Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir

Reviewed by: Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory ed. by Barry Keith Grant, Malisa Kurtz Christina Parker-Flynn Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory. Edited by Barry Keith Grant and Malisa Kurtz. University of Texas Press, 2016, 294 pages Each genre film, according to one of the most firmly established “rules” of film genre study, must exhibit qualities that determine its relationship to other examples in the genre. Barry Keith Grant and Malisa Kurtz’s Notions of Genre is no different. While claiming to be something unique, a study in genre through works written before the academic tradition (1970-) became firmly established, it also self-locates precisely within the types of writings one expects in a genre reader. Notions of Genre offers a compilation of essays on popular film from 1945 to 1970 that reflect an early and organic preoccupation with film genre theory, prior to its proper academic application. A distinguished film scholar well known for his Film Genre Reader, “the first scholarly anthology on film genre” released in 1986, Barry Keith Grant reveals his enthusiasm for the prehistory of film genre in the Introduction to its current, fourth edition (2013), in which he emphasizes the early significance of Robert Warshow’s article on the gangster film (1948) and André Bazin’s essay on the western (1952), both works included here in Notions of Genre, as the earliest contributions to genre theory (7). Grant and Kurtz use essays by more familiar authors—like Warshow and Bazin, who have been considered forefathers to genre study since the publication of Christine Gledhill’s The Cinema Book (1985)—to balance out their reintroduction of historically lesser-known work and authors. Grant and Kurtz divide the collection into four sections, the first two (“Comedy” and “Western”) directly indicative of film genre labels, and the last two (“The Fantastic” and “Crime and Punishment”) more universally applicable beyond the realm of film studies proper. The first section on “Comedy” is nicely anchored by the first two readings, James Agee’s “Comedy’s Greatest Era” and Siegfried Kracauer’s “Silent Film Comedy,” important and familiar works written by authors who clearly befit the book’s project. Though perhaps better known as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, James Agee was one of the earliest and most steadfast film critics before the vocation truly existed, defending film’s artistry as a writer at Time and The Nation, and writing his most influential piece, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” included here, as a freelancer for Life Magazine. Kracauer’s essay largely argues that the physicality of slapstick comedy evoked “material life at its crudest” and therefore intrinsically “conformed to the spirit of the medium predestined to capture the fortuitous aspects of physical life” (36). Though Kracauer’s essay represents meta-level film Theory more than genre theory in a limited sense, both Agee’s and Kracauer’s texts lament the devaluation of physical comedy at the advent of sound cinema. The remaining four readings in the section range from 1963 to 1968 and all revolve around the same axis. In “Whatever Happened to Hollywood Comedy?” Dwight MacDonald illustrates how “the old magical world” of silent comedies disappears by mid-century, when contemporary films become too realistic to be amusing abstractly, with films like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad [End Page 59] World (1963) violating the “basic rules of comedy” (54). The last two essays explore film comedy systematically, with Donald W. McCaffrey charting “The Evolution of the Chase in the Silent Screen Comedy,” and Carolyn and Harry Geduld mapping the transformation of comedic characters upon the introduction of sound. Highlights of the second section on the “Western” include Bazin’s highly influential essay “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence” and George Bluestone’s “The Changing Cowboy: From Dime Novel to Dollar Film,” another early work in adaptation studies, itself pioneered by Bluestone’s seminal book Novels Into Film (1957). Interestingly, despite being devoted to a genre not highly regarded for its representation of diversity, this section exemplifies the widest assortment of critical methods and authors of any in the book. Harry Schein, chemical engineer and founder of the...

Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals

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...

Genre films were the staple of Hollywood production in the heyday of the studio system. As Thomas Schatz puts it: ‘Simply stated the genre film — whether a western or a musical, a screwball comedy or a gangster film — involves familiar, essentially one-dimensional characters acting out a predictable story pattern within a familiar setting.’1 Academic studies of genre films have for the most part neglected the swashbuckler and preferred to concentrate on westerns, crime films, musicals, horror films and melodramas.

Film: Genres and Genre Theory

This paper examines the pedagogical and decolonial possibilities of teaching genre cinema through non-Western perspectives. As a sessional instructor teaching across multiple institutions in Vancouver, Canada, I elaborate on how I have taught genre cinema as a decolonial and pedagogical project. Through course design that recognises the way that the evolution of film theory in general, and genre theory in particular, has been encoded in Euro-Western-centrism and analysis, my teaching practice brings into conversation other knowledges and approaches to film-making and film studies that have often been excluded from film studies pedagogy. My pedagogical project is to decolonise film studies, including genre theory, as exemplified in such courses as: Re-Visioning Genre Theory, a fourth-year course at Emily Carr University of Art and Design; Genre Cinema: From Classical Hollywood to Global Contemporary, a third-year course at the University of British Columbia; and Refiguring Futurisms, a fourth-year film seminar at the University of British Columbia. Some of the questions explored in my research and teaching practice consider how genre cinema is adopted and subverted in contemporary non-Western films. In this paper, I use Latin American decolonial theory to focus on Brazilian cinema as an exemplar of non-Western and decolonial approaches to genre theory.

This book explores contemporary existential science fiction media, including film, television, and video games, and their influence on society’s conceptions of memory, identity, and humanity. Most poignantly, Ryan Lizardi argues, are the ways in which a recent cluster of science fiction media, including Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), Legion (2017-2019), Westworld (2016-present), Soma (2015), and Death Standing (2019), among others, present a vision of the future that is inextricably tied to an exploration of humanity that is more contemplative and comparative than traditional science fiction. The combination of the existential nature of this current trend in science fiction with the genre’s ability to manifest these abstract concepts in a generic environment that is historically focused on new frontiers and ideas creates a powerful set of media texts that ask audiences to contemplate what it means to exist, think, and connect as human beings. Scholars of media studies, film studies, television studies, genre studies, and philosophy will find this book particularly useful.

Reviewed by: The Essay Film: Dialogue/Politics/Utopia ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades, and: Essays on the Essay Film ed. by Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan, and: The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction by Nora Alter Larson Powell The Essay Film: Dialogue/Politics/Utopia. Edited by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades. London: Wallflower, 2016. Pp. 315. Paper $25.00. ISBN 978-0231176958. Essays on the Essay Film. Edited by Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. 372. Paper $35.00. ISBN 978-0231172677. The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction. By Nora Alter. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 394. Paper $30.00. ISBN 978-0231178204. In the most systematic presentation of genre formation until now, Rick Altman analyzed the rise of genres through a kind of feedback loop between producers, critics, and audiences: "Genres begin as reading positions established by studio personnel acting as critics, and expressed through film-making conceived of as an act of applied criticism" (Film/Genre, 1999; 44). For this move to be confirmed, however, "broad industry acceptance" is required (46). Genres can also be reevaluated and redefined by academic critics and not only journalists, as with the "woman's film" or melodrama, brought back into currency and reinterpreted by feminist scholars in the 1970s during second wave feminism. Altman also offers a paradigmatic sketch of how genre definitions work, namely through a process of identifying corresponding films, compiling a canon of those films, and analyzing the genre's characteristics. Such a process often involves reassigning a new place for films previously assigned to other genres, or redrawing prior generic boundaries (e.g., between science fiction and horror, or action and adventure). Even art film, once seen as the opposite of genre cinema, has been treated as a genre. Since film scholars first turned toward questions of genre in the later 1960s, a considerable body of work on the topic has been produced, along with continued work on literary genres. The essay film as a distinct genre has only emerged as a scholarly topic in the last decade or so, put forth by Laura Rascaroli (The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, 2009), Tim Corrigan (The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, 2011), and David Montero (Thinking Images: The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema, 2012). The appearance of three publications on the subject in little over a year—two edited volumes, Papazian's and Eades's The Essay Film and Alter's and Corrigan's Essays on the Essay Film, and Alter's monograph The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction—suggests that its time may have come. Despite their overlap in topic, the three volumes are all distinct in their organization: The Essay Film is made up of new work, whereas Essays on the Essay Film begins with a compilation of foundational texts on the subject, ranging from Lukács, Musil, Bense, and Adorno to Bazin; another section reprints work by more recent scholars, and the final part is composed of work by filmmakers themselves. Finally, Nora Alter's [End Page 667] The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction offers a complete history of the genre from its origins to the present. All volumes utilize to one degree or another the generifying strategies listed by Altman, yet reference to genre theory is surprisingly infrequent. Raymond Bellour mentions the genre theories of Genette and Schaefer in his contribution to Essays on the Essay Film (235–236), and Alter herself briefly cites Alastair Fowler's theory of literary genres (17), but nowhere in any of these books is there any sustained engagement with genre theory—something one might reasonably have expected, given how rich the discussion of genre formation has been in film studies. Instead, many of the authors seem to presume the existence of the essay film genre, and assume the reader does, too. However, this assumption is not at all self-evident. One cannot define the essay film in most of Altman's terms, whether semantic or syntactic: "common topics, shared plots, key scenes, character types, familiar objects, or recognizable shots and sounds" or "plot structure, character...

Andrew Sarris has long been one of America's most celebrated writers on film, author of the seminal work The American Cinema, and for decades a highly regarded critic, first for The Village Voice and more recently for The New York Observer. Now comes Sarris's definitive statement on film, in a masterwork that has taken 25 years to complete. Here is a sweeping--and highly personal--history of American film, from the birth of the talkies (beginning with The Jazz Singer and Al Jolson's memorable line "You ain't heard nothin' yet") to the decline of the studio system. By far the largest section of the book celebrates the work of the great American film directors, with giants such as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and Howard Hawks examined film by film. Sarris also offers glowing portraits of major stars, from Garbo and Bogart to Ingrid Bergman, Margaret Sullavan, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, and Carole Lombard. There is a tour of the studios--Metro, Paramount, RKO, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Universal--revealing how each left its own particular stamp on film. And in perhaps the most interesting and original section, we are treated to an informative look at film genres--the musical, the screwball comedy, the horror picture, the gangster film, and the western. A lifetime of watching and thinking about cinema has gone into this book. It is the history that film buffs have been waiting for.

Since the birth of cinema, film has been lauded as a visual rather than a verbal medium; this sentiment was epitomized by John Ford's assertion in 1964 that, 'When a motion picture is at its best, it is long on action and short on dialogue'. Little serious work has been done on the subject of film dialogue, yet what characters say and how they say it has been crucial to our experience and understanding of every film since the coming of sound. Through informative discussions of dozens of classic and contemporary films - from Bringing Up Baby to Terms of Endearment, from Stagecoach to Reservoir Dogs - this lively book provides the first full-length study of the use of dialogue in American film. Sarah Kozloff shows why dialogue has been neglected in the analysis of narrative film and uncovers the essential contributions dialogue makes to a film's development and impact. She uses narrative theory and drama theory to analyze the functions that dialogue typically serves in a film. The second part of the book is a comprehensive discussion of the role and nature of dialogue in four film genres: westerns, screwball comedies, gangster films, and melodramas. Focusing on topics such as class and ethnic dialects, censorship, and the effect of dramatic irony, Kozloff provides an illuminating new perspective on film genres.

In the field of film and television studies there are numerous ways one can obtain a PhD. An alternative to the traditional PhD consisting of an 80–100,000 word thesis is the PhD by Publications. From the unearned honorary doctorate in film and television purchased on the Internet, to honorary doctorates bestowed according to film and television celebrity, to PhDs by Publications given to candidates who package together a number of films produced before enrolment to PhDs by Publications in which the submitted papers must be generated during candidacy, the range in requirements for this type of degree is huge. This paper argues for recognition of their varying status.

This book explores contemporary existential science fiction media, including film, television, and video games, and their influence on society’s conceptions of memory, identity, and humanity. Most poignantly, Ryan Lizardi argues, are the ways in which a recent cluster of science fiction media, including Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), Legion (2017-2019), Westworld (2016-present), SOMA (2015), and Death Stranding (2019), among others, present a vision of the future that is inextricably tied to an exploration of humanity that is more contemplative and comparative than traditional science fiction. The combination of the existential nature of this current trend in science fiction with the genre’s ability to manifest these abstract concepts in a generic environment that is historically focused on new frontiers and ideas creates a powerful set of media texts that ask audiences to contemplate what it means to exist, think, and connect as human beings. Scholars of media studies, film studies, television studies, genre studies, and philosophy will find this book particularly useful.

Rethinking Genre Theory Film Genre: and Beyond, by Barry Langford, Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Barry Langford correctly contends that while has become an increasingly contested concept in scholarship, the film continues to dominate much of Hollywood's annual output. To add to his point, at the time of this review, the top-grossing films in the United States include two horror films, a sports film, an action/adventure film, a historical drama, two teen films- one a musical and another a college comedy-and, finally, an animated children's film. While genre theory has traditionally focused on the formation of such Classical categories as the Western, the gangster, the romantic comedy, the horror, and the combat film, the need for a redefined understanding of genre-one which accounts for the post-Classical emergence of the notoriously difficult to define science-fiction and blockbuster action that make up the bulk of multiplex fare every summer- is more necessary than ever. Langford's Film Genre successfully addresses this growing need by working through the question of how the academic and industrial concept of genre emerges, and convincingly promoting an evolutionary model that focuses on genre formation as a process rather than as constant and internally consistent. Instead of decrying the post-Classical impulse toward genre blending and bending as a threat to traditional notions of genre theory, Langford effectively demonstrates that these impulses have been a key feature of genre since the beginning of narrative film. Langford carefully balances his critique of the constantly evolving generic categories between two audiences. On one hand, he pitches his discussion toward students who might be coming to an understanding of genre for the first time, and on the other, he successfully navigates the various and sometimes competing assertions of genre scholars. More specifically, Film Genre extends and revises the expert's sense of genre by pointing to the prescient need to reformulate rigid conceptions of genre films as being only systematic, routinized, and internally consistent productions intended for mass audiences. Langford divides his book into three major sections. First, he traces the emergence of four Classical genres-the Western, the musical, the war/combat film, and the gangster film-and provides significant examples of how scholarship and the industry have shaped the ways in which audiences have come to understand the key signifiers of each. The second section focuses on what he refers to as transition genres of the horror and science-fiction film, clarifying how each contributes to the destabilization of the categories described in the first section. Finally, the third section explores contemporary post-Classical genres like noir, the action blockbuster, and other complex forms like documentary, the Holocaust film, and pornography in order to demonstrate how the mutability of generic form has been a constant and consistent feature of narrative film. Each chapter, moreover, includes a discussion that goes beyond Hollywood to explore how other national cinemas have treated the specific genres under consideration. Lastly, each chapter provides a case-study of a specific analyzed within the matrix of scholarly approaches employed by the author throughout the book, which makes Film Genre especially useful for students. Langford's approach to Film Genre allows him to successfully achieve the important goals of extending the pioneering work of genre theorists like Thomas Schatz, Rick Altman, and Steve Neale, and providing an accessible explanation of Hollywood's historical relationship with the genre film. Langford's flexible definition of genre depends heavily on reinvestigating the significance of melodrama to narrative film. Identifying what he refers to as the melodramatic modalities of genres, Langford's theory helps to clarify why genre films often fail to fully satisfy the rules of their form. …

The Godfather Trilogy forms an important body of work in American cinema, not only because the films, particularly Part I (1972) and Part II (1974), have received acclaim from journalists, critics, and audiences but also because they have received so much attention from academics. The emphasis in the study and appreciation of the trilogy has, however, been on Parts I and II, partly because of their complexity and longevity but also because of how they helped redefine the gangster genre in portraying the Mafia on film, and because of the films’ contributions to the development of New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (all of which have formed important perspectives in academic approaches to the trilogy). Part III (1990) has been felt by critics either to be a disappointment or a coda to the prior incarnations of the series, although it has also attracted academic interest for these very reasons. It is, however, Parts I and II that have served as the main focus of critical attention and not only as gangster films—even if the study of genre has had further influence because their generic revisions introduced the Mafia film. This innovation has produced a range of academic responses that locate the films via reference to histories of organized crime and author Mario Puzo’s representation of the Mafia crime family in the novel on which Parts I and II are based as well as accounts that extend discussion to consider their influence on related representations of the criminal underworld, their impact on popular conceptions of the Mafia, and their representation of Italian-American ethnicity and related areas such as the family and gender. The family has also formed another nexus of connections in criticism because it is so often treated in relation to American culture, and this has also generated a significant body of work on the political and ideological consideration of capitalism in the films. Finally, because Francis Ford Coppola was an important influence in New Hollywood Cinema, there have also been significant considerations of all three films by reference to auteur theory and to Coppola’s balancing of artistic and commercial imperatives.

The study of gangster films extends back to the 1970s when the development of film studies as an academic discipline generated new perspectives to provide a scholarly framework for the analysis of film. Alongside the study of film theory, national cinemas, and film histories, genre theory and the parallel creation of a taxonomy of genres and the study of specific genres were among these new approaches to film. During the 1970s the iconography, narrative structures, and ideological or cultural parameters of the gangster film were established as part of this critical methodology, very often alongside or in contrast to the western, because of shared concerns with individuality, masculinity, and social concerns. From the earliest articles and books on the gangster film, the genre has predominantly been considered in relation to its historical, ideological, and sociocultural contexts, and such perspectives have continued to inform the study of the genre in recent accounts of masculinity and the gangster and in new studies of the Mafia film. The gangster film has, in particular, been considered in terms of realism, often in contrast to the “mythic” style of the western, but most critics who adopt such a view are more concerned with its symbolic or imaginary representation or refraction of social and political relations than with examining verisimilitude in the mapping of criminal activities. The gangster film has, as a consequence, been considered to be a subversive form of filmmaking, not only in America, but also in European and Asian versions of the genre, even if notable critics such as Richard Maltby and Paul Kerr question such a viewpoint by arguing that institutional and production concerns often contain or deflate the political and ideological messages of specific films. The presumption of the genre’s subversive politics is often based on its critique of American society, and much criticism of the gangster film has focused on Hollywood films at the expense of other traditions. However, in recent years this balance has been redressed with the development of critical strands examining Asian and European cinema, not only because of the awareness of the global reach of criminal organizations and the development of representations of crime in cinematic traditions outside of the United States, but also because of recent critical works that have been produced on Asian, British, and French crime film traditions as well as on the developing crime forms in Latin American and post-Soviet Russian cinemas.