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Title: AMERICAN%20FILM%20GENRES%20TET2040e%203%20op

1
AMERICAN FILM GENRESTET2040e 3 op

lecturer Eija Niskanen
eija.niskanen_at_gmail.com

2
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

3
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

4
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.

5
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

6
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

7
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)

9
Ideological study on a genre cycle

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

10
Genre and audience

audience knowledge and expectation
specific systems of expectation and hypothesis
gt 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'

11
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 plotgt onset, discovery,
confirmation, confrontation (sexuality)
The Isle of Dead, Mark Robson, RKO, 1945
2. Overreacher plotgt preparation for experiment,
experiment, experiement goes wrong, confrontation
of the monster
The Body Snatcher, Robert Wise, RKO, 1945

12
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

13
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

14
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

15
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)

16
Hollywood film industry and genre

19.4.2008

17
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

18
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 gt 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,

19
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

20
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

21
Independents made

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

22
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)

23
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

24
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

25
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

26
Media conglomerates

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

Grupo Televisa

27
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

28
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...?

29
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

30
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

31
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

32
Later gansters

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

33
1970s Blaxploitation Shaft
34
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

35
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

36
The new romance