In a film an action is the stream of energy that gives it life. During every moment of a movie, the action is “what’s going on.” If viewers ever lose track of what is happening, or if nothing is happening, their attention immediately wanders, and they get bored. The focal action is the structural element that holds all the images, moments, and scenes together.

A dramatic action is a pattern of human change based on a succession of visual images creating moment clusters and scenes. Such action consists of a series of emotionally charged moments arranged to arouse, extend, and fulfill expectation. Francis Ford Coppola defines cinematic action by explaining, “A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.” More films fail for lack of a genuinely functional action than for any other reason.

A cinematic moment functions as a turning point, a climax when everything changes or settles. These moments enable profound empathy that stimulates viewer involvement.

Carefully selected images, moments, and scenes enable filmmakers to build a functional and compelling action. In Brian de Palma’s film The Untouchables, the action is the effort to convict and imprison gangster Al Capone. Detective Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and his lawmen exert all their efforts to put Capone behind bars, and of course Capone (Robert De Niro) and his henchmen resist that effort. Ness represents the positive force driving the action, and Capone exerts an opposing negative force.

A cinematic moment functions scenically like this: In a static situation a character experiences an accident or makes a shocking discovery; as a result, the character makes a decision and takes action. In Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, two sympathetic outlaws try to rob a train but discover it’s full of mounted horsemen. So they take off in a hurry. As they try to evade the horsemen, they realize that their pursuers are implacable lawmen; to escape, Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) must make a death-defying leap off a cliff. And because the filmmakers used cinematic moments so effectively, most viewers identify sympathetically with the two lovable desperados.

Not all movies need such story driven cinematic moments as those in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Well conceived cinematic moments are also essential in more subtle, character driven films, such as Shakespeare in Love, Citizen Kane, or The Reader. For example in The Reader, Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) commits suicide. But her will asks her estranged lover, Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), to give her life’s savings to the family of a prisoner at Auschwitz where she had been an SS guard. Michael visits the woman’s daughter (Lena Olin) and for the first time confesses his affair with Hanna.

The most effective scenes in any type of film contain one or more cinematic moments, points of character change with strong empathic appeal that energize the action. Such a moment occurs when a character makes a significant discovery or decision and a reversal results. A cinematic moment functions as a turning point, a climax when everything changes or settles. These moments enable profound empathy that stimulates viewer involvement. It’s such moments that make everyone love films. By understanding the nature of cinematic moments, filmmakers and viewers alike are better enabled to create or simply enjoy movies.