The Frozen Screen: Levinas and the Action Film

Abstract

The cinema has long reigned as the kinetic medium of the twentieth century. Early in its development it secured its privilege over the more traditional arts through its unprecedented control and manipulation of time. In The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S Porter, 1903) and Life of an American Fireman (Edwin S Porter, 1903) crowds had their first experiences of film crosscutting between two different spaces and moments in time. They saw a shot of a raging house fire, and then suddenly a shot of a sleeping fireman in the station. Between these two spaces is a simple cut, and yet here is the precise location of a vast frontier: the pleasure of waiting for something forever on the verge of arrival. This expectation of the event, the catastrophe, and the culmination, is the fuel for modern cinema. The Hollywood tradition has been a developing story of technology’s attempts to exploit this passion, pushing the barriers of how much suspense can be introduced and resolved within the space of a screen and a segment of time, and in the