Art of Action at HOME
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
HOME look at the Art of Action this winter, with a BFI-backed film season set to bring a whole range of action movie hits back to the big screen. This high-octane affair ranges from silent movie classics, through to a celebration of legendary director Sam Peckinpah, a selection of pulp movies from Mexico, and a triumphant silver screen return for Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break.
In the 1960s and 70s Peckinpah worked across various sub-genres of action cinema, directing westerns, war movies, heist films and car chases. His innovative, distinct approach to directing his, often hyper-violent, action is characterised by the use of quick montage, combined with slow motion cinematography and freeze-frames. Through films such as The Wild Bunch (Sun 24 Nov) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Fri 22 Nov) he helped update Hollywood’s myth-making for the times, adding not just explosive blood and violence, but a sometimes funereal, occasionally nihilist sensibility.
The films themselves remain thrilling and audacious, the work of a true maverick, and HOME have titled their mini-retrospective “If they move, kill ’em” – Sam Peckinpah and Action Cinema. Audiences can look forward to five films, with those previously mentioned joined by lesser-seen WWII actioner Cross of Iron (Mon 4 Nov), plus Steve McQueen’s iconic turn The Getaway (Wed 6 Nov), and rodeo western Junior Bonner (Mon18 Nov), again featuring McQueen. The season is curated by HOME and University of Salford’s Andy Willis who will present various intros and discussions across the screening dates.
Excitingly, the BFI-backed re-release of Point Break (from Fri 15 Nov) makes an appearance as a centre piece of Art of Action at HOME. Long tied up with rights issues and only sporadically available for big screen bookings, Kathryn Bigelow’s masterful action film stars Keanu Reeves as an undercover cop on a mission to infiltrate a band of surfing bank robbers, led by Patrick Swayze’s guru-like gang leader. It’s a goofy premise, but the film is sublime. As dazzling set-piece follows dazzling set piece, there’s just enough time to clock Bigelow’s daring approach to masculinity as the lines blur for the pretty-boy surfers.
The joy of this kind of over-arching theme is often in seeing what the programmers manage to pluck from the margins, the treasures unearthed and returned to the cinema screen. This time, feminist film collective Invisible Women and T A P E Collective offer a playful counter to the sometimes overly-musky action canon with She Packs a Punch: a pair of films from the “action-laden, camp and curious world of 1960s Mexican pulp cinema”. Mashing up lucha libra wrestling with dark magic and superheroes, screenings of The Panther Woman (Sat 30 Nov) and The Bat Woman (Sun 1 Dec) look an absolute hoot.
For the Art of Action’s grand finale, HOME look back to the original daredevil stuntman, with a screening of Buster Keaton’s The General scored live by HarmonieBand. The Mad Max: Fury Road of the silent era is also one of the funniest films of all time. Stone faced Keaton stars as an railway engineer attempting to rescue both his stolen steam train and his sweetheart in this American Civil War chase movie. If you haven’t seen Keaton’s locomotive antics before, prepare to be astounded.
