Fabius (Unofficial) / Fabius (Unofficial) is on Nostr

Unofficial automated RSS/Atom links to Fabius's work on Independent political commentary. Original work is credited at the source; follow the source links. Zaps support the independent feed operator, not the author.

Last Notes

2026-10-30 03:00:53 GMT

I have been wanting to write more about film for a while, and especially action film. My primary aim is to write reviews of films (or groups of films) as one usually does, with an eye towards plot, characters, cinematography; but I also want to put on more emphasis on the moving image than I feel is usually done in written film reviews. Towards this goal, consider this introduction as a kind of guiding framework.[1]
First, action films are about bodies under duress; about the human body being strained to its limits. Action cinema depicts the capabilities of the human body (and quite often celebrates these capabilities).[2] In martial arts movies, the sheer physicality of the body — its strength, and its endurance — tends to be the focus. Such bodies may be “extended” by various inanimate objects — swords, guns, cars —, which may move the focus towards agility, speed, or precision, but such extensions must still refer back to the human body to remain legible.
Second, as said, action films consist of moving images. Of course, all film consists of moving images, or images of movement. We may say that there are three basic types of such movement[3]: the movement of people and objects within the frame; the movement of the frame itself, which is to say, the camera; and finally, slightly more abstractly, the cut from one shot to another.
For the first type of movement, with action films we would especially consider the movement of bodies (or their mechanical extensions, as above). Think of someone landing a punch, avoiding a kick, or jumping over an obstacle, but also of a motorcycle weaving through traffic, or a gun being aimed and shot.
Consider Jackie Chan punching and getting punched in Wheels on Meals (1984):
Or Daniel Craig as a young, brash James Bond, unable to match the agility of his opponent, crashing through a wall in Casino Royale (2006):
Or Tom Cruise’s professional killer in Collateral (2004), whose professionalism is in part signified precisely by how he shoots — two shots to the body to neutralize a threat, followed by one shot to the head to kill:[4]
The second type of movement is that of the camera, which might move in parallel with the movement of a body, or in the opposite direction — or stay perfectly still. (Additionally, the camera may zoom in or out, widening or narrowing the frame.) Watch the extraordinarily long tracking shot in Johnnie To’s Breaking News (2004), far too long to be represented here by an animated file. See how it pans across the entire site of the action about to unfold while, since it refuses to cut, remaining essentially claustrophobic. Or think of Trinity’s kick in the opening sequence of The Matrix (1999), which seems to slow down time[5]:
Or of a camera moving at the same speed as a motorbike accelerating down a narrow Parisian alley in Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018), turning the background into an increasingly abstract space, representing nothing but sheer velocity:
The third kind of “movement”, finally, is the cut, which is to say, the movement from one shot to another. Cutting can reset the movement of the camera, or accentuate it. It can also feign bodily movement where there is none — for example, movies may cut around the exact moment of a punch to give the appearance of a punch without the actors and stunt men actually having to potentially seriously hurt one another. (Conversely, many Hong Kong action movies, especially those in which Jackie Chan or Sammo Hung were responsible for the stunts, can afford not to cut precisely because the actors were so willing to actually get hurt.)
Cutting can be especially crucial when the limits of the human body are “extended” by vehicles or machinery: a cut can be necessary to meaningfully connect the movement of a driver with that of a car (or a motorbike, or a spaceship, or…). Think of the cutting back and forth between shots of a moving car, driven by a stunt driver, and shots of the car interior in which the actor turns a steering wheel — or, perhaps more unexpectedly, activates the horn and lights to get other cars out of her way, as in Ronin (1998):
All of these movements interact; each of these movements can be done well, or badly. Sometimes only one type of movement is necessary. Sometimes, one type of movement done well can successfully mask the lack of another type of movement. Sometimes, as in the infamous scene from Taken 3 of Liam Neeson climbing a fence, such masking will fail catastrophically. Sometimes, all these things can come together well. To quote the movie critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky,
At their core, action movies are about bodies—bulging veins, swelling muscles, chests and foreheads drenched with sweat—and what those bodies are capable of. When there’s a sense of unity between what the body is doing and what the camera is doing, the result can be sublime. A body framed a certain way becomes figurative art and takes on a meaning that goes beyond the context of narrative or character. Space becomes sculptural, and movement becomes musical. That’s the essence of what made action movies a vital, exciting genre to begin with.
This, in essence, is what I would like to focus on in my future posts.
[1] Consider this, then, an ultra-primitive version of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing for action films.
[2] Such celebrations of the human body can, of course, often tend towards the fascist.
[3] It is possible that I am mostly just badly rephrasing Gilles Deleuze’s books on the movement-image and the time-image here, but I haven’t had the time to actually read them, so I can’t be sure.
[4] This is popularly known as the “mozambique drill”. Tom Cruise’s character in Collateral repeats this shooting pattern, almost compulsively, throughout the film; so does Keanu Reeves’ titular character in the John Wick films.
[5] And which is in fact technically also a series of cuts, as the sequence was shot with a whole array of cameras: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYk0WHcmrYo
[6] [ https://web.archive.org/web/20140827123953/http://www.avclub.com/article/todays-best-action-directors-arent-working-in-holl-104394]
https://10000signs.wordpress.com/2026/10/29/1778/
https://10000signs.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wheels3.webp?w=854
https://10000signs.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/casinowall.webp?w=1024
https://10000signs.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/coll.webp?w=1024
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit