Rethinking Genre Theory

Reviewed by: Generic Histories of German Cinema: Genre and Its Deviations ed. by Jaimey Fisher Roger F. Cook Generic Histories of German Cinema: Genre and Its Deviations. Edited by Jaimey Fisher. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. Pp. 314. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 978-1571135704. This collection of twelve substantial essays fills a notable gap in scholarly work on German film and is a welcome addition to Camden House’s prominent series in German Studies. In the introduction the volume’s editor, Jaimey Fisher, documents convincingly the need for a volume that focuses on the history and theory of genre in German cinema. He provides a good overview of the scant existing scholarship on German genre films and then describes how Generic Histories addresses the topic in a way that can contribute both to the history of German film and to genre theory more broadly. He lays out two key goals of this anthology. One is to illuminate from [End Page 682] a new perspective the links between art cinema and popular film. The second, more central concern is the need to override the partitioning of German history into fixed periods that are seen as distinct and disconnected. Fisher asserts that in emphasizing “the ongoing histories of film genres and their ever mutating forms” (4), the essays in this volume read genre in the German context across the boundaries of these periods and, in doing so, seek to contribute to genre theory more broadly. After stating these objectives, Fisher addresses briefly the influence that German theorists (Adorno, Horkheimer, Kracauer) have had on genre theory, before offering a brief historical sketch of critical writing on film genre. He does so in order to spell out the specific contribution that the “historic-discursive approach” of Generic Histories has to offer. Tailoring his short account of a complex history to this end, Fisher argues that genre theory as a whole has tended to follow a triangulated model constructed around the filmic text, audiences, and industry institutions. The thrust of this historical account (which includes John Calweti, Rick Altman, and Steve Neale, among others) is to show that the various models of genre theory have struggled to find an approach that incorporates both a historical focus on institutions and practices and a discursive engagement with the filmic text. Generic Histories seeks to rectify this by offering a history of German genre film that does both and that can thus serve as a model for genre studies in general. The collection pursues this goal by assigning a certain structure to the individual contributions. Each essay provides a general history of its designated genre and then provides a reading of a particular film as a case study. For the most part, the articles follow the design laid out in the introduction and, in doing so, give a broad history of genre film in German cinema. The contributions cover the most important genres: horror films, the essay film, science fiction, musicals, war films, crime films, the Heimat film, romantic comedy, and detective/police thrillers. While the collection may not cover every genre (e.g., political thriller, Bergfilme, and historical films are not included), there are no glaring gaps. In most cases, the essays also trace the development of a particular genre across different periods in German history, delivering on the promise in the introduction of “transperiod genre criticism.” Of all the contributions, Lutz Koepnick’s piece adheres to the plan laid out in the introduction most effectively. It provides an excellent critical perspective on the history of science-fiction film in German cinema, explaining its limited success in relation to German social, political and cultural history. In a skilled balancing of case study with the larger scope of his piece, he frames his arguments with a discussion of two Fritz Lang science-fiction films of the 1920s (one classic and one minor), and then comes back to Metropolis in a strong conclusion that solidifies his argument with a superb analogy drawn from a classical moment of German science-fiction. Gerd Gemünden also contributes effectively to the theoretical purpose of the volume. He gives a strong reading of Edgar Ulmer’s 1934 horror film The Black Cat as...

Direct-to-Video (On Demand): New Industrial and Cultural Valuations of Nontheatrical Film Releases

In their book An Illustrated Glossary of Film Terms. Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman define as a category, kind, or form of film distinguished by subject matter, theme, or techniques. They list more than seventy-five genres of film, both fiction and non-fiction. There are categories within categories and categories which overlap and are not mutually exclusive. In light of the difficulty of accurately defining the individual genres, I would rather side-step the problem by considering the Fictional Genre Film as a single category which includes all that is commonly held to be genre film, i.e. the Western, the Horror film, the Musical, the Science Fiction film, the Swashbuckler, etc., in order to show that all of these films have a common origin and basic form. Bound by a strict set of conventions, tacitly agreed upon by filmmaker and audience, the genre film provides the experience of an ordered world and is an essentially classical structure predicated upon the principles of the Classical world view in general, and indebted to the Poetics of Aristotle in particular; in the genre film the plot is fixed, the characters defined, the ending satisfyingly predictable. Because the genre film is not realistic, because it is so blatantly dramatic, it has been condescendingly treated by many critics for its failure to be relevant to contemporary issues, philosophies, and aesthetics. Yet the truth of the matter is that the genre film lives up to the guiding principle of its Classical origins: there is nothing new under the sun, and truth with a capital T is to be found in imitating the past. The contemporary and the particular are inimical to the prevailing idea in Classical thought that knowledge is found in the general conclusions which have stood the test of time. Thus originality, unique subject matter, and a resemblance to actual life are denigrated as values, while conformity, adherence to previous models, and a preoccupation with stylistic and formal matters are held to be the criteria for artistic excellence. The subject matter of a genre film is a story. It is not about something that matters outside the film, even if it inadvertently tells us something about the time and place of its creation. Its sole justification for existence is to make concrete and perceivable the configurations inherent in its ideal form. That the various genres have changed, gone through cycles of popularity, does not alter the fact that the basic underlying coordinates of a genre are maintained time after time. From Porter's The Great Train Robbery to The Cowboys or True Grit, the Western has maintained a consistency of basic content; tne motifs, plots, settings, and characters remain the same. What is true of the Western is also true of the Adventure film, the Fantasy film, the Crime film, and the Musical, or any fictional genre one can identify. Any particular film of any definable group is only recognizable as part of that group if it is, in fact, an imitation of that which came before. It is only because we have seen other films that strongly resemble the particular film at hand that we can say, Yes, this is a Horror fMm or a Thriller or a Swashbuckler. Consciously or unconsciously, both the genre filmmaker and the genre audience are aware of the prior films and the way in which each of these concrete examples is an attempt to embody once again the essence of a well-known story. This use of well-known stories is clearly a classical practice. Homer, the Greek dramatists, Racine, Pope, Samuel Johnson, and all the other great figures of the classical and neo-classical periods used prior sources for their stories. The formative principle behind the creation of classical art has always been the known and the familiar. The Greeks knew the stories of the gods and the Trojan War in the same way we know about hoodlums and gangsters and G-men and the taming of the frontier and the never-ceasing struggle of the light of reason and the cross with the powers of darkness, not through firsthand experience but through the media. …

Gattungsgeschichte und ihr Gattungsbegriff am Beispiel der Novellen

The science fiction film genre is separate from the irrational or unconscious meanderings of the human mind. In line with this, this book regularly pertains to examples of the genre that can found on television, in books, comics, video games and even fine art, as part of the project to locate the films within a wider cultural context. Science fiction has surely adopted material from both the musical and horror film. The genre of science fiction film allows the kind of debate witnessed among critics, writers and aficionados of the written novels. The chapter then looks at what might be called proto-science fiction films. These films came before the science fiction film which boom in the 1950s. It is shown that Metropolis had a huge impact on science fiction. The interwar films evidently address the political and social unrest of their times. Until the 1950s, the science fiction feature film genre actually started in America.

No British film released in 1950, nor in 1951 (when the charming Ealing comedy The Lavender Hill Mob, starring Alec Guiness and Stanley Holloway was the British Film Academy's choice of best British film of the year) carried an X certificate. In 1952, 1953, and 1955 there were two in each year; in 1954, one; but in 1956, three.l In 1957, there were seven; in 1958, nine; in 1959, eleven; in 1960, seventeen; in 1961, sixteen. The curve may not be exponential, the facts behind the crude figures may not be simple, but times, as they say, were certainly changing. Until the balance altered in the late fifties, X-certificate films, almost exclusively, meant Continental films. Indeed, several of the British Xs had strong French connections (Intimate Relations of 1953 was based on a play by Jean Cocteau, and Knave of Hearts of 1954 was directed by Rene Clement and starred Gerard Philipe; the other Xs tended to heavy crime films, sometimes involving children). However, one of the two Xs in 1955, The Quatermass Experiment, broke new ground in two ways: it gained its X because of the horrific character of its science fiction, and the film itself was the first to have its origins in a successful television programme. The other X of 1955 was I Am a Camera, starring Laurence Harvey as Christopher Isherwood. As it happened, it was in February 1956 that the film of 1984, Orwell's novel of the late forties, was released; more portentous was the first horror film from Hammer, a derivation from Quatermass entitled The Unknown. Quatermass II followed in 1957, accompanied by The Curse of Frankenstein and four other horror films, so that in fact there was only one sex-oriented film, The Flesh is Weak, to contribute to that year's total of seven Xs. All of the next year's crop were horror or science fiction films. If

White Skin and the Black Mask™

Despite the now-traditional tendency of noir scholarship to call attention to the retrospective and constructed nature of this genre— James Naremore argues that film noir is best regarded as a “mythology”— one feature that has rarely come under question is its association with the city (2). Despite the existence of numerous rural noirs, the depiction of urban space is associated with this genre more consistently than any other element. Even in critical accounts that attempt to deconstruct the solidity of the noir genre, the city is left as an implicit inclusion, and the country, an implict exclusion. Naremore, for example, does not include the urban environment in a list of the central tenets of film noir that he calls into question: “nothing links together all the things described as noir—not the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings” (10). Elizabeth Cowie identifies film noir a “fantasy,” whose “tenuous critical status” has been compensated for “by a tenacity of critical use” (121). As part of Cowie’s project, to revise the assumption that noirs are almost exclusively male-centered, she cites character types, visual style, and narrative tendencies, but never urban spaces, as familiar elements of noir that ought to be reconsidered. If the city is rarely tackled as an unnecessary or part-time element of film noir in discursive studies, it is often the first trait identified by critics in the kind of formative, characteristic-compiling studies that Cowie and Naremore work against.

The results of an empirical study of the relationship between radical attitudes and consumer preferences in the field of film production in a sample of young people are presented in the article. Attitudes to radicalism were operationalized through indicators on the scales of relative deprivation, social dominance, and authoritarianism. Horror, melodrama, and arthouse films were considered the preferred film genres. One of the stages of the study was an attempt to determine the possibility of organized influence on radical attitudes through viewing movie trailers of preferred and non-preferred genres by respondents. It is shown that initially the choice of genres of melodrama and arthouse cinema is not associated with any of the supposed components of radical attitudes, and the propensity to watch horror films is associated with a low intensity of the behavioral component of radical attitudes. When organizing the impact by watching trailers, it was found that respondents who prefer the genres of melodrama and arthouse cinema are almost not affected by their socio-political attitudes by consuming film products, while the affective component of their radical attitudes increased among fans of horror films, but only if the genre of the viewed trailer coincided with the preferred one. Thus, the results obtained do not allow us to unambiguously assert that there is a relationship between consumer preferences in film genres and radical attitudes in youth. In general, they indicate an extremely vague relationship between aesthetic preferences and attitudes of the sociopolitical spectrum.

Reviewed by: Screening Youth: Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema ed. by Romain Chareyon and Gilles Viennot Leon Sachs Romain Chareyon and Gilles Viennot, eds. Screening Youth: Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema. Edinburgh UP, 2019. 253 pp. This volume of fourteen chapters preceded by an editors' introduction examines, as its title indicates, representations of youth in recent French and Francophone cinema. The editors maintain that although the "teen film" is a well-established Hollywood genre accompanied by a significant amount of scholarship, the same cannot be said of filmic representations of youth in the French/Francophone context. Scholars of French and Francophone film have overlooked the "ways film can help us get a better, more nuanced and [End Page 367] true-to-life understanding of the complexity and struggles of youth" (1). The choice of the word "youth" in the volume's title is deliberate. The films studied in this collection embrace an expansive idea of youth, ranging from childhood to early adulthood, and the borders between different stages of development, like the very concept of coming of age, are fluid. The word "youth" is meant to capture this expanse and fluidity. The volume's essays examine films that are about youth but not necessarily aimed at youth as their primary audience. They focus on the particular ways contemporary directors broach the subject matter and how the topic of youth intersects with other concerns in contemporary society (democracy, globalization, economic disparity, immigration). The editors view these films as "sound boxes" offering an amplification and distortion of contemporary life through the filtering lens of young people who, according to the critic Timothy Shary, are entering a "more fast-paced [world that is] removed from the traditions and mores of their parents' generation" (4). The genre of French youth film, if it is a genre at all, does not have the same status as the "teen film" in America with its highly-codified, trope-laden format most commonly set in the high school (think Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High or John Hughes's Ferris Bueller's Day Off). One reason for this is that the prominent role of the director as auteur in French film lends itself to a kind of general aversion to genre. Most of the directors considered in the volume still display a debt to the New Wave directorial tradition even if, as some of the essays indicate, there is an attempt to move out from under the shadow of the New Wave. The editors are at pains to argue that the youth depicted in the films in question do not conform to clichés about youth and therefore offer us more authentic images. They present individual struggles with the "process of youth" and avoid confirming preconceived ideas of what youth is. No single image of youth emerges from these films. Each film is better understood, the editors explain, as a "snapshot" of what it means to be an adolescent in contemporary France. Though it may be difficult to generalize about youth, there are a number of recurring themes in the essays and films, such as gender and sexual identity as well as social class and ethnic identity. Because of the number of contributions, it is impossible to discuss them all. What follows are some summary thoughts about a few of the essays that stood out for this reader. Another reader might well have selected different essays. Gemma Edney's contribution, "Un Vrai 'Teen Film' Français? The Contemporary Adolescent Genre in French Cinema," complements the editors' introduction as another point of entry into the topic in general. Edney divides [End Page 368] the genre into two types, those that have a popular audience and those that attract critical attention. The latter are about (and not necessarily for) teens, have an arthouse style and tend to present youth in a more realistic and less stylized or idealized way. Edney observes for instance that French actors in these films (as opposed to their American counterparts) tend to be closer in age to the characters they represent, thereby offering what seems to be a more authentic rendering of the teen experience. Karine Chevalier's essay on the films of...

Currently, film remains the main media for public entertainment. Of the many genres of film in Indonesia, horror is still the most popular. Unfortunately, Indonesian horror films pay little attention to the creative aspects of the story but focus on cinematography, producing repetitive performances which often follow stock templates. The story typically begins with moving to an empty house, getting lost in the forest, and being haunted by female ghosts. Even so, horror films like this are required to encourage critical and creative thinking of observers and film producers. Therefore, this study aims to discuss the disruptive element through repetitive stories in horror films that are able to open up opportunities for the emergence of creative interplay and its relevance to creative education through horror films in Indonesia. This research uses Maruska Svasek’s perspective on transit and transition which will dissect cultural phenomena in Indonesian horror films. In addition, the viewpoint from Derrida is used to deconstruct repetitive thoughts by film audiences to show the demythologization that occurs in current horror films. Data is taken from literature studies of Indonesian horror films with temporal limitations 2017-2019. Data was also collected using a questionnaire with the decoding-encoding belonging to Stuart Hall perspective. The results of the study show that the repetitive story culture is caused by Indonesian people’s interest in legendary urban legend stories. Utilizing urban legend as the main idea of the story, through Svasek’s perspective, creates attention to the culture that provides an opportunity for cultural preservation and revitalization.
 Keywords: Indonesian horror film, urban legend, deconstruction, cultural revitalization, creativity

İlk yıllarında kayıt altına aldığı gündelik hayatı gösteren sinema, zaman içinde kurmaca hikayelere de yer vermeye başlar. Bu hikayelerde de gerçek hayattan esinlenen sinemanın komedi, müzikal, korku gibi birçok türde ürettiği filmler üretimin gerçekleştiği ortama bağlı yansımalar taşır. Bu çalışma, korku sinemasının alt türü olan slasher filmlerinin zaman içinde geçirdiği dönüşümleri inceleyerek değişen ekonomik, siyasal ve toplumsal değerlerin slasher filmlerinin ikonlarını nasıl etkilediğini ortaya koymayı amaçlar. Edebiyat eserlerinde benzer temalar ile oluşan türler sinemada da karşılık bulur. Türleri oluşturan içerikte her türün sahip olduğu ikonografi ayırt edici özellik taşır. Aynı zamanda filmler, sinematografinin sağladığı imkanlar ile anlatının vermek istediği duyguyu izleyicisine yönetmenin isteği doğrultusunda aktarır. Bu aktarımın taşıdığı mesaj özellikle korku filmleri bağlamında düzene, iktidara, sisteme, aileye, kısaca siyasal, ekonomik ve sosyal her alana dair eleştirilerin rahatlıkla sunulması açısından ikonografiye kolaylıkla yansıtılabilir. Bu nedenle çalışma, öncelikle sinemada tür kavramına yer vererek korku türünün günümüze kadar olan tarihine bakmayı hedeflemektedir. Ardından çalışmada, örneklem olarak seçilen Cadılar Bayramı Öldürür (2021) filminin ikonografisi üzerinden bir tür analizi yapılacaktır. Çalışma, ahlak sorgulayan ve gelenekselliğe yönlendirme yapan ilk slasher ikonlarının değişen politikalar nedeni ile farklılaşmasını ve ideolojinin ikonografi üzerindeki etkisini ortaya koyması nedeni ile önem taşımaktadır.

This essay considers the uncertainties surrounding the advertising of science fiction when it was still a relatively new player among film genres in the 1950s. Because it was sourced in the science-fiction pulp magazines—based on John W. Campbell Jr.'s story "Who Goes There?"—and was the first science-fiction film advertised in the pulps, The Thing from Another World (1951), as well as RKO studio's unconventional ad campaign for it, offers some insight into this uncertainty. While science fiction was starting to powerfully emerge in various media, as evidenced by the new television space operas, comic books, and a growing number of pulp magazine platforms, RKO seemed unsure of how best to frame The Thing. Instead of presenting it in a science-fiction context, RKO mounted a campaign that framed this work, even for the pulp audience, in various non-science-fiction ways: as a horror movie, as an exploitation effort, and even as a mystery or suspense narrative. The approach of this curious campaign, the essay argues, reveals the film industry's indecision about the box-office potential of science fiction, even as the genre was poised to explode in popularity during the decade. That uncertainty underscores the extent to which science fiction has followed what Rick Altman describes as a "process" route in its perception as a genre.

Reviewed by: Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television by Brian E. Crim Monica Black Brian E. Crim. Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 280 pp. In 1961, during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the writer Yehiel Dinur, better known to much of the world as Ka-Tzetnik, testified, as he put it, from "the planet of Auschwitz." Dinur, who described himself to the court as "fall-out" from that planet, became so overwhelmed trying to relate his experiences that he collapsed on the stand. Brian E. Crim's new book begins by recounting that moment of unspeakable abjection, one that laid bare the gap between what survivors of the Holocaust knew and endured and any assurance that those who came after could comprehend it. In the most straightforward sense, Planet Auschwitz's subject matter is how science fiction and horror on screen have drawn on Holocaust imagery and themes and narratives to allow us, the viewers, to imagine unimaginable experiences. And yet the book offers much more than that. It is about moral knowledge and its limits, and the means at our disposal, such as they are, to confront those limits. Crim makes very clear that mystifying the Holocaust, or treating it as something by definition outside our comprehension, is not his aim. Rather, he wants to show how filmmakers, screenwriters, and producers have used the richly imaginative [End Page 425] genres of sci-fi and horror to explore a subject that, at its core, resists knowledge, even as we compile fact upon fact and book after book about the Nazi genocide. Knowledge of the Holocaust has been heavily mediated from the very beginning. As the camps were liberated, they were documented by the Allied armies on film, creating the first widely distributed visual record of the genocide. That visual record in turn "permanently altered notions of horror" (7). Horror directors use iconic Holocaust imagery—boxcars, a railway line, a storage room filled with toys and shoes—to evoke dread. And even some realist Holocaust films use horror framing to elicit the audience's empathy. In each of the book's six chapters, Crim shows how the Holocaust has—philosophically, ethically, visually, epistemologically, thematically, psychologically—altered horror and sci-fi, and how the images and ideas those genres have generated continually reshape our consciousness of the Holocaust in turn. This entangling of reality and film can be seen in the figure of the zombie. Zombie narratives created after the Second World War, Crim argues, were "undoubtedly inspired by liberation footage, photographic evidence produced in concert with war crimes trials" (33). He goes on to trace this interpenetration of history and film through the example of the AMC television show The Walking Dead, a series filled with scenes that intentionally evoke the Holocaust—dense woods and a railway junction called Terminus, where newcomers are stripped and then devoured. The zombie is also a metaphor, Crim shows, for history's insistent, remorseless presence, even as it remains only partly communicable. Chapter 2 looks at two films in tandem: Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1964) tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who struggles to connect with anyone in a society willfully and cruelly indifferent to his experiences. In HBO's The Leftovers, a huge portion of Earth's population has simply and suddenly disappeared. Both The Pawnbroker and The Leftovers allow audiences to reflect on what Alan Mintz called the "tremendum"—an "event of such awful transcendence that it cleaved history into a before and after" (57). While The Pawnbroker deals directly with the Holocaust's aftermath for its main character, The Leftovers is not "about" the Holocaust. And yet it is, Crim suggests—as an imaginative attempt to grapple psychologically with losses and absences that cannot be accounted for within standard frames of reference. One of Crim's most powerful themes concerns the inescapable knowledge that the Holocaust resulted, at least in part, from the modern state's vast war-making capacities, dehumanized science, and technocratic instrumentalism. That means that the world that made the Holocaust was not made by the Nazis...

This book examines a range of so-called ‘male’ and ‘female’ film genres in order to uncover the ways in which film sound conveys meanings about gender. The notion of genre has played a key role in the writing of this book, partly because genre and gender are frequently so inextricably linked: action or science fiction films seem to be so often categorised (both inside and outside of academia) as ‘male’, while romantic comedies or melodramas are deemed ‘female’. Rick Altman, in Film/Genre, highlights that genre is linked to the recognition of repeated semantic codes or conventions, leading to the categorisation of film texts based on common features. Genre conventions allow filmmakers to work to particular ‘formulas’ and realise the expectations of film distributors and consumers.