This dissertation treats les sensations fortes, or “thrills”, that can be accessed through the experience of viewing a French action film. Throughout the last few decades, French cinema has produced an increasing number of “genre” films, a trend that is remarked by the appearance of more generic variety and the increased labeling of these films – as generic variety – in France. Regardless of the critical or even public support for these projects, these films engage in a spectatorial experience that is unique to the action genre. But how do these films accomplish their experiential phenomenology?
Starting with the appearance of Luc Besson in the 1980s, and following with the increased hybrid mixing of the genre with other popular genres, as well as the recurrence of sequels in the 2000s and 2010s, action films portray a growing emphasis on the importance of the film experience and its relation to everyday life. Rather than being direct copies of Hollywood or Hong Kong action cinema, French films are uniquely sensational based on their spectacular visuals, their narrative tendencies, and their presentation of the corporeal form.
Relying on a phenomenological examination of the action film filtered through the philosophical texts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Mikel Dufrenne, and Jean-Luc Marion, in this dissertation I show that French action cinema is pre-eminently concerned with the thrill that comes from the experience, and less concerned with a political or ideological commentary on the state of French culture or cinema. The spectacular visuals of Luc Besson set the tone for the genre, while the narrative of the action-heritage film hybrid led it through its next phase, until finally arriving at the superiority of corporeal movement through sequential films in the mid-2000s and 2010s. By addressing basic and fundamental human experiences of vision, story-telling, and movement, these films invite a new appreciation of French cinema, apart from the typical moniker of the emotionally-driven “art cinema” while still evoking the concepts of the artistic endeavor.