Genre

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

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 ‘a kind’ (see

gender ).





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

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.









Genre

Major Movie Genres

(according to Tim Dirks [filmsite.org])







•Action •Epics/Historical

•Adventure •Musicals

•Comedy •Science Fiction

•Crime/Gangster •War

•Drama •Westerns



Genre

Major Movie Sub-Genres

(according to Tim Dirks [filmsite.org])







•Biopics •Melodrama

•Chick Flicks •Road Films

•Detective/Mystery •Romance

•Disaster •Sports

•Fantasy •Supernatural

•Film Noir •Thrillers/Suspense

Genre

•Guy Films

Minor Movie Sub-Genres

(according to Tim Dirks [filmsite.org])







•Aviation •Jungle •Political

•Buddy •Legal •Prison

•Caper •Martial Arts •Religious

•Chase •Medical •Slasher

•Espionage •Parody •Swashbucklers

•Fallen Woman •Police

Genre

Movie Genres/Subgenres

Action Adventure—Jungle | Martial Arts | Mountain | Spy | Swashbuckler

Art—Any genre or subgenre may be an "art" film

Comedy—Buddy | Black Comedy | Mocumentary | Parody | Road | Romantic Comedy | Satire

| Screwball Comedy | Slacker

Crime—Blaxploitation | Caper | Film Noir | Gangster | Hardboiled Detective | Police

Procedural | Prison | Private-Eye | Trial Films

Cult—Any genre or subgenre may be a "cult" film

Drama—Domestic | Education | Historical | Political

Epic--Biblical | Greek Myth | Historicak

Gender—Gay and Lesbian | Rape-Revenge | Women’s Pictures

Horror—Demonic Possession | Haunted House | Monster | Serial Killer | Slasher | Vampire

Life Story—Autobiography | Biopic | Diary Film

Melodrama—Disease/Disability | Ethnic Family Saga | Weepie | Yuppie Redemption

Music—Concert Films | Musicals | Rocumentary

Science Fiction and Fantasy—Cyber Punk | Disaster | Dystopia | Fantasy | Post-Apocalypse |

Prehistorical | Space Opera | Supermen and Other Mutants | Time Travel

Sports—Auto Racing | Baseball | Basketball | Boxing | Football | Horse Racing | Track |

Wrestling

Teen Films—Pre-Teen Comedy | Teen Sex Comedy | Coming of Age

War—Aerial Combat | Civil War | Korean | Prisoner of War | Submarine | Viet Nam | World

War I | World War II

Western—Cattle Drive | Indian War | Gunfighter

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)









Genre

“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

Relevant Terms for Genre from Hans Robert Jauss,

German Reception Theorist/Reader-Response Critic



“generic audience”

“generic frustration”

“generic tension”





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)









Genre

The “repertoire of elements” that identify

genres (Lacey [2000], cited by Neale in Creeber

3):

•Character Types

•Setting

•Iconography

•Narrative



Genre

•Style

Institutional Aspects of Genre:

•Scheduling

•Modes of Production

•Demands of Advertisers

•Demands of Audiences

•Developments in Adjacent Entertainment

Institutions/Media (Neale in Creeber 4)

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)





Genre

Hybridity: The now common tendency to

“splice” together different genres.









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







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+).







Genre

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

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

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

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

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)









Genre

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

Genre

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 Parody/Burlesque (of other films or

girl, recovers true love) genres)



Reductio ad Absurdum: a mistake is pursue The Renoir Structure: a comic/ironic

to its logical outcome investigation of the foibles of society.

The Picaresque: the life of a central, Riffing: improvised gaggery in a loose

wandering character structure



The Quest: a comic hero undertakes a The Unknown Error: the plot concerns

difficult task, usually with a happy outcome bringing a mistake to light.

Genre



Comedy (continued)

Theories of laughter (see next slides).

Screwball Comedy: a fine website.

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 Helmuth

second Outgoing, the third Pending, and the fourth Too Plessner, author

difficult.”--Owen Barfield of Laughing and

Crying









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.









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?





Genre

Genre

Henri Bergson

“Life is a comedy to those who

think, a tragedy to those who

feel.”

--Horace Walpole, 18th Century









Genre

Genre



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

Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”

(from The Immediate Experience)





The Gangster Film The Western

A "story of enterprise and success ending in A story of a man's struggle to retain his

precipitate failure" (453). honor, even in defeat.



A romantic tragedy about a man "whose A classical tragedy based on a hero of virtue

defeat springs with almost mechanical always prepared for defeat; need not end in

inevitability from the outrageous the death of the hero.

presumption of his demands: the gangster

is bound to go on until he is killed" (458).



A tale of the city. A tale of the frontier.



The gangster is "without culture, without The Western hero Is a figure of repose.

manners, without leisure" (453).

The Gangster Film The Western

The gangster is "lonely and melancholy.” The Western hero is also lonely and

melancholy, but out of a profound worldly

wisdom," the 'simple' recognition that life

is unavoidably serious.”

The gangster is "expansive and noisy," not The Western hero is "organically"

introspective. introspective; he has to do what he has to

do (457).



The gangster is violent in both his The Western hero avoids violence at all

attractions and repulsions; he may lose cost; he is always in control.

control at any time.

The gangster is never satisfied; The Western hero is complete within

complacency is fatal to him. himself, self-contained.



The gangster is always trying to get ahead; The Western hero has no desire to get

always wanting to own something more, anywhere.

conquer some new territor.

The Gangster Film The Western

“Everyone wants to kill him and The Western hero is also under

eventually someone will” (454) customarily “under fire” but would

avoid it if he could.



The gangster does not seem to need The Western hero does not seek love, is

love in any traditional sense. "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 gangster associates with The Western hero associates with

prostitutes and “loose” women prostitutes because they understand

because of their “passive availability” him.

and their “costliness.”



The gangster’s possessions are central The Western hero owns nothing, or

to his being; he owns things in a gaudy, seems not to; money, possessions, a

exhibitionistic way. house, a regular place to seep, all

seem alien to him.

Genre

The Gangster Film The Western

The gangster's death reveals his whole Even in death, the Western hero retains

life to have been a mistake. his honor.



A modern genre which "confronts Essentially "archaic" (466).

industrial society on its own ground"

(465).

Genre

Genre



Film Noir

Tim Dirks’ Film Noir site.

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

Genre



Film Noir



frame-ups

fall guys

most scenes at night, in metaphorical darkness; heavy on shadows

tone of cynicism

Heroes and villains cynical, disillusioned, and often insecure loners

Its characters are “inextricably bound to the past and unsure or

apathetic about the future” (Katz).

“[A]bounds with night scenes, both interior and exterior, with sets that

suggest dingy realism, and with lighting that emphasizes deep

shadows and accents the mood of fatalism”

Its “dark tones and the tense nervousness are further enhanced by

the oblique choreography of the action and the doom-laden

compositions and camera angles” (Katz)

Genre



Film Noir



Hollywood productions of the film noir style include:



John Huston

THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), KEY LARGO (1948), and THE

ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)



Howard Hawks

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) and THE BIG SLEEP (1946)



Michael Curtiz'

CASABLANCA (1942) and MILDRED PIERCE (1945)



Tay Garnett

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946)

Genre



Film Noir

Billy Wilder

DOUBLE INDEMNITY, THE LOST WEEKEND (1945), SUNSET BLVD.

(1950), and THE BIG CARNIVAL (1951)



Orson Welles

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1948)



Otto Preminger

LAURA (1944), FALLEN ANGEL (1945), and WHERE THE SIDEWALK

ENDS (1950)



Robert Siodmak

PHANTOM LADY (1944), THE SUSPECT (1944), THE STRANGE

AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY (1945), THE KILLERS (1946), THE DARK

MIRROR (1946), and CRY OF THE CITY (1948)

Genre



Film Noir



Jacques Tourneur

OUT OF THE PAST (1947)



Charles Vidor

GILDA (1946)



George Cukor

GASLIGHT (1944)



Frank Tuttle

THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942)



Fritz Lang

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944), SCARLET STREET (1945),

and THE BIG HEAT (1953)

Genre



Film Noir



John Brahm

THE LODGER (1944) and HANGOVER SQUARE (1945)



Alfred Hitchcock

SPELLBOUND (1945)



Lewis Milestone

THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS (1946)



Edward Dmytryk

MURDER, MY SWEET (1944) and CORNERED (1945)



André De Toth

DARK WATERS (1944) and PITFALL (1948)

Genre



Film Noir

Stuart Heisler

THE GLASS KEY (1942)



Jean Negulesco

THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (1944), THREE STRANGERS (1946),

NOBODY LIVES FOREVER (1946), and ROAD HOUSE (1948)



Anthony Mann

T-MEN (1947), RAW DEAL (1948), and SIDE STREET (1949)



Fred Zinnemann

ACT OF VIOLENCE (1949)



Rudolph Maté

THE DARK PAST (1948), D.O.A. (1950), and UNION STATION (1950)

Genre



Film Noir



Henry Hathaway

KISS OF DEATH (1947) and CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (1948)



Robert Rossen

JOHNNY O'CLOCK (1947) and BODY AND SOUL (1947)



Abraham Polonsky

FORCE OF EVIL (1948)



John Cromwell

DEAD RECKONING (1947) and THE RACKET (1951)



Robert Montgomery

LADY IN THE LAKE (1946) and RIDE THE PINK HORSE (1947)

Genre



Film Noir

Delmer Daves

DARK PASSAGE (1947);



Robert Wise

THE SET-UP (1949) and THE CAPTIVE CITY (1952)



Jules Dassin

BRUTE FORCE (1947), THE NAKED CITY (1948), THIEVES'

HIGHWAY (1949), and NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)



John Farrow

THE BIG CLOCK (1948) and ALIAS NICK BEAL (1949)



Elia Kazan

BOOMERANG! (1947) and PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

Genre



Film Noir



Edgar G. Ulmer

RUTHLESS (1948)



Joseph H. Lewis

THE UNDERCOVER MAN (1949) and GUN CRAZY (1949)



Nicholas Ray

THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1949), IN A LONELY PLACE (1950), and ON

DANGEROUS GROUND (1951)



Phil Karlson

SCANDAL SHEET (1952), 99 RIVER STREET (1953), and TIGHT

SPOT (1955)



Samuel Fuller

PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953)

Genre



Film Noir



Robert Aldrich

KISS ME DEADLY (1955).

Genre



Melodrama

Why has melodrama now become a genre of

interest?

Todd Haynes, Far From Heaven (Douglas

Sirk) to Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz)

Genre



The Musical

As mirror of society

As spectacle

Rock documentary

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

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)

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

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?

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

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)