Action Cinema Since 2000

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).

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.

• Introduction: Action as Mode - Chris Holmlund, Lisa Purse, and Yvonne Tasker1. Accounting for Action: Racial Discourse and Chronologies of Genre - Yvonne Tasker2. Dirt Research: Contemporary Stunt Work in Action - Lauren Steimer3. Big and Loud: The Sonic Aesthetics of the Fight Scene in Digital Action Cinema - Lindsay Steenberg and Lisa Coulthard4. “French Touch” Action Cinema - Charlie Michael5. No Exit from “Hell Joseon”: National Tragedy and Heroic Rescue in South Korean Action-Disaster Films - Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient6. Mesmerizing Outsiders: Washington, Mackie, and Performance in Action Cinema - Cynthia Baron7. Samuel L. Jackson in Geriaction: “Bad Ass” Black Screen Masculinity, Aging, and Redundancy - Glen Donnar8. Action Latinas in an Era of Precarity - Mary Beltrán9. Bollywood’s New Action Cinema: The Woman-led Action Film and the Nation - Krupa Shandilya10. Anxiety in Action: Jackie Chan, COVID-19, and Brexit along the Belt and Road - Gina Marchetti11. Aging, Disability, Acting: Pam Grier and Sigourney Weaver - Chris Holmlund12. What Does Power Look Like? Women Heroes in Digital Action Cinema - Lisa Purse13. Beyond the Dark Moment: Seriality and Heroic Failure in Contemporary Action Cinema - Scott HigginsFilmographyIndex