The Continuity of Forms: Myth and Genre in Warner Brothers' The Charge of the Light Brigade

Abstract

THE CONCEPTS OF MYTH AND GENRE refer us to the continuities we perceive in the development of the various arts, professions, disciplines, and institutions that give culture its form. Myth has to do with the continuity of meanings: the transmission from generation to generation of a characteristic ideology or system of beliefs and values, embodied in a continuously evolving set of narrative fictions and a language of symbols. Genre has to do with the continuity of forms: the persistence and development, from generation to generation, of particular ways of telling or transmitting stories, making symbols, structuring systems of representation. The concept of myth directs our attention toward the ways in which our material and social history shapes our cultural productions. It highlights those aspects of our fictions and ceremonies that represent and preserve bits of history, transforming them into fictive resolutions of real ideological dilemmas. The concept of genre directs our attention toward the internal processes that shape the formal structures of our cultural productions, suggesting that such forms have a life and logic of their own, which is given direction by artists and producers. Since each is a historical phenomenon, myths and genres also rise and fall in cultural favor: new myths or variants succeed older ones, as the material and ideological basis of the culture changes; and genre succeeds genre, form succeeds form, medium succeeds medium as the forms of social life and communication are steadily transformed.' Most students of cinematic form, whether formalist or mythographic, have recognized that the classic Hollywood cinema produced in America has been characterized as much by its adherence to generic story forms as by typical styles of cinematography, editing, and direction; the worldwide influence of Hollywood movies has given these American genre properties a nearly universal currency. David Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film treats genre as one of the basic tropes of film narration, a practice with well-understood rules that has predictable effects on narrative whenever it is deployed. Bordwell sees genre effects as the encoding of what may be a rather complex framework of understandings in a set of simple visual signs. By playing with or against these-understandings the filmmaker can create and manipulate climates of expectation, build or explode sus-