ABSTRACT
Such a project cannot be conceived outside of the action cinema’s historical locus, its overlap with a modernity in which the accelerated motion of transportation technologies and that of optical devices linked together to create fundamental perceptual and psychic changes in human subjects. The wounding effects of modernity’s tempo are well known. Pummeled by too much, too fast, the modern subject succumbed to an array of pathologies – nervous tics, psychic blockage, alienation, fatigue – collectively understood in terms of shock and trauma. Yet familiar ‘traumatocentric’ accounts of modernity, to borrow from Jeffrey Schnapp, miss the era’s key aesthetic premise, which is to say, ‘trauma thrills’.1 The conjoining of a medical term with a form of entertainment is more than rhetorical play. Its employment underscores the fact that representations, visual or otherwise, have direct consequences for the body. It also suggests that cultural distress regarding the subject’s instability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided the historical conditions for the emergence of a distinctively modern aesthetic mode, one that theorists such as Walter Benjamin understood as pre-eminently cinematic. In recent years of course we have assimilated cinema’s historic affair with speed, shock,
attractions’.2 Yet we have for too long overlooked the fact that the aesthetic privileging of sensational movement, aggressive energy, and unsettling form – in short, a trauma that thrills – over character psychology and meaningful content, was (and is) inextricably hinged to complex narrative techniques through which they found their most sustained expression.
