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

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

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

Aviation Buddy Caper Chase Espionage Fallen Woman Jungle Legal Martial Arts Medical Parody Police Minor Movie Sub-Genres (according to Tim Dirks [filmsite.org]) Political Prison Religious Slasher Swashbucklers 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 Style 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) 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

Action-Adventure  Hard/Hyperbolic Bodies? See Jeffords quote on p  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 girl, recovers true love) Parody/Burlesque (of other films or genres) Reductio ad Absurdum: a mistake is pursue to its logical outcome The Renoir Structure: a comic/ironic investigation of the foibles of society. The Picaresque: the life of a central, wandering character 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.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 second Outgoing, the third Pending, and the fourth Too difficult.”--Owen Barfield Helmuth Plessner, author 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

Henri Bergson Genre

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

The Gangster FilmThe Western A "story of enterprise and success ending in precipitate failure" (453). 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.A tale of the frontier. The gangster is "without culture, without manners, without leisure" (453). The Western hero Is a figure of repose. Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (from The Immediate Experience)

The Gangster FilmThe 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 introspective. 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 Western hero avoids violence at all cost; he is always in control. The gangster is never satisfied; complacency is fatal to him. 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 FilmThe Western “Everyone wants to kill him and eventually someone will” (454) 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 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 gangster associates with prostitutes and “loose” women because of their “passive availability” and their “costliness.” 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 FilmThe Western The gangster's death reveals his whole life to have been a mistake. Even in death, the Western hero retains his honor. A modern genre which "confronts industrial society on its own ground" (465). Essentially "archaic" (466).

Genre

Film Noir  Tim Dirks’ Film Noir site. 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)