Barna Donovan on Aspects of
Action/Adventure Films
• Tend to interrogate what it means to be a man
(even for women, as co-stars or heroes)
• Lead is usually a marginalized outsider called
to assist people who don’t trust him
• Often use monomyth, or Campbell’s “Hero of
a 1000 Faces,” as basic narrative
• Feature carnage, violence, speedy narratives,
and lately a lot of computer graphics
Paul Wells on Aspects of Animation
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Motion-based: “What the animator does on each frame of film is not as
important as what he or she does in between” – viewer seeks closure
akin to montage, but on more minute scale of flow
Authorial-power-privileging: Similar to art cinema, viewer is aware of
author’s power (author could do anything), thus wonders why story is
being told this way, looks for rationale and authorial unity
Associative: “Intrinsically interrogates the phenomena it represents and
offers new and alternative perspectives and knowledge”; makes surface
more visible, tracks implications of motion, gives forms new
embodiment in purely qualitative, unreal instances so their essence may
be revealed
Self-reflexive: Knowingness exposes “complexities of its own illusions…to
offer the simultaneity of insight and reference”
Surreal or dream-like: Deliberately juxtaposes unusual and unexpected
elements within nominally plausible, fictionally consistent environments
– uses this quality for comedy or nightmare
Germaine Dulac on Aspects of the
Avant-Garde
• Technique “breaks with established traditions to
search out…new emotional chords”
• Egoistic, i.e, based on personal thought AND
altruistic, i.e., concerned only with progress
• Industry may or may not think of art; avant-garde
only tries to be art – is “other” to industry
• “Pure cinema”: nature’s unseen processes, the
invisible, the imponderable, abstract movement
• Tries to free cinema from existing arts and bring
back its “essential considerations”: movement,
rhythm, life, and dreams
Thomas Leitch on Aspects of Crime
Films
• By definition crime is an aberration, a disruption to the normal
workings of society; yet crime films treat crime as normal even as
they observe how it undermines social order
• Criminal behavior in crime films rides tension between being
abnormal and all too normal
• Crime is metaphor, critique of social order
• Individual must overcome even well-meaning community; victims
must turn vigilante, good cops must bypass corrupt justice system
• Three key roles: the criminal, the victim, and the avenger/detective
– films are about the breakdowns and renewals of boundaries
between the three key roles
• In the end, a contradiction: films valorize these boundaries to affirm
order EVEN AS they explore permeability between boundaries to
mount a critique that challenges that order
Michael Renov on Reasons for
Documentary
1. To record, reveal, or preserve – capturing
“the imponderable movement of the real”
2. To persuade or promote – selling products or
values, rallying support, solidifying identity
3. To analyze or interrogate – often to pose and
resolve puzzles or mysteries
4. To express – to privilege truth over beauty,
yet also to expose that as a false binary
Paul Jennings on Aspects of Fantasy
• A central situation that defies rational or even pseudo-scientific
explanation
• Often, inexplicable world is contrasted to a conventional “reality”
from which the characters have come and to which they may
return; hero almost always chooses the “home” where they will
have love and acceptance
• Major theme is discovery of joy; hero goes from drab existence to a
full, rich and wondrous life
• Other major theme is freedom; hero can personally choose how to
live, not be bound by duty or unhappy traditions; hero can
overcome anything (implying death is a release or an illusion)
• Three common types: superhuman, child hero, and wise mentor
• Distinct from: symbolic/allegorical films, non-narrative avant-garde
films, religious-based films, or films where fantasies are used
primarily for comedy, erotic, or musical devices
Robin Wood on Aspects of Horror
• Normality is threatened by the Other/Monster
• “They are our collective nightmares” and signify the return of the
repressed (because in our monogamous, family-oriented culture,
the repressed must return)
• Lowness of genre (just “escapism”), ordinariness works to lower our
guard
• Monster may come from family but now opposes it; family must be
defended
• Pre-1960s, Monster was foreign; post-1960s, Monster often
American, and annihilation is inevitable and humanity is powerless
to stop it
• Release of sexuality is always perverted, monstrous, and excessive
• “Progressive” to the extent that they question absolute evil of
Monster, “reactionary” to the extent that they don’t
Linda Williams on Aspects of
Melodrama
1. Begins, and wants to end, in a “space of
innocence”
2. Focuses on victim-heroes and recognizing their
virtue, thus orchestrating moral legibility
3. Uses dialectic of pathos and action – a give and
take of “too late” and “in the nick of time”
4. Borrows from realism but realism serves pathos
and action
5. Presents characters who embody simplified good
and evil
Robert Stam on “Meta”-films
• Also called reflexive, self-referential: refers to
the process by which films foreground their
own production
• Subvert the assumption that movies are a
transparent means of communication by
turning the mirror back on themselves
• Remind the viewer of their constructed nature
• Not always anti-illusion; can be just as fictional
as fiction, depending how they’re done
Richard Dyer on Aspects of Musical
Films
• Entertainment through song, dance, and narrative designed
to provide pleasure
• Three kinds of musicals, all privileging utopia: Show Musical
where narrative and number are separate; Folk Musical
where narrative = problems and number = escape, but
papered over with devices like “cue for a song”; Fairy-Tale
Musical where narrative world is already utopian/dreamlike
• Abundance instead of scarcity
• Energy instead of exhaustion
• Intensity instead of dreariness
• Transparency instead of manipulation
• Community instead of fragmentation
Wes Gehring on Aspects of Parody
Comedy
• Has two types: overt and reaffirmative
• Provides humor based on distorted imitation of a
familiar genre or auteur
• Like musical, not bound by time and place, but
upon finding one, makes itself different/odd
• Offers “creative criticism,” educational insights
• Is distinct from satire (about structure, not
society)
• Compounds more than one target subject
• Is self-conscious about itself as film
Carrie Preston on Traits of Romantic
Comedy
• Development of love between two main characters is the main
story line
• Various obstacles, goals, plotlines, characters, misunderstandings
keep our leads apart for much of the film, often including chasing
lost lovers or that one character is engaged to wrong person
• Confidant character acts as sounding board, listens to lead’s inner
feelings – much more in comedy than drama
• Visualization of transformation as one or both leads becomes more
ready for other
• Often no sex before “true love”; if sex is too early, seen as impulsive
mistake
• In comedy, typically ending in marriage; not so in drama
Geoff King & Tanya Krzywinska on
Aspects of Science Fiction
• Human v. products of science, technology, and rationality
• Navigates tension between utopia and dystopia – science is useful
only up to a point, and one can never control messiness of life
(could be seen as conservative, liberal, or both)
• Robots and aliens are “good” if human-helpful; when “bad” read as
metaphors for threats to humanity (or just white male America)
• Travels in space, time and scale implicitly raise concerns of our real
world, often passed over rapidly to get to spectacle and
entertainment
• Contentious political issues form a point of reference, partly to lure
viewers with the promise of forbidden elements, but these are not
explored in detail, and sidelined in favor of magical reconciliation
and individual achievement
• Tension between realism and fantasy but tendency toward latter
(“what is a realistic representation of something unknown?”)
Andrew Klavan on Aspects of War
Films
• They depict the external and internal struggles of
people who defend the nation
• The films explore contradiction: to defend home, must
be estranged from it; to defend values, must
contravene them; to defend civilization and peace,
must learn fluency in uncivilized violence
• Tension between patriotism and anti-nationalism,
between glory and futility
• Pre-1970, warrior’s sacrifice of self is necessary,
inspiring; post-1970 it is a “spiritual death”
• May focus on war and battles, or sometimes prison,
covert ops, training, civilian struggles during war