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This monograph is a study of a genre and the work of a director in the contemporary Hong Kong cinema. The theoretical premise of this monograph is that the work of the director in focus, Johnnie To (Chinese name: To Kei-fung in Cantonese, Du Qifeng in Mandarin), has affected and changed the nature of genre and its industry more so than the other way around. Some of his works are presented. The auteur function is the centre of the film texts in this study, with genre occupying a subordinate position coordinated into the texts. The genre exerts are discussed as a constraint. It also retraces the history of To's achievements within the genre and poses a historicist connection between To, the action film genre, and the Hong Kong film industry. To's three periods of development are examined in order to consider the historicist connections and to see more clearly To's accomplishments and status vis-à-vis his contemporaries in the Hong Kong cinema. Furthermore, an overview of the chapters included in this monograph is provided.

This chapter describes a cluster of action films that Johnnie To produced for Milkyway Image, the production company that he founded in 1996. It starts with a discussion with Beyond Hypothermia, a film released in 1996 and produced by To under a separate independent entity (the film was eventually affixed under the Milkyway banner after the setting up of the company and was released as a Milkyway film). It also addresses how the films Beyond Hypothermia, Too Many Ways to Be Number One (1997), The Odd One Dies (1997), The Longest Nite (1998), and Expect the Unexpected (1998), corroborate, reaffirm, and depart from the sum and substance of To's cinema. These films are all the more outstanding in that they were made in a spirit of creative freedom and apparently not much constraint over market considerations. The Milkyway films earned To his greatest critical acclaim thus far but, ironically, he was credited on these films as producer.

This chapter explores a selection of Johnnie To's works where the flaws qualify his auteur status and make him an uneven auteur. It specifically describes Needing You, Help!, Fulltime Killer, Running on Karma, and Throw Down, another group of five films which constitutes an “uneven pentad” from the point of view of genre and To's direction. Though the nucleus of this study is the gunplay action film with a concentration on the gangster film or the cops-and-robbers thrillers, it also reviews To's contribution to the Hong Kong genre cinema in toto as much as possible. All of these films contain unequal measures of excellence and flaws which result from the effort to integrate different qualities.

This chapter attends to representations of violence—specifically, violence generated by and directed against male bodies—in Hollywood action films. Linking the “violence” of action films with the trauma of war, however tangentially, may appear as obscene and problematic as Bataille's celebratory turn to mystical self-annihilation in the midst of World War II, but a connection between the action genre's pleasures and those “drawn [from] the combat aspect of war” can be seen. This chapter then considers some of the clearest examples of the male-body-in-pain's ambiguity. Featuring narratives of the suffering but triumphant hero, and containing spectacular displays of the male body, action films present all the issues and questions that motivate this study.

This chapter considers action cinema in relation to issues of globalisation and the international film marketplace, and looks at the stylistic exchanges that result in the light of recent debates about whether multi-country co-productions can (or should) protect a national cultural identity. Arguing that many countries, not just the US, are now attempting an ‘internationalising formula’ for the action movie that will maximise their international box office potential, the chapter makes a case study of a particular region, focusing on recent films of the French production company EuropaCorp. The contemporary French action ?lm has become a key site of controversy in national debates about cultural imperialism, cultural identity and indigenous ?lm style. Looking at Banlieue 13 and Danny the Dog the chapter analyses the stylistic and representational tensions that can result from putting the internationalising formula into practice.

The demand for all areas of Nordic film and television culture outside the borders of the Nordic countries may come as no surprise. The popularity of television shows such as The Killing (Forbrydelsen, 2007) and The Bridge (Bron|Broen, 2011) both domestically and internationally have increased the profile of Nordic media while the crime novels of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson have penetrated the American market – the barometer for global Commercial ‘relevance’. The Guardian in the UK has published several articles on the craze, noting how the protagonist of the original Danish version of The Killing, detective Sarah Lund, has become an unlikely fashion icon with her knitted sweaters. While a certain type of Nordic film – the existential artistry of a Dreyer, a Bergman or a Kaurismäki – has existed at the periphery of this global consciousness, such perceptions are clearly shifting as the contemporary situation seems to be more characterised by Nordic contributions to global popular culture instead of the more traditional frameworks of artistic or experimental relevance. How did we get to this situation? In short, how did the media products of this small region of the world become part of global popular culture?

This chapter investigates the representation of the feminine subject in science fiction. It is shown that feminine subjects have traditionally been joined within the science fiction film. The 1990s saw the development of a different kind of female figure in science fiction cinema. The chapter states that female figures which emerged in science fiction/action films appeared to take on a functioning role more normally assigned to the male hero. Comparative analyses of three films in which a female hero appears are given: Hardware, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Nemesis 2: Nebula. Both Hardware and Nemesis 2 exploit the Terminator films, but each in its way also subverts the narrative trajectory of their blockbuster counterparts. Starship Troopers effectively takes both the female hero and the femme fatale. An interview with Director Paul Verhoeven regarding the female heroes is also offered.

This chapter defines the serious Hollywood war film of the post-Vietnam era within industry, genre, visual style, and reception history. These movies engage seriously with historical fact from the point of view of the individual soldier and veteran and reflect their makers’ sense of moral urgency. Several of these films have sparked larger national conversations about specific American wars. The various discourses and practices of authenticity undergirding these films are discussed. The capacity of young men to read ostensibly anti-war films as celebrations of war is noted. The four overlapping cycles of serious war film production after Vietnam are outlined: films about Vietnam made between 1978 and 1989, four films about US military involvements in the Middle East in the 1990s, the long-lived World War II cycle begun in the late 1990s, and the twenty-first-century cycle of combat films about ongoing American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The first chapter argues for the pervasiveness, and productivity, of self-endangerment in mainstream cinema. It does so via one of the most popular and exportable genres, the action film, which thrives on the self-endangerment of its predominantly male protagonists. Establishing, initially, the place of peril in narrative per se as a ‘recovery momentum’, this recovery momentum proves a useful analogue for mainstream cinema's (conservative) investment in cure and self-affirmation. The often-damaged but invulnerable heroes who frequent the action genre provide a steady stream of maverick, heroic but also reckless self-risk. Indeed, this non-conformity and wildness prove central to the pleasures of the genre and its construction of heroism, especially its Americanness. By the end of the films, however, the heroes appear reformed and the status quo restored. But the battles that are won in the action films discussed in this chapter are shown to be ideological ones ultimately, and the representation of self-endangerment proves an integral part of this. For all its testimony to the grandeur, and pleasure, of spectacle and to the cheapness of life, the action film is shown to foment enduring principles of the valuation of life in nationalist and gendered terms.

This chapter relates mass-mediated abuses against Arabs and Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo to relevant U.S.-American films since the 1980s and to Middle Eastern films in order to show how such cultural representations are tied to the international power structure and what ideological premises underpin them. It argues that while depictions of physical abuse in U.S. and Middle Eastern films are interdependent and cross-referential, the two sets of film differ substantially in their choice of genres and modes of representation. Moreover, while characterizations of ethnic difference vary according to the particular political and racialized agenda being espoused, those relating to sexual difference follow a more uniform set of codifications. Emphasis on physical traits, such as weakness, passivity, and penetrability, are crucial to delivering a gendered political message that links recourse to torture to a drive for absolute power and gender domination.

This chapter is an exploration of the defining trends of the action film in post-9/11 cinema. It situates the debate around the shifting parameters of masculinity in the War on Terror decade with a detailed analysis of the Bourne, Rambo, Taken and James Bond franchises.

This chapter looks at Sylvester Stallone's screenwriting through an analysis of Cobra (1986). In constructing his plot for Cobra, Stallone filtered out the complexities of Paula Gosling's 1974 novel Fair Game, and relied on the basic principles of melodrama. The film's melodramatic plotting contrasts with classical cinema's tight causality. Where classical text imposes strict limits on coincidence, and seeks to motivate action through character psychology and verisimilitude, melodrama thrives on juxtaposing thrilling situations, emotional reversals, and dramatic happenstance. In addition, it engages in melodrama's tradition of elevating spectacular pictures over the dramatic text (pictorialism). Thus, strong imagery and moral polarities, rather than dialogue or causal plotting, are Cobra's backbone. Stallone also uses the attack-and-defence model to generate sturdy action-film set pieces, including a car chase, a hostage standoff, a race to the rescue, a siege, and a final confrontation.

This chapter discusses how the Quay Brothers’ small-scale puppet animations turned into feature and live-action films. In addition to their independent filmmaking engagements, they also took charge of stage performances such as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Jonathan Miller, 1996), the opera Mazeppa (Richard Jones, 1991), and the ballet Queen of Spades (Kim Brandstrup, 2001). They were particularly assigned to the decorative, architectural, and narrative design of these performances. This chapter then explores how these performances contributed to the film techniques used by the Quay Brothers in their entry into the field of feature and live-action films. These include The Comb [From the Museums of Sleep] (1990), De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis (1991), Stille Nacht Series, Institute Benjamenta (1995), The Summit (1995), In Absentia (2000), and Frida (2002).

The first chapter is concerned with the cinematic narratives of Eastern noir, which adopt a border discourse and imagine Russia (and thereby often Eastern Europe) as a crime scene. In these crime narratives, Russia is essentialised as a crime scene, where the traces of crime comprise evidence of an omnipresent evil emanating from the centre of power. The chapter argues moreover that whereas Russia serves as the ‘great Other’, in whose gaze the small nations from the Nordic region are controlled and overseen, Eastern Europeans function merely as unfamiliar, rather than threatening, ‘others’. By juxtaposing diversity of genres, including popular Nordic action films (Orion’s Belt and Born American), two documentaries and a television series (Occupied), the chapter shows that the hegemonic Eastern noir narrative, although persistent in mainstream cinema, functions across various modes of cinematic expression. The analyses corroborate the fact that border discourse affords the viewers a sense of safety in the increasingly globalised reality.

Adam Knee continues this discussion of the action/adventure genre in Chapter Seven, "Training the Body Politic: Networked Masculinity and the 'War on Terror' in Hollywood Film", offering a detailed analysis of the representation of masculinity and agency in two Hollywood films, Unstoppable (2010) and Source Code (2011), which exhibit striking similarities at a range of levels, from their narratives to deeper structures of gendered character function, theme, and geo-political perspective that, he contends, are a manifestation of distinctly post-9/11 American concerns. Like Vincent M. Gaine's chapter on James Bond, Knee analyses both the variations inherent in the genre in the wake of 9/11 and the consistencies of the parameters of American mainstream film, and, more specifically, a developing conceptualization of modes of disciplined masculinity necessitated by the nation’s 'War on Terror' narrative. Knee then concludes with a comparative analysis of a pre-9/11 film and its post-9/11 remake in which these parameters are brought to the fore: the original Paul Verhoeven RoboCop (1987) and RoboCop (2014) directed by José Padilha.

Chapter Six, Vincent M. Gaine's analysis of perhaps the defining action-adventure series of the era (or of any era), the iconic figure of Ian Fleming’s James Bond in ‘"Not now that strength" Embodiment and Globalisation in Post 9/11 James Bond.’ In a dynamic investigation of Daniel Craig's four films as James Bond, from his first appearance in Casino Royale (2006) to his fourth film Spectre (2015), Gaine explores the thematic and stylistic variations undertaken in the Daniel Craig era. Craig's Bond, as Gaine astutely reveals, is as intrinsically connected to the post-9/11 decades as the first incarnation of the character played by Sean Connery was to the Cold War era in which the original books and films were written and set. In this chapter Gaine proposes that the Bond franchise, more than any other, given its longevity, is uniquely placed to observe changing cultural and socio-political trends. The Craig Bond emerges as a much more complicated figure than his predecessors, both emphatically masculine and yet at the same time distinctly fallible, but a resolutely more human figure because of it. Daniel Craig’s interpretation of the character, as Gaine observes, is a Bond who bleeds and one who is traumatised rather than a figure who glides almost effortlessly through his adventures hardly with a scratch, as he once did in the eras of Connery, Moore and Brosnan.

This chapter focuses on three action films that contain a variant of the ticking time-bomb scenario, and in which the protagonist employs torture to get the terrorist, or organized crime member, to confess: Man on Fire (2004), Taken (2008), and Unthinkable (2010). America has been an interventionist and imperialistic power since its infancy. During the Cold War, presidential administrations used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as their “personal, secret, unaccountable army,” whose agents have tortured or advised torturers in countries such as South Vietnam, Uruguay, Honduras, Paraguay, Iran, Chile, El Salvador, Bolivia, and the Philippines. America employs spies as agents of imperialism. In the films discussed in this chapter, the protagonists have been trained in the craft of torture and other methods of state terror by the United States. The representation of masculinity in these films is quite disturbing. The three films also illustrate that fear is often a prime motivator of torture. More importantly, they show torture as a means to secure a true confession.