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])
Genre
•Action
•Epics/Historical
•Adventure
•Musicals
•Comedy
•Science Fiction
•Crime/Gangster
•War
•Drama
•Westerns
Major Movie Sub-Genres
(according to Tim Dirks [filmsite.org])
Genre
•Biopics
•Melodrama
•Chick Flicks
•Road Films
•Detective/Mystery
•Romance
•Disaster
•Sports
•Fantasy
•Supernatural
•Film Noir
•Thrillers/Suspense
•Guy Films
Minor Movie Sub-Genres
(according to Tim Dirks [filmsite.org])
•Aviation
•Jungle
•Political
•Buddy
•Legal
•Prison
•Caper
•Martial Arts
•Chase
•Medical
•Slasher
•Espionage
•Parody
•Swashbucklers
•Fallen Woman
•Police
Genre
•Religious
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 rulebound 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, interand/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
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
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
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
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.
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
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 Film
The 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 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
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
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)