Les films d’action : une rhétorique corporelle en régime d’utopie

Abstract

Action films, particularly American Action films from the 90s, offer the body a means of expression which, because it is not limited by any referential principle of reality, allows one to place its functioning beyond the natural somatic limits. This cinematographic genre, now historically of age, presents an important, formal coherence, itself a guarantee of an aesthetic autonomy which, under the generic theme of confrontation, includes varying situations where specific gestual or postural vocabulary, – widely borrowed from the martial arts – allows the staging of a series of values linked to the social representations of the body. As a semiotic object, the body, made hero by the action, can be seen as an expression whose content reminds us of the repertoire of kung-fu techniques re-examined by the stuntman schools in Hong Kong, or from the point of view of content which has substantially evolved over the last thirty years. From The Fury of the Dragon to Matrix, the kung-fu style has been decompartmentalised, going beyond the classic genre of karate films to become an almostobligatory pattern in action films and series, and this within varying registers ranging from the dectective story to the spy story or fantastic to science-fiction films. This progressive decompartmentalisation, which has benefitted from the evolution in cinematographic and choreographic techniques, has an influence on the construction of the scenarios. It also goes along with an overall change in people’s expectations. Skills and speed have supplanted pure strength, which allows for relative neutralisation of the classic oppositions related to gender and/ or age. In conclusion, this relationship to a body «beyond the extreme» is aided by the construction of action worlds which seem like utopia and are often thematised as such in certain productions, for example Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is the most explicit example of such thematising.