Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

manner that is sometimes fairly straightforward and at
other times more complex. Thus, for example, crime
thrillers and cop and gangster films articulate perspectives
on law and order, registering the social and ethnic
upheavals of the 1970s. Yet while commonplace, it is
somewhat reductive to read the vigilante or rogue cop
cycles of the 1970s in the context of social upheaval. The
muscular cinema and stars of the 1980s have been read as
fantasized responses to the defeat of American forces in
Vietnam. Similarly, such sprawling war films of the late
1970s as Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter
(1978), which began to engage that conflict as a problematic
aspect of US history, have been seen to register a
cultural uncertainty about US involvement in the region.
Because action focuses on conflict, it is centrally
concerned with defining heroism and presenting violence
as just in some instances, unjust in others. As such, action
and adventure narratives enact scenarios of social power
at a variety of registers, whether as a response to oppression,
a celebration of empire and conquest, or more
generalized images of physical freedom from the
restraints of culture (the hero as a commanding figure
within a natural landscape, for instance). Yet violence and
movement more generally are also presented as sources of
formal pleasure within action cinema. Thus while it is
important to place action and adventure narratives in their
social and historical contexts, it is also necessary to understand
their centrality as sites of pure cinematic spectacle.
SEE ALSO Feminism; Genre; Martial Arts Films
FURTHER READING
Abel, Richard. ‘‘The ‘Culture War’ of Sensational Melodrama,
1910–1914.’’ In Action and Adventure Cinema, edited by
Yvonne Tasker, 31–51. London: Routledge, 2004.
Action and Adventure Films
Bean, Jennifer. ‘‘ ‘Trauma Thrills’: Notes on Early Action
Cinema.’’ In Action and Adventure Cinema, edited by Yvonne
Tasker, 17–30. London: Routledge, 2004.
Beltrán, Mary C. ‘‘The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the
Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive,’’ Cinema
Journal 44, no. 2 (2005): 50–67.
Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark, eds. Screening the Male:
Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. London and
New York: Routledge, 1993.
Dyer, Richard. ‘‘The White Man’s Muscles.’’ In Race and the
Subject of Masculinities, edited by Harry Stecopoulos and
Michael Uebel, 286–314. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1997.
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in
Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
Holmlund, Chris. ‘‘Wham! Bam! Pam! Pam Grier as Hot Action
Babe and Cool Action Mama.’’ Quarterly Review of Film and
Video 22 (2005): 97–112.
Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan
Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.
Romao, Tico. ‘‘Guns and Gas: Investigating the 1970s Car Chase
Film.’’ In Action and Adventure Cinema, edited by Yvonne
Tasker, 130–152. London: Routledge, 2004.
Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema
and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
Studlar, Gaylyn. This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity
in the Jazz Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action
Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993.
Taves, Brian. The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical
Adventure Movies. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1993.
Yvonne Tasker
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 35