AMERICAN FILM GENRES TET2040e 3 op

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AMERICAN FILM GENRESTET2040e 3 op

• lecturer Eija Niskanen
• eija.niskanen_at_gmail.com

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American Film Genres syllabushttp//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_at_ room 8 )
• 25.4. Film noir and melodrama genres or film
  styles?
  
• 26.4. Genres The musical

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Requirements

• 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_telev
  ision_writtenwork.htm
  

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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.

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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 Aristotles 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

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Major Hollywood genres

• 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 womans film

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On genre

• Thomas Schatz "All film genres treat some form
  of threatviolent or otherwiseto 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

8
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. womens films
• narrative-stylistic industry history study
  (Tino Balio, David Bordwell, Steven Neale)
  
• cognitive study (Noel Burch on horror)

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Ideological study on a genre cycle

• To Live and Die in L.A., William Friedkin, 1985
• Reaganism in 80s films, Jane Feuer, Susan
  Jeffords
  

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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'
  

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Pure genre?

• 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
• 1. 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

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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

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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

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Genre evolution 2 critique

• 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

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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)
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Hollywood film industry and genre

• 19.4.2008

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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

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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
• Loews-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,

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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

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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 others films (British imports),
  released indep. producers films, slapstick
  musicals w Eddie Cantor, some Hitchcock films,
  Wuthering Heights

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Independents made

• prestige pictures (Selznick Gone with the Wind
  for MGM)
  
• Oscar Michaeaux - black films
• different language films (Yiddish films)

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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)
  

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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

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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

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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

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Media conglomerates

• Bertelsmann
• Sony-Columbia
• Disney
• General Electric
• News Corporation
• Time Warner
• Viacom
• Vivendi

• Grupo Televisa

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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

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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...?

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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

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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

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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

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Later gansters

• The Killing, Stanley Kubrick, 1956
• The Godfather, 1972
• GoodFellas, Casino, etc. Mafia cycle
• American Ganster, 2007

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1970s Blaxploitation Shaft
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Genre sample Sophisticated comedy

• womans 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 womens films comedies of remarriage
  
  

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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

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The new romance

• Neale Krutnik the new romance
• When Harry Met Sally, 1989
• Woody Allen-like "nervous romance"