Action: The Soul of Movies

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 498, May 9, 2010

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THERE'S A REASON FILMS
ARE CALLED MOVIES

Beginning with the first flip books,
the point of movies was movement

By John Greenwald

The conversation went like this.

She: What movies have you seen lately?

Me: Yesterday, I saw "The Losers."

She: I heard it's junk.

Me: Well, it is a mindless action movie, and I loved it!

She: You loved it? How?

Me: Because it moved! Let me explain.

From their very beginning, the point of movies, their raison d'etre, was movement. Call them flip books, movies, films, or motion pictures, or as we once called them the chronophotographic camera (Greek for "pictures of time"), or the Kinetograph, or the cinemtograph), their purpose was to capture movement and project those moving images to a paying audience.

The key was movement.

The earliest films were little more than home movies. Thomas Edison produced such films as "Fred Ott's Sneeze" (1894) and boxing matches. A French cameraman shot a steam locomotive pulling into a station. Few in the audience had ever seen a movie before, so this one seemed so realistic that many ran from the theater scared to death that a real train was about to run over them.

"The Great Train Robbery" (1903) had three firsts: first fiction film with a clear narrative, first action film and first Western. All this in a 12-minute movie.

It has bandits sneaking onto a moving train; a pistol duel between a bandit and a guard protecting a large trunk of cash; a scene in a dance hall where a nearly dead telegraph operator tells what happened; a posse chasing after the bandits; and the final, deadly shoot out.

This little movie set up the next century of filmmaking, right up to "Avatar" (2009) and "The Losers" (2010), and with many more to come.

"Robbery's" last scene has nothing to do with the rest of the story. The lead bandit, played by a young vaudeville performer, "Bronco" Billy Anderson, takes direct aim at the audience in a dramatic close up of his face and pistol. The shot suddenly explodes across the screen. Martin Scorsese paid homage to that shot in "Goodfellas" (1990), as did Ridley Scott in "American Gangster" (2007).

Action films have always been part of American cinema; there's even a Museum of the Moving in Image in New York City. Yet, many people look down on them as mindless. They use the expression "mindless action movie" so often it's become a redundancy.

But action movies are no more mindless than abstract art or ballet or classical music. Instead of narratives, these arts are filled with sweeps of movement, color and patterns. Movies' film editing enhances and dramatizes the action. These films take advantage of the art and technologies of sound, music and computer graphics, all to enhance the movement.

Humans are selfish people. They want to see themselves in narrative fiction. It's not enough there are poems, novels, plays and TV to focus on them. Amateur and professional critics want movies to explore the human condition. For them it's enough movement for Seymour Phillip Hoffman to slouch in despair in some lifeless, pointless existential drama.

But that's not a movie; it's a performance best suited for the stage. (Movies do record and preserve such performances, without advancing the art.) There's no reason to diminish movies simply because they move. That's like diminishing dances because they're not pantomimes of Shakespeare. Or Jackson Pollack because he's not Norman Rockwell. Or contemporary composer John Adams because he doesn't write advertising jingles.

Even a picture with a simplistic plot, such as "The Losers," needs thought, intelligence and talent to make all that action entertaining and engaging. Sure, the movie is just another revenge drama. But the filmmakers give us enough about the half-dozen thankfully brief and unobtrusive.

The action scenes often take their time to build before their payoffs, which are complicated, noisy and full of carefully wrought filmmaking -- all designed to give us a good, fast-moving, exciting time.

Some action films, like John Ford's "Stagecoach" (1939), combine Western action with revealing character drama. Still, the most powerful moment in the movie happens when John Wayne suddenly arrives to stop the stagecoach, his rifles aggressively perched on his legs. The camera lens moves right up to him. It was enough to take my breath away. For me, everything before and after that moment was merely commentary. That shot was the peak of "Stagecoach's" dramatic arc.

I could go on for another 850 word on why movement is the very heart of the best pictures and should be appreciated for that.

Movement begins with the visions of writers, directors and producers. Let them argue about character development and plot twists. I can get caught up in all that as much as anyone. But when a film begins [begin to move, I get interested. Whether its characters are crawling on the floor to avoid bad guys or are riding computerized flying horses, that's what gets me most excited, most pleased. No other dramatic art does that, or can stir me just that way.

So-called mindless action movies are the soul of the art of the motion picture.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. 

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Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved