Set off in part by the arguments over The Dark Knight's action scenes--widely held to be "visually incoherent" even by many of the film's admirers--Dennis Lim has assembled a thoughtful and compelling "slide show" charting the evolution of the movie fight scene. Classic action directors such as Don Siegel and Samuel Fuller used action and space to give their fights a kinetic punch that made audiences sit up and forget to blink, but in recent years directors have come to rely more and more on technological pizzazz to put the viewer in the position of someone right in the action (as in Scorsese's Raging Bull) or to violate the laws of gravity, more purposefully in The Matrix.
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