Join us for the launch of our Fight Nights at the UPP season with a special lunchtime talk on the art of action cinema. We’re excited to welcome a panel of experts, including Dr. Lindsay Steenberg (Associate Professor of Film Studies, Oxford Brookes University), Professor Lisa Purse (Professor of Film, Reading University), and Darren Smith (Oxford Brookes University). Together, they’ll explore the impact and significance of action films, why we are captivated by on-screen violence, and pose the question: what can fighting on film teach us?

There will be discussion of the shifting themes of the action cinema, including the use of computer generated imagery (from green screens to motion capture); the dangers and delights of stunt performance, and the inclusion of East Asian martial arts in Hollywood. Afterwards, there will be time to ask any questions you have about how action cinema works and why it continues to capture global audiences.

Tickets for the talk are £5 (£3 for UPP Members), and if you purchase a ticket for our evening screening of The Raid (Sat 2 Nov, 6pm), you’ll receive a further £2 discount. Click here to book a ticket for The Raid.

Speakers:

Dr Lindsay Steenberg is Reader/Associate Professor in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University where she is Chair of their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Research Network. She has published numerous articles on the crime and action genres and is the author of Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science (2017) and Are You Not Entertained? Mapping the Gladiator in Visual Culture (2020). She is currently completing a monograph on the fight sequence in post-millennial action cinema with Lisa Coulthard (at the University of British Columbia) and has recently been training with stunt performers for a new project on the British stunt industry.

Lisa Purse is Professor of Film in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading, UK. She is a leading action and digital effects scholar with interests in the politics of representation and the aesthetics of contemporary digital cinema technologies. Her publications include Contemporary Action Cinema (2011), Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013) and (as co-editor) Action Cinema Since 2000 (2024).

Darren Smith’s exposure to martial arts began, like many an 80s child, with homemade nunchaku, practising his crane kick, waiting impatiently to be old enough to take karate lessons. After an eclectic career squeezing gratuitous film references into everything from textbooks to corporate presentations, a pilgrimage to his hero Arnie’s childhood home in Austria convinced him to return to his first love: action cinema. Darren completed his MA at Oxford Brookes on the films of Van Damme and Seagal, and will continue his studies with a PhD on realism and augmented on-screen martial arts performances.

This screening is part of the BFI’s national Art Of Action tour. For more information go to: