Genre Action-Adventure Comedy Contemporary Crime Costume Drama (no coverage) Exploitation Cinema (no coverage) Film Noir Melodrama The Musical Science Fiction and Horror Teenpics The Western Tim Dirks Filmsite.org: Genres Film Studies.

Transcript Genre Action-Adventure Comedy Contemporary Crime Costume Drama (no coverage) Exploitation Cinema (no coverage) Film Noir Melodrama The Musical Science Fiction and Horror Teenpics The Western Tim Dirks Filmsite.org: Genres Film Studies.

Genre

 Action-Adventure  Comedy  Contemporary Crime  Costume Drama (no coverage)  Exploitation Cinema (no coverage)  Film Noir  Melodrama  The Musical  Science Fiction and Horror  Teenpics  The Western

Tim Dirks Filmsite.org: Genres Film Studies

Dictionary genre

| ˈ zh änrə| Noun a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.

ORIGIN early 19th cent.: French, literally

gender

‘a kind’

(see

Thesaurus

Noun

historical fiction is my favorite genre of literature

category, class, classification, group, set, list; type, sort, kind, breed, variety, style, model, school, stamp, cast, ilk.

Genre Film Studies

Genre

Megagenre: A large, all encompassing, umbrella genre, having no distinct subject matter or style or iconography or formulae. The megagenres of the movies might be thought of as non-fiction (documentary) film, fiction film, animated film, and experimental / underground film.

Film Studies

Genre

Major Movie Genres (according to Tim Dirks [filmsite.org]) •Action •Adventure •Comedy •Crime/Gangster •Drama •Epics/Historical •Musicals •Science Fiction •War •Westerns

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Genre

Major Movie Sub-Genres (according to Tim Dirks [filmsite.org]) •Biopics •Chick Flicks •Detective/Mystery •Disaster •Fantasy •Film Noir •Guy Films •Melodrama •Road Films •Romance •Sports •Supernatural •Thrillers/Suspense

Film Studies

•Aviation •Buddy •Caper •Chase •Espionage •Fallen Woman

Genre

Minor Movie Sub-Genres (according to Tim Dirks [filmsite.org]) •Jungle •Legal •Martial Arts •Medical •Parody •Police •Political •Prison •Religious •Slasher •Swashbucklers

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Movie Genres/Subgenres  Action Adventure—Jungle | Martial Arts | Mountain | Spy | Swashbuckler  Art—Any genre or subgenre may be an "art" film

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Genre

“The classification of texts is not just the province of academic specialists, it is a fundamental aspect of the way texts of all kinds are understood.” (Neale in Creeber p. 1)

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“In many cases, of course, it is likely that audiences will have some idea in advance of the kind of film (or play or programme) they are going to watch. They will have made an active choice either to watch or, if their preferences dictate, to avoid it. They will have done so on the basis of information supplied by advertising, by reviews, and previews, perhaps by a title (such as Singin’ in the Rain) or by the presence of particular performers. They are therefore likely to bring with them a set of expectations, and to anticipate that these expectations will be met in one way or another.” (Neale in Creeber 1)

Genre Film Studies

Genre

Relevant Terms for Genre from Hans Robert Jauss, German Reception Theorist/Reader-Response Critic

“generic audience” “generic frustration” “generic tension”

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Genre

“In English-speaking countries, the term ‘genre’ came to be applied to literary works during the nineteenth century, at a point in history at which art of all kinds began to be industrialized, mass-produced for a popular public (Cohen, 1986, 120).”--Neale in Creeber 2)

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Genre

The “repertoire of elements” that identify genres (Lacey [2000], cited by Neale in Creeber 3): •Character Types •Setting •Iconography •Narrative •Style

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Genre

Institutional Aspects of Genre: •Scheduling •Modes of Production •Demands of Advertisers •Demands of Audiences •Developments in Adjacent Entertainment Institutions/Media (Neale in Creeber 4)

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Genre

Complaints Against Genre Criticism: 1) Circularity--critics dismiss texts for failing to meet criteria they have themselves established.

2) Prescriptiveness--critics dismiss genre shows/series for departing from Platonic “ideal” versions. (Turner in Creeber 6)

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Genre

Hybridity: The now common tendency to “splice” together different genres.

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Genre

“Genres came to be identified with impersonal, formulaic, commercial forms and distinguished from individualized art. Ironically, this represented a reversal of previous characterizations, which saw ‘high art’ as rule bound and ordered (as evident in genres lke the sonnet and tragedy) and ‘low art’ as unconstrained by the rules of decorum (Cohen, 1986, 120).”--Neale in Creeber 2

Film Studies

Genre

“Some important new critical theories have challenged the primacy of genre as a basic critical concept. The next important task of genre theory is to examine these objections in order to discover to what extent they require revision of the theory of popular genres and to what extent they may require us to go ‘beyond genre’” (John Cawelti, “The Question of Popular Genres Revisited” [1997]).

Film Studies

Genre films essentially ask the audience, "Do you still want to believe this?" Popularity is the audience answering, "Yes." Change in genre occurs when the audience says, "That's too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated." And genres turn to self-parody to say, "Well, at least if we make fun of it for being infantile, it will show how far we've come." Films and television have in this way speeded up cultural history.

Leo Braudy, American film scholar

Genre

Film Studies

Thomas Schatz's life history of a genre (from Hollywood Genres) : an experimental stage, during which its conventions are isolated and established, a classic stage, in which the conventions reach their “equilibrium” and are mutually understood by artist and audience, an age of refinement, during which certain formal and stylistic details embellish the form, and finally a baroque (or “mannerist,” or “self-reflexive”) stage, when the form and its establishments are accented to the point where they “themselves become the “substance” or “content” of the work. (37-38) Thomas Schatz, American film scholar

Genre

Film Studies

History of Genre Criticism:

 “the studio system's dual need for standarisation and product differentiation” (252)  A corrective to auteur criticism’s treatment of the movies as high art which led to more focus on “industrial conditions”  First genres of interest: western, gangster, noir  Enabled “placement” of a whole range of films auteurism could not touch  Led to a new reciprocity between art and society  From mise-en-scene (auteurism) to iconography

Genre

Film Studies

History of Genre Criticism:

 “For such a type [of genre] to be successful means that its conventions have imposed themselves upon the general consciousness and become the accepted vehicles of a particular set of attitudes and a particular aesthetic effect. One goes to any individual example of the type with very definite expectations, and originality is to be welcomed only in the degree that it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it. Moreover, the relationship between the conventions which go to make up such a type and the real experience of its audience or the real facts of whatever situation it pretends to describe is of only secondary importance and does not determine its aesthetic force. It is only in an ultimate sense that the type appeals to its audience's experience of reality; much more immediately, it appeals to previous experience of the type itself: it creates its own field of reference.”—Robert Warshow

Genre

Film Studies

History of Genre Criticism:

 “[T]he relationship between the conventions which go to make up such a type [genre] and the real experience of its audience or the real facts of whatever situation it pretends to describe is of only secondary importance and does not determine its aesthetic force. It is only in an ultimate sense that the type appeals to its audience's experience of reality; much more immediately, it appeals to previous experience of the type itself: it creates its own field of reference.”— Robert Warshow

Genre

History of Genre Criticism:

 Iconography originates in the “profilmic arrangements” of “sign events”; it is “not produced by specifically filmic codes but was taken up and transformed by cinema from cultural codes already in circulation”  Buscombe on

Guns in the Afternoon

(256)  History and Ideology: America talking to itself (McArthur 256)

Film Studies

Genre

Action-Adventure

 Hard/Hyperbolic Bodies? See Jeffords quote on p. 265.

 A lens for studying masculinity  Action heroes?

 Pfeil (p. 266): “fantasies of class- and gender-based resistance to the advent of a post-feminist/post-Fordist world keep turning over, queasily, deliriously, into accommodations’ and in which, within a “very specifically white/male/hetero American capitalist dreamscape, inter and/or multi-national at the top and multiracial at boththe bottom . . . all the old lines of force and division between races, classes and genders are both transgressed and redrawn.”  Tasker : “knowing visual excess” and tongue-in-cheek humor

Genre

Action-Adventure (cont.)

 Now making norms of gender and sexual identity strange while also reinforcing them.

 Debt to the romance.

 Interest in the swashbuckler —

Pirates of the Caribbean

 Some interesting films to consider:

Crouching Tiger

Indiana Jones

Die Hard

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Genre

Film Studies Comedy

 Comedy’s multi-faceted nature  Study of comedy is multi-disciplinary  Comic units and narrative —are they always digressive?

 Gerald Mast’s eight comic film plots:

“New Comedy” (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, recovers true love) Parody/Burlesque (of other films or genres)

Reductio ad Absurdum: a mistake is pursue to its logical outcome The Picaresque: the life of a central, wandering character The Renoir Structure: a comic/ironic investigation of the foibles of society.

Riffing: improvised gaggery in a loose structure The Quest: a comic hero undertakes a difficult task, usually with a happy outcome The Unknown Error: the plot concerns bringing a mistake to light.

Genre

Comedy (continued)

 Theories of laughter (see next slides).

 Screwball Comedy: a fine website .

Film Studies

Comedy Theory

Notoriously incomplete and lacking in definitive answers. May well be a “fourth tray”* phenomenon.

Plessner’s thesis in

Laughing and Crying.

* “A Civil Servant used to keep four trays on his desk to put his papers in. The first was marked Incoming, the second Outgoing, the third Pending, and the fourth Too difficult.”--Owen Barfield Helmuth Plessner, author of

Laughing and Crying

Film Studies Genre

Comedy Theory

Three basic camps • Superiority--laughter reinforces social power.

• Incongruity- humor the result of the “clash of incompatible discourses.” • Relief--the comic as a vent for repression.

Film Studies Genre

Key Questions:

•Do we laugh at or with?

•Is comedy innately subversive?

•Is comedy congenitally offensive/politically incorrect?

•What is the connection between the body and the comic?

Film Studies Genre

Genre

“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” --Horace Walpole, 18th Century

Film Studies Genre

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Contemporary Crime

 The Detective Film •Ratiocination •Conversative (the crime is solved) •Investigation •

Dirty Harry

 The Gangster Film •Contemporaneousness •Warner Brothers—known for its “social issues” movies •Warshow—see following slides  Suspense Thriller

Film Studies

Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (from The Immediate Experience) Film Studies The Gangster Film

A "story of enterprise and success ending in precipitate failure" (453).

The Western

A story of a man's struggle to retain his honor, even in defeat.

A romantic tragedy about a man "whose defeat springs with almost mechanical inevitability from the outrageous presumption of his demands: the gangster is bound to go on until he is killed" (458).

A classical tragedy based on a hero of virtue always prepared for defeat; need not end in the death of the hero.

A tale of the city.

The gangster is "without culture, without manners, without leisure" (453).

A tale of the frontier.

The Western hero Is a figure of repose.

The Gangster Film

The gangster is "lonely and melancholy.” The gangster is "expansive and noisy," not introspective.

Film Studies The Western

The Western hero is also lonely and melancholy, but out of a profound worldly wisdom," the 'simple' recognition that life is unavoidably serious.” The Western hero is "organically" introspective; he has to do what he has to do (457).

The gangster is violent in both his attractions and repulsions; he may lose control at any time.

The gangster is never satisfied; complacency is fatal to him.

The Western hero avoids violence at all cost; he is always in control.

The Western hero is complete within himself, self-contained.

The gangster is always trying to get ahead; always wanting to own something more, conquer some new territor.

The Western hero has no desire to get anywhere.

The Gangster Film

“Everyone wants to kill him and eventually someone will” (454)

Film Studies The Western

The Western hero is also under customarily “under fire” but would avoid it if he could.

The gangster does not seem to need love in any traditional sense.

The gangster associates with prostitutes and “loose” women because of their “passive availability” and their “costliness.” The Western hero does not seek love, is "prepared to accept it, but . . . never asks of it more than it can give"; love seems "at best an irrelevance"; the woman the Western hero loves (usually from the East) does not understand what he does and he is incapable of explaining it to her.

The Western hero associates with prostitutes because they understand him.

The gangster’s possessions are central to his being; he owns things in a gaudy, exhibitionistic way.

The Western hero owns nothing, or seems not to; money, possessions, a house, a regular place to seep, all seem alien to him.

Genre

The Gangster Film

The gangster's death reveals his whole life to have been a mistake.

The Western

Even in death, the Western hero retains his honor.

A modern genre which "confronts industrial society on its own ground" (465).

Essentially "archaic" (466).

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Film Noir

 Tim Dirks’ Film Noir site.

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Genre

Film Noir

(thanks to Danny Peary’s

Guide for the Film Fanatic

and Ephraim Katz’

Film Encyclopedia

)

Signatures/Motifs

 often heavily narrated  tainted characters  entangled relationships  events determined by chance  large sums of money  murder  a tough, morally ambiguous hero with a gun in his trench coat, a hat on his head, and a cigarette in his mouth  a lying, cheating, chameleon-like

femme fatale

--a corruptive influence who leads an essentially decent guy down a wayward path, and, ultimately, betrayal

Film Studies

Genre

Film Noir

Melodrama

 Why has melodrama now become a genre of interest?

 Todd Haynes,

Far From Heaven (Douglas

Sirk) to

Mildred Pierce

(Michael Curtiz)

Film Studies

Genre

The Musical

 As mirror of society  As spectacle  Rock documentary

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Genre

Science Fiction and Horror

 Hard to distinguish?

SF  Sobchack: contested space between the human community and an alien other  The iconography of SF  The sounds of science fiction  Telotte: the issue of humanness  The robot and the cyborg  SF and wonder

Film Studies

Genre

Science Fiction and Horror

Horror  Slow to gain critical attention  Hammer films  The feminist complaint  Robin Wood: The horror film has consistently been one of the most popular and at the same times most disreputable of Hollywood genres. . . . It is restricted to aficionados and complemented by total rejection, people tend to go to horror films either obsessively or not at all. (Robin Wood,

The American Nightmare

)

Film Studies

Genre

Science Fiction and Horror

Horror  Youth-oriented?

 And the gothic  Reading horror psychoanalytically  The nightmare —film and dream  Return of the repressed: the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses (Robin Wood,

The American Nightmare

)  Feminism and Horror: See Clover quotes on p. 357  The final girl  Body Horror

Film Studies

Genre

Teenpics —a lame section

 Adolescence as a problem —Van Den Berg  The teenage audience 

Rebel without a Cause



Reefer Madness

 Teens in horror and SF  John Hughes/Brat Pack 

American Graffiti

and

Back to the Future

 What about teen raunch?

Juno

? Michael Sera?

Kick-Ass

Film Studies

Genre

The Western

 Warshow and Bazin as pioneers  The West in American history —The Turner Hypothesis  The Western’s universal appeal—the Spaghetti Western; the “invention of America”  Lovell’s four principal elements (377)  hero, villain, damsel in distress  action story: violence, chases, crime  stories of migration and settlement  tales of revenge

Film Studies

Genre

The Western

 Kitses: the West was already myth when the Western film was born.

"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”—Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) in

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

(John Ford, 1962)

Film Studies

Genre Action-Adventure Comedy Contemporary Crime Costume Drama (no coverage) Exploitation Cinema (no coverage) Film Noir Melodrama The Musical Science Fiction and Horror Teenpics The Western Tim Dirks Filmsite.org: Genres Film Studies.

Transcript Genre Action-Adventure Comedy Contemporary Crime Costume Drama (no coverage) Exploitation Cinema (no coverage) Film Noir Melodrama The Musical Science Fiction and Horror Teenpics The Western Tim Dirks Filmsite.org: Genres Film Studies.

Genre

Megagenre: A large, all encompassing, umbrella genre, having no distinct subject matter or style or iconography or formulae. The megagenres of the movies might be thought of as non-fiction (documentary) film, fiction film, animated film, and experimental / underground film.

“generic audience” “generic frustration” “generic tension”

History of Genre Criticism:

History of Genre Criticism:

History of Genre Criticism:

History of Genre Criticism:

Genre

Genre

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Comedy Theory

Comedy Theory

Key Questions:

•Do we laugh at or with?

•Is comedy innately subversive?

•Is comedy congenitally offensive/politically incorrect?

•What is the connection between the body and the comic?

“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” --Horace Walpole, 18th Century

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Directory