American Film Genre Research Articles

The Western as a Genre of Cultural Mobility

The Western is, in many respects, the essential American film genre, “a cornerstone of American identity” (Kitses). Yet, despite its distinctly American character, the genre has exerted a fascination all over the world. This contribution examines the Western as a site of transnational cultural exchange and as an illustration of what Stephen Greenblatt calls cultural mobility. In the work of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961), Western elements are evoked, which provide complex comments on the influence of American culture on Japan in the post-WWII years. While Seven Samurai appears to embrace the promise of class eradication as a result of Westernization, its American remake The Magnificent Seven (1960) shows a particular fascination for the decidedly Japanese aspects of the material, namely the idea of a warrior class dissociated from society. The Italian remake of Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars (1964), shows how the Western can function not only as an external comment on American culture, in its cynical redefinition of the cowboy hero, but also as an amalgam of cultural practices and symbols, reaching from Japanese samurai codes to Christian Catholic redeemer imagery, that through their stylization expose the performativity of culture as such.

Staging the Cinematic: Puccini, Fanciulla, and Early Silent Film

Abstract Giacomo Puccini’s operas have a long history of being hailed as “cinematic.” Such descriptions began to appear during his lifetime and persisted in the years following his death, and more recent scholarship has continued to echo them. Associations between Puccini and film also extend to the cinematic screen: there are numerous filmed versions and adaptations of his operas, and his music has been featured in film soundtracks since the 1930s. Nevertheless, even though Puccini’s career roughly coincided with the first three decades of film history, surprisingly little is known about his attitude toward film or how it may have influenced his oeuvre. Taking La fanciulla del West as a case study, I investigate the complex historical relationship between early cinema, Puccini, and his operas, focusing particularly on the connections between Fanciulla and three American silent film genres that were popular in the years leading up to the opera’s premiere: early or “Eastern” Westerns, chase films, and lynching or execution films. I begin by investigating the filmic world to which Puccini and his creative team were exposed, tracing the evolution of cinema to 1910. I then turn specifically to the chase scene and attempted lynching in act 3 of Fanciulla, which I analyze in relation to the aforementioned genres, as well as to Belasco’s play The Girl of the Golden West, on which the libretto is based. Finally, I offer new perspectives on what it means—and meant—to understand Puccini’s operas as cinematic. In so doing, I demonstrate that the meaning of the adjective “cinematic” is historically contingent, not determined by immutable characteristics or qualities.

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

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

The History of Trans Representation in American Television and Film Genres, Traci B. Abbott (2022)

Review of: The History of Trans Representation in American Television and Film Genres, Traci B. Abbott (2022) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 293 pp., ISBN 978-3-03097-792-4, h/bk, $119.99 ISBN 978-3-03097-793-1, e-book, $89.00

Riding East—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in Hidalgo (2004)

<i>Riding East</i>—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in <i>Hidalgo</i> (2004)

Shoot to Kill: The Weaponized Gaze of the American Action Film

"Shoot to Kill" is a seven-minute-long audiovisual account of the geopolitical power structures present in the American action film genre. By taking apart 29 action films and editing scenes and stills of these films together I deliver a dissection of how the action films construct a binary of the hero self and the enemy other, as well as exemplify how the conflict between these two opposing forces is discursively and emotionally framed.

How We Talk about the Movies: A Comparison of Australian, British and American Film Genre Terms

ABSTRACT Vocabulary or terminological control has been an issue of critical information practice for Australian information professionals for many years. In the 1970s Australian libraries began to supplement Library of Congress Subject Headings with their own List of Australian Subject Headings, and today there remains the bibliographic need to cover uniquely Australian terms and concepts, including those about Indigenous Australian culture. The library world is not the only domain, however, to have developed vocabularies to describe and make sense of information resources. Comparison of film genre vocabularies is of particular interest because film studies have often assumed a fixed set of categories, regardless of geography, culture or time. Although much of today’s film industry is ‘global’, with a strong Hollywood influence on genre to sell movies, this does not mean that filmmakers, nor film audiences, use a set vocabulary. This paper looks at whether similar geographical biases may be discerned in vocabularies used in the domain of film curation by examining the variation in terminology and the classification of film genres used by film institutes based in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Conning all over the world: Latin American variations of an American film genre

Conning all over the world: Latin American variations of an American film genre

‘Going Home’: mobility and return journeys in French and Spanish road movies

Frequently understood as a typical American film genre, the matrix of the road movie is adapted by film-makers of national cinemas across the world. As a modern audio-visual continuation of the literary tradition of journeys of initiation, this genre is an ideal format for the cinematic depiction of uprooting as well as for the search for individual or trans/national identity in time and space. Dealing with the return journeys of the protagonists through France and Spain towards the Maghreb countries Morocco and Algeria, a comparative analysis of Exiles, by Algiers-born French director Tony Gatlif, and Hassan’s Way, by Spanish film-makers Fran Araújo and Ernesto de Nova, explores the categories of identity and mobility, as those expose the temporal and spatial structures which determine ideological attributions to the aesthetics and the filmic narration of nomadic postcolonial European road movies.

A Real Human Being and a Real Hero: Stylistic excess, dead time and intensified continuity in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive

Abstract This article sets forth that Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) exhibits a ‘complex transformation’ of an American film genre by foregrounding features associated with art cinema and, more specifically, European and auteur film-making. We argue that the film’s appeal derives precisely from an intelligent and cine-literate deployment of the tensions in this dichotomy of European/American film-making. As such, Drive is a film that foregrounds or reveals its own construction in a number of ways, but its appeal lies in the fact that it does not prevent intense emotional engagement on the part of the viewer. It is neither a cold exercise in mere style nor a simple copy of an earlier formula, but rather a film that manages to marry a number of narrative and stylistic features in such a way that the film itself, arguably, is not easy to categorize.

The cultural characteristic of American film (genre Drama) in &lt;Blind Side&gt;

The cultural characteristic of American film (genre Drama) in &lt;Blind Side&gt;

Shooting the Civil War: cinema, history and American national identity

Foreword - Patrick Rael Introduction Chapter 1 National Identity, Ideology and American Film Genres Chapter 2 Civil War Melodramas: The Family and the Home Chapter 3 War-Westerns: Shifting Lines of Conflict Chapter 4 Civil War Combat Films: Masculine American Ancestry Chapter 5 The Birth of a Nation: Race, Family, Gender Chapter 6 An Enduring Southern Ancestry Conclusion To Remember / Forget Index.

Self-fashioning, Freedom, and the Problem of His-story: the return of noir

With a mix of two patently American film genres - film noir and the western - David Cronenberg’s critically acclaimed A History of Violence (2005) sets up a group of oppositions through the story of a man who leaves a life of crime and violence behind to assume a new identity, start a family, and settle down in the quiet town of Millbrook, Indiana. The oppositions between gangster thug, super-killer and good citizen, family-man are paralleled in another opposition particularly typical to the ...

Russian gangster films as popular history: genre, ideology and memory in Pavel Lungin's Tycoon

This essay employs Pavel Lungin's Tycoon (Oligarkh, 2002) to examine the ways that popular film genres are used to represent history and to shape national memory. Tycoon was the first major Russian film to treat the so-called ‘transition to capitalism’ from a historical perspective. In explaining why the director employed the American gangster film genre to depict Russia's recent past, the essay calls attention to his use of the genre's conventions for representing the passing of time and other dimensions of historical experience, as well as his flexible adaptation to Russian circumstances of the critique of Americanism at the genre's ideological core. It also illuminates various dimensions of the collective memory of the 1990s by exploring the socially marked perspectives (intelligentsia, official, bourgeois, popular etc.) presented in the film and the critical response to its interpretation of history in Russian cinema journals and the popular press.

The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre (review)

The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre (review)

The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: ecocriticism in an American film genre

Films located in the American West and the Western as a cinematic genre have endured throughout the history of moviemaking. Today, this tradition of battles between good versus evil, populists versus profiteers, and man versus nature may have been largely assimilated and transformed into action adventures with car chases replacing mounted posses, yet the genre remains popular with audiences. In studies of the Hollywood Western, the importance of landscape itself, the idyllic or treacherous environment portrayed in these films, often receives supporting-role status. Without the land, however, American national mythmaking would not exist.The essays in this volume scrutinize the special place of nature and landscape in films including silent, documentary, and feature length film that are specifically American and Western. The films discussed here go beyond the stereotypical sagebrush setting. Although many of the films closely fit the standard conventions of the Western, others demonstrate the fluidity of the genre. The wildness of the western environment as a central fact of the American mythos encompasses far more than a brief period of national history or a specific geographical location.

The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre ed. by Deborah A. Carmichael

The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre ed. by Deborah A. Carmichael

The Philosophy of film noir

A drifter with no name and no past, driven purely by desire, is convinced by a beautiful woman to murder her husband. A hard-drinking detective down on his luck becomes involved with a gang of criminals in pursuit of a priceless artifact. The stories are at once romantic, pessimistic, filled with anxiety and a sense of alienation, and they define the essence of film noir. Noir emerged as a prominent American film genre in the early 1940s, distinguishable by its use of unusual lighting, sinister plots, mysterious characters, and dark themes. From The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), films from this classic period reflect an atmosphere of corruption and social decay that attracted such accomplished directors as John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles. The Philosophy of Film Noir is the first volume to focus exclusively on the philosophical underpinnings of these iconic films. Drawing on the work of diverse thinkers, from the French existentialist Albert Camus to the Frankurt school theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the volume connects film noir to the philosophical questions of a modern, often nihilistic, world. Opening with an examination of what constitutes noir cinema, the book interprets the philosophical elements consistently present in the films -- themes such as moral ambiguity, reason versus passion, and pessimism. The contributors to the volume also argue that the essence and elements of noir have fundamentally influenced movies outside of the traditional noir period. Neo-noir films such as Pulp Fiction (1994), Fight Club (1999), and Memento (2000) have reintroduced the genre to a contemporary audience. As they assess the concepts present in individual films, the contributors also illuminate and explore the philosophical themes that surface in popular culture. A close examination of one of the most significant artistic movements of the twentieth century, The Philosophy of Film Noir reinvigorates an intellectual discussion at the intersection of popular culture and philosophy.

"Just Some Bum From the Neighborhood": The Resolution of Post-Civil Rights Tension and Heavyweight Public Sphere Discourse in Rocky (1976)

THE endurance of the motion picture Rocky, the 1976 Oscar winner for Best Picture, has recently been reaffirmed in 21st century popular culture. Its 25th anniversary rerelease in 2001 and the accompanying publicity in high profile entertainment magazines like Entertainment Weekly suggests that, despite the mockery garnered by the production of increasingly formulaic sequels throughout the 1980s, the character of Rocky Balboa continues to be a powerful icon with a semiotic currency that is still recognized by those born in the 1980s. The primary question motivating my inquiry into the 1970s blockbuster boxing film asks why it became and has continued to be a stable commodity to be exchanged throughout the American cultural meaning market over the past twenty-five years. The boxing film has recently garnered a modest amount of scholarly attention from critics interested in theorizing it as a genre with a distinct set of characters, values, and symbols, as well as identifiable narrative contours. Though I do not seek to add to this particular critical enterprise, the work of Aaron Baker, Dan Streibel, Tony Williams, and Leger Grindon has been crucial in linking the ideology of the boxing film to a set of material and political circumstances related to increasing industrialization of the twentieth century. Such work has helped constitute the critical lens that I deploy to better understand the American mainstream's affection for the character of Rocky and, more importantly, the extent to which the film provides an appealing resolution of national tension during a time of considerable anxiety regarding, and fragmentation of, traditional values. In this detailed analysis of a single film, I am less interested in placing Rocky within a set of conventions and more interested in its finessing of race and gender alliances at a time when such questions were vexed, to say the least. Foremost here, then, is my interest in the significance of the film's overwhelming and unexpected success and what this signifies in terms of how American audiences deal with social change through the invocation of certain narratives given a specific context. Rocky's narrative is one that invokes a recognizably American film genre while retooling the ideological valences of that genre to respond to historical changes confronting the country during the late 1970s. The film's characters and its outcome provide a neoconservative resolution to the challenging social, economic, political, and military shifts that had taken place since the end of World War II. A culture of burgeoning consumerism, the unsuccessful campaign in Vietnam, and the loss of faith in the democratic experiment implicit in Watergate all elicit a response within the film's world. However, the social advances made by African Americans and women in the quarter decade after the war receive the most intense and shrewdly plotted resolution in the ideological implications of the film's narrative. The popular appeal of such a resolution is bolstered, I argue, both by a desire to reaffirm a socio-political status quo and by the film's reliance on and invocation of specific values and beliefs that have long been pivotal to the invention and articulation of an American character. It is thus that Rocky recasts a national ethos that responds nominally to the social and political changes of recent decades. More specifically, the film reaffirms traditional gender boundaries and values while simultaneously expanding the parameters of national citizenship to include African American men. Rocky offers masculine status and national citizenship to a previously rejected group in exchange for their allegiance in a quest for the remasculinization of white men (and, by extension, the nation) as well as offering a bond of solidarity in rolling back the advances made by feminism. In particular, this rolling back focused on reinforcing the primacy of reproduction as women's social (and civic) duty. Rocky tells the story of a failed boxer who is given the chance to fight the world heavyweight champ, Apollo Creed, in a novelty match that is designed to fulfill promotional contracts that threaten to fall through when Creed's original opponent breaks a hand six weeks before the event. …

Merging Genres in the 1940s: The Musical and the Dramatic Feature Film

of the conference paper version of this article. 3. The parts for Knock on Wood show the song's design as a four-bar intro, a sixteen-bar A section marked with repeats (for unhappy), eight instrumental bars, and another iteration of the A section (for happy). The eight instrumental bars were dropped in the film. (The parts are among the musical materials for Casablanca, Warner Brothers Collection, University of Southern California.) 4. Martin Marks, Music, Drama, Warner Brothers: The Cases of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 173. 5. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 22. 6. Richard Dyer links the late arrival of this essential story element (nearly two-thirds of the way through the film) to a class of musical in which utopia is implicit in the world of the narrative as well as in the world of the [musical] numbers. Such films are overwhelmingly nostalgic-Far from pointing forwards, they point back, to a golden age-a reversal of utopianism. Other titles listed by Dyer include My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Hello Dolly! (Richard Dyer, Entertainment and Utopia, in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan [London: Routledge, 2002], 28). 7. This information is drawn from the music files for the film (MGM Collection, University of Southern California). 8. Nick Browne, Preface, in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xi. 9. Frans de Bruyn, Genre Criticism, in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 84. 10. Rick Altman, Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process, in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Browne, 38, 6. 131 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.125 on Sun, 17 Jul 2016 05:14:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms