In 2003, I found myself at Lingnan University in Hong Kong to speak at a conference on action cinema. What better occasion to reflect on the work of cinematic editing in all its forms, from the blazing guns and flying fists of blockbuster movies to the stridently flickering, visual assaults of the avant-garde? The kinetic kick of the clips I had minutely studied obviously possessed me: in the course of my improvised remarks, I dared use the words pure cinema in an effort to capture and name what was so unique and exciting about these dizzy highlights of screen action.

Uttering this term – pure cinema – was an unwise move. Everyone – even my best friends – felt compelled to tell me, publicly on the spot or privately afterwards, that “there is no such thing as pure cinema”. The cinema is gloriously impure, as theorists from André Bazin to Alain Badiou have no doubt proved. It offers the amalgamation and transformation of all the other arts and media. More dramatically still, there is nothing in any film worth describing as “specifically cinematographic”. The search for cinematic specificity – so goes the critical lecture – is a dangerous dream, a delusion, dragging us back to the reassuring fancies and fallacies of art-for-art’s-sake. Retreating into the pleasure of pure cinema is a way of avoiding the messy impurity of the world, of culture, of history and ideology.