AMERICAN FILM GENRES
TET2040e 3 op
lecturer: Eija Niskanen
eija.niskanen@gmail.com
American Film Genres syllabus
http://www.helsinki.fi/taitu/tet/Americangenres.htm
18.4. Definitions and theories of film genre in the
context of Hollywood
19.4. at 10-12 The birth and historical-industrial
development of American film genres
19.4. at 12-14 Genre examples: The gangster film,
Sophisticated comedy
21.4. Genres, society, and ideology: The western
(Note:@ room 8 )
25.4. Film noir and melodrama: genres or film styles?
26.4. Genres: The musical
Requirements
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Participation in lectures 80%
home reading (articles) and/or viewing of films
Either a study diary or two essays. The essays or study diary should
comment on the lectures, the films seen, and the home reading, as well
as possibly draw on examples of own viewing of films (for example
contemporary examples of American genre films).
# In both cases the minimum requirements are: total 10-12 sheets
# Sheet = approx. 30 x 60 characters (dbl spacing) Check Word:
file/properties/statistics
# Written work must be submitted within two weeks after the last lecture
to the lecturer by email, in a word or rich text format.
for writing directions, see Department home page
http://www.helsinki.fi/taitu/english/film_television_writtenwork.htm
The course is about
• The course focuses on the meaning and centrality of
genre films in Hollywood cinema. Topics covered
include: birth and evolvement of genres side by side
with the rise (and later demise) of the studio system,
major Hollywood film genres, such as the western,
musical and sophisticated comedy in historical light
up until today. All this will be discussed both from the
industrial and aesthetic point of view, including the
social and ideological interpretation of genres.
Theoretical approaches include the terminological
definition of genre as well the problematics of
classifying genres/styles such as melodrama and film
noir.
What is genre?
• genre = type or kind? theme or form?
• genre comes from the French (and originally Latin) word
for 'kind' or 'class'.
• literary genre: Aristotle’s Poetics: tragedy, epic, lyric;
Medieval lit. for ex. romance
• poetry, prose and drama, within which there are further
divisions, such as tragedy and comedy within the category
of drama
• genres in painting: landscape, portrait, religious etc.
• mass media – genres born
• film genre
• national film genres
• film industry and genre: production, distribution,
exhibition, studio marketing
Major Hollywood genres
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Action-adventure
Biopics
Comedy
Detective, gansgster, suspense thriller
Epics and spectacles
Horror, science fiction, fantasy
Musicals
Social problem films
Teenpics
War films
Westerns
Film noir
Melodrama and the woman’s film
On genre
• Thomas Schatz: "All film genres treat some form of
threat—violent or otherwise—to the social order"
• narrative closure (genre films vs. art films)
• technique, style, mode, formula or thematic grouping
may be treated as a genre
• David Bordwell: 'any theme may appear in any genre’
• Robert Stam, genre definition often based on story
content, borrowed from literature etc.
• 'family resemblances' among texts
• How we define a genre depends on our purposes
Film genre - critical definitions historically
• books & articles in the U.S. and Europe, 1940s and 50s
• French New wave critics and filmmakers: Andre Bazin,
Claude Chabrol; to take Hollywood seriously
• 1960-70s: UK & US: academic study, to displace
auteur criticism (Cahiers du Cinema, Screen)
• phases: iconographic (Erwin Panofsky)
structuralist, semiotic, psychoanalytic,
ideological analysis (Screen writers)
feminist interest in genres, esp. women’s
films
narrative-stylistic & industry history study
(Tino Balio, David Bordwell, Steven
Neale)
cognitive study (Noel Burch on horror)
Ideological study on a genre
cycle
To Live and Die in L.A., William Friedkin,
1985
Reaganism in 80s films, Jane Feuer,
Susan Jeffords
Genre and audience
• audience knowledge and expectation
• specific systems of expectation and hypothesis
=> recognition and understanding
• verisimilitude + probability, possible, likely; propriety
• Todorov generic verismilitude and social or cultural
verisimilitude
• rules of the genre - the audience uses the concept of
genre in order to make sense of a particular movie
• Semiotically, a genre can be seen as a shared code
between the producers and interpreters of texts
included within it.
• Alastair Fowler: 'readers learn genres gradually,
usually through unconscious familiarization'
Pure genre?
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often genres are hybrid, overlap each others
genre or style? melodrama & film noir
genre cycles: new gebres (catastrophe movies)
genre parodies
sub-genres
cross-cultural hybridization
Noel Carroll on horror
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Discvovery plot> onset, discovery,
confirmation, confrontation (sexuality)
The Isle of Dead, Mark Robson, RKO, 1945
• 2. Overreacher plot> preparation for experiment,
experiment, experiement goes wrong, confrontation
of the monster
The Body Snatcher, Robert Wise, RKO, 1945
Casablanca, Variety, Dec. 2, 1942
”Exhibs, in selling the picture, will do well to bear in
mind that it goes heavy on the love theme. Although
the title and Humphrey Bogart's name convey the
impression of high adventure rather than romance,
there's plenty of the latter for the femme trade.
Adventure is there, too, but it's more as exciting
background to the Bogart-Bergman heart
department.”
Casablanca, dir. Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros, 1941
Genre evolution (trad. view)
John Cawelti: 1970s changes in American
genre movies. Aware of themselves as
myth, genre movies of the period responded
in four ways: humorous burlesque,
nostalgia, demythologization, and
reaffirmation.
Francis Ford Coppola's (b. 1939) The Godfather (1972)
Robert Altman's (b. 1925) McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The
Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975)
Rocky Horror Picture Show
Genre evolution 2: critique
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Rick Altman (studied musicals)
intra- and intergeneric processes of genre
criticises the compartmentalised manner to study genres
generic evolution, later genre films are assumed to build
on earlier films of the same genre
• Thomas Schatz's examination of Westerns in Hollywood
Genres (1981), which focusses almost exclusively on the
work of John Ford
• Altman: cross-pollination occurs across genres
Genre evolution (cont.)
•almost all classical Hollywood studio directors worked in
more than one genre: Howard Hawks directed westerns,
screwball comedies, and science fiction films
•genres start out with a set of semantic elements, and only
achieve true genre status when they complete a process of
evolving an accompanying syntax. After all, the syntactic
and semantic elements both continue to shift after this
process is completed.
•A set of promising semantics simply hijack an existing
syntactic framework from another genre.
•science fiction exists almost entirely as a set of semantics).
There is, no syntactic framework existent; a parasitical
genre, relying on hybrids between its semantics and the
syntactic frameworks taken from elsewhere. science fiction /
horror films (Alien)
Hollywood film industry and
genre
19.4.2008
Classical Hollywood period
1925-1950s:
8 majors and others
Big five: vertically
integrated
• Loews-MGM
• Paramount Publix
• Fox (20th Century
Fox)
• Warner Bros
• RKO
Little three: production and
distribution
• Universal
• Columbia
• United Artists (UA)
Poverty Row producers
(Republic, Monogram,
Mascot etc.)
Independent producers:
Goldwyn, Selznick
Animation studios:
Fleischer, Disney
Studio genres?
• Paramount: ”European style”, Josef von Steinberg &
Marlene Dietrich, Ernst Lubitsch, Maurice Chevalier,
Marx Brothers, Mae West, Bob Hope etc... comedy;
Cecil B DeMille => historical films
• Loew’s-MGM: visible producers Louis B. Mayer,
Irving Thalberg, lavish style and sets, musicals
• 20th Century Fox: Shirley Temple
• Warner Bros: smaller budgets than MGM, James
Cagney, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Erroll Flynn,
recycled plots, Busby Berkeley musical, gangster,
problem film, bio-pic, war films,
Studios and genre cont.
• RKO: King Kong (1933), Fred Astaire &
Ginger Rogers musicals (1934-38),
distribbuted Disney, i the 1940 Orson Welles
and Broadway plays, Citizen Kane (1941),
creative B unit (horror, crime...)
• Universal: visually striking horrors w/ bela
Lugosi and Boris Karloff (Dracula,
Frankenstein...), targeted small-town
audiences (Deanna Durbin), Bs (Sherlock
Holmes series) and slapstick comedies
Studio and genre 3
• Columbia: borrowd stars and directors from
other studios (for ex. His Girl
Friday/Howard Hawks), Frank Capra, B
westerns, 3 Stooges comedies
• UA: D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Charlie
Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks owned UA
1935 on, distributed other’s films (British
imports), released indep. producer’s films,
slapstick musicals w Eddie Cantor, some
Hitchcock films, Wuthering Heights
Independents made
• prestige pictures (Selznick: Gone with the
Wind for MGM)
• Oscar Michaeaux - black films
• different language films (Yiddish films)
Studio differentiation of films
• A and B films – prod. budget
• A: superspecials (prestige, big budget
musicals w. top stars 1milj.+, Selznick,
Golwyn as producers ) - upscaling genres, for
ex. Monumental Westerns
Gone with the Wind, prod. David O. Selznick,
1939, dir. George Cukor & Victor Fleming
• specials (bulk of the class A, normal length),
• programmers (lowest budget, original stories,
minor stars, shorter, even 50 mins, Poverty
Row made only these)
post-1960
• vertical integration declared illegal in 1948 –
big five sold their theaters
• demographic and lifestyle changes
• decline in film attendance, television
• inhouse staff laid off
• RKO collapsed
• From Production Code to Ratings system
post-60s cont.
• big five: make less but more expensive films,
abandoned Bs, widescreen, other new
technologies, blockbusters, co-productions, ,
international markets, target audiences
production of TV programs, screening film
library on TV, acting as distributros, facility
rentals, financiers etc. for independents
• stars went indie – talent agents rise
• one-off production basis – package
production
• drive-in theater, multiplex, abandonment of
production code in 1968
• congloramate take-overs of studios
The New Hollywood
• package and indep. prod.
• mini-majors (Miramax, New Line, Tri-Star)
along the old majors
• freelance workers
• a few heavily pre-marketed blockbusters,
blanket release, made for teens and 20s
audience, special effects and sound
innovations, spin-offs and tie-ins (CDs,
games etc.), video, DVD, cable income
• synergies, global, multi-media
Media conglomerates
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Bertelsmann
Sony-Columbia
Disney
General Electric
News Corporation
Time Warner
Viacom
Vivendi
• Grupo Televisa
New Hollywood cont.
• recycling of established stories, characters,
ideas and performers, sequels 1970s and 80s
– but same in 1930s
• audience: movie consciousness & popular
culture consciousness
• allusion, pastiche, hybridity
• multi-platform popular culture already in the
1930s, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, sales of
sheet music etc.
• so: different but same
Genre samples: Ideological claim
”Hollywood film, like US society, should be
seen as a contested terrain and films could
be interpreted as a struggle nof
representation over how to construct a
social world and everyday life.”
problem: who decides in practice? Studios,
audience...?
Genre example: Ganster
• The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)
Warner Bros early 1930s cycle of ”topicals”:
• Little Caesar
• Public Enemy
• Scarface
star vehicles: James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson,
early Humphrey Bogart
The Production Code (Hays Code), 1930, started
enforcing 1934, self-regulation within the industry
The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors
Association (MPPDA
Gansgster genre deals with
• threats to law and order
• social stability within and urban society (vs.
western)
• public sphere as opposed to the domestic sphere of
social comedies, melodramas and musicals
• dear and fascination of criminals
• cultural conflicts, economic rise - making the
American Dream
• attractive, vital characters
Clash with censors
text insert at the beg of Little Caesar:
"to honestly depict an environment that
exists today in a certain strata of
American life, rather than glorify the
hoodlum or the criminal”
ending: crime does not pay
later same actors played touch cops
Later gansters
• The Killing, Stanley
Kubrick, 1956
• The Godfather, 1972
• GoodFellas, Casino,
etc. ”Mafia cycle”
• American Ganster,
2007
1970s: Blaxploitation: Shaft
Genre sample: Sophisticated
comedy
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woman’s film x comedy
the influence of literary naturalism on the cinema
sexual antagonism
A film stars
a decisive shift in 1920s American cinematic
sensibility and taste-from 'hokum' to
'sophistication,' – Lea Jacobs
• domestic x women’s films = comedies of
remarriage
Sophisticated comedy/screwball
comedy
• Bringing Up Baby – screwball comedy 1934 It
Happened One Night, Twentieth Century (1934)
CLIP: Desire, dir. Frank Borgaze, 1936
CLIP: Arsenic and Old Lace, dir. Frank Capra,
Warner Bros 1941, stars Cary Grant
CLIP: Gis Girl Friday, dir. Howard Hawks, 1940
The new romance
• Neale & Krutnik: the new romance
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When Harry Met Sally, 1989
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Woody Allen-like "nervous romance"