mode - Chris Holmlund, Lisa Purse, and Yvonne Tasker
1. Accounting for Action: Racial Discourse and Chronologies of Genre - Yvonne Tasker
2. Dirt Research: Contemporary Stunt Work in Action - Lauren Steimer
3. Big and Loud: The Sonic Aesthetics of the Fight Scene in Digital Action Cinema - Lindsay Steenberg and Lisa Coulthard
4. “French Touch” Action Cinema - Charlie Michael
5. No Exit from “Hell Joseon”: National Tragedy and Heroic Rescue in South Korean Action-Disaster Films - Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient
6. Mesmerizing Outsiders: Washington, Mackie, and Performance in Action Cinema - Cynthia Baron
7. Samuel L. Jackson in Geriaction: “Bad Ass” Black Screen Masculinity, Aging, and Redundancy - Glen Donnar
8. Action Latinas in an Era of Precarity - Mary Beltrán
9. Bollywood's New Action Cinema: The Woman-led Action Film and the Nation - Krupa Shandilya
10. Anxiety in Action: Jackie Chan, COVID-19, and Brexit along the Belt and Road - Gina Marchetti
11. Aging, Disability, Acting: Pam Grier and Sigourney Weaver - Chris Holmlund
12. What Does Power Look Like? Women Heroes in Digital Action Cinema - Lisa Purse
13. Beyond the Dark Moment: Seriality and Heroic Failure in Contemporary Action Cinema - Scott Higgins
Filmography
Index

Editorial Reviews

This book emphatically confirms the continuing significance of action cinema, particularly as a site of cross-cultural exchange. In its capacious breadth and its intellectual generosity, it captures an astonishing range of issues, offering transnational perspectives on this evolving genre.” —Sharon Willis, University of Rochester, USA

“Action Cinema Since 2000 offers a series of solid intellectual punches that together make a convincing case for considering action cinema as a dominant mode of popular film. Comprehensive and compelling, it examines the aesthetics of action in a global context and is certain to be an indispensable volume for anyone interested in contemporary filmmaking.” —Barry Keith Grant, Brock University, Canada

“This book offers a superb collection of essays that examines the aesthetics, technologies, and ideologies involved in a diverse series of contemporary films that deploy action as a key mode of expression. Attuned to issues of race, gender, and other identity categories across different world cinemas, as well as to how action cinema itself has been formulated in the 21st century, Holmlund, Purse, Tasker, and their authors provide bracing new insights into films that have powerfully defined today's global mediascape.” —Barbara Klinger, Provost Professor Emerita, Indiana University, USA

“Speeding around the world and across the past two decades, this action-packed collection brings two-fisted scholarship up to date with a hyperkinetic array of hard-hitting insights. Holmlund, Purse and Tasker serve up a baker's dirty dozen of heavyweight scholars who score knockouts with new research on action movies' production, performances, technology, aesthetics, politics and ideology, including spectacular rematches with the mode's muscular sparring partners gender, race and the body. This book packs a punch.” —Mark Gallagher, author of Action Figures: Men, Action Films and Contemporary Adventure Narratives.

“Action Cinema Since 2000 is a trail-blazing, fist-pumping, butterfly kick of a book that will change the way action is conceptualized in cinema studies. With a dream team of editors, and a stellar list of contributors, this book diversifies understandings of action in its careful attention to film production, industry developments, socio-political issues, and cinema aesthetics in an ever-evolving global mediascape. Making the case for action cinema as a mode, rather than a genre, Action Cinema Since 2000 reveals its complexity and nuance.” —Tanya Horeck, Anglia Ruskin University, UK

From the Publisher