read below and answer 2 questions 80 word min total

History

Cinema, more than any other art form, has an immediacy that can set the pulse racing by catapulting viewers into death-defying situations in far-off times and places. Pirates, outlaws, spies and renegade cops are among the larger-than-life characters onto whom audiences can project their own heroic fantasies. Within this escapist form of entertainment, stunts add a visceral thrill to the emotional impact of a story – as early as the 1890s, showmen were eliciting gasps by fixing cameras to the front of trains for a ‘phantom ride’. The swashbucklers of the silent era brought exciting physical movement to costume dramas, leading to increasingly high standards of spectacle and set design. Bursts of action became important components of many genres, from World War II-inspired films to the historical epics of the 1950s. The relaxation of censorship laws in the late 1960s allowed action scenes to become more graphically violent, although scale was still of primary importance, as evidenced by the disaster-themed adventures of the 1970s. By the 1980s, action in US cinema had become synonymous with the popcorn buzz of high-concept blockbusters and the oiled muscles of superstars such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The genre today

Although Hollywood’s big-budget adventures dominate the global box office, they have recently started to respond to foreign influences – notably the slow-motion gunfights of Hong Kong cinema and the invisible-wire acrobatic techniques of Asian kung fu epics. Increasingly sophisticated computer effects have helped to push action spectacle to unprecedented levels, although one result of this trend is that many action blockbusters now resemble a series of stunt set pieces, only loosely linked by a plot.