AMERICAN FILM GENRESTET2040e 3 op

lecturer: Eija Niskanen

eija.niskanen@gmail.com

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:@ room 8 )25.4. Film noir and melodrama: genres or film

styles?26.4. Genres: The musical

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_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• 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 filmsnarrative-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?• 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 monsterThe 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• 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 othersBig 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

• 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• Scarfacestar vehicles: James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, early

Humphrey BogartThe Production Code (Hays Code), 1930, started

enforcing 1934, self-regulation within the industryThe 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 paylater 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

• 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, 1936CLIP: Arsenic and Old Lace, dir. Frank Capra,

Warner Bros 1941, stars Cary GrantCLIP: Gis Girl Friday, dir. Howard Hawks, 1940

The new romance

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

romance"