Film Genre Research Articles

La visée pathémique dans le genre de la critique de cinéma comme stratégie persuasive

The pathotic dimension in the film review genre as a persuasive strategy The paper investigates the relatively little-examined journalistic film review genre from discursive, pragmatic and rhetorical perspectives. To illustrate the presented framework for genre analysis, we have selected 32 French and francophone journalistic reviews of two different film genres: a comedy (from 2017) and a drama (from 2019). The persuasive strategies of the pathotic dimension in the film review we focus on leverage two of the Aristotelian modes of persuasion (ethos and pathos) in order to instill particular views and concepts. Our study centres around those persuasive strategies that draw on the discursive construction of the reviewer’s ethos and pathos in the film review based on the concept of emotive argumentation.

Film Genres after #MeToo: Promising Young Woman as a Rape-Revenge Film and a Rom-Com

Abstract From 2017 on, the #MeToo movement has resulted in a set of new perspectives and narratives in cinema; narratives, which, so far, have only ever been presented from and for the point of view of the male gaze. A special case in this process is Emerald Fennel’s 2020 directorial debut, Promising Young Woman. This essay argues that the film not only capitalizes on rape-revenge genre clichés, but it also relies on the tropes of romantic comedy traditions to give a sharp critique of the cultural climate that tolerates, denies, and normalizes rape. The subversion of the male gaze, the centrality of morality in revenge, and the avoidance of the spectacle of female suffering align Promising Young Woman with the rape-revenge genre. At the same time, the film’s take on the Hollywood myth of the likeable and harmless “good guy” highlights the role of classical romantic comedy conventions in perpetuating rape culture. (ZSOR)

"It Means Possibility"

Following the cataclysmic AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, a defiant embrace of the word "queer" and new technology sparked an influx of films by independent filmmakers that were later termed "New Queer Cinema." As a product of its time, New Queer Cinema interrogates the heteronormativity it conflicts with and thus breeds a reimagining of what queer film can look like. The conflict between queer identity and its heteronormative surroundings drives distance between queer individuals and their communities, as well as larger social structures. This distance leads to a sense of isolation. This article explores themes of isolation within select New Queer Cinema films and offers a potential reference point from which we can understand queer life and cultural production in the midst of yet another global illness—COVID-19. Gus Van Sant’s 'My Own Private Idaho' (1991) highlights isolation from heteronormative social structures, particularly the nuclear family unit. Cheryl Dunye’s 'The Watermelon Woman' (1996) focuses on a curation of queer kinship as a survival tactic in the face of this isolation. Gregg Araki’s 'Totally Fucked Up' (1993) and Thomas Bezucha’s 'Big Eden' (2000) both explore themes of self-imposed isolation. 'Totally Fucked Up' provides an essential New Queer Cinema perspective of this phenomenon; meanwhile, 'Big Eden' challenges assumptions that queer individuals are destined to be isolated by imagining a future in which this is not the case. Themes of isolation are essential to the New Queer Cinema genre as a product of its circumstances. Yet, it also provides a basis from which the possibilities of future queer cinema and culture can be imagined. Understanding this relationship is critical as we begin to understand the effects of structural and social isolation on the queer community as exacerbated by COVID-19.

Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Intimate Public of Asian American Cinema

The multiple Academy Award winning sci-fi absurdist multiverse film Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniels, 2021) uses transpacific film genre conventions to represent the possible life variations of its Asian American immigrant family protagonists. An exception to the seeming incommensurability of commercial feature filmmaking and the anti-capitalist and anti-racist traditions of Asian American cinema, the film highlights how the conventions of transpacific genre films condition the intimate public of Asian American audiences. To be legible as an Asian American, the film shows, is to be attuned to the conventions of its dominant, often hegemonic and repressive, representations. By illustrating how genre conventions condition the sense of belonging amongst its Asian American protagonists, the film offers new ways of imagining and relating with Asian America Cinema.

Alexandre Volkoff’s Casanova (1927): Text, myth, film

Alexander Volkoff’s acclaimed silent masterpiece Casanova (1927) is an excellent example of the many links between Italian and Russian cultures: this international super-production, led by a group of Russian émigrés, is based on the memoirs of a famous Venetian, and shot largely in Venice. While the film’s production history is relatively well studied, little has been written on the relationship between the film and the text on which it is based. This article aims to fill in this gap. It demonstrates that Volkoff’s Casanova, often considered to be merely a spectacular genre film, actually offers a subtle reading of Giacomo Casanova’s autobiography. Volkoff’s Casanova both illustrates myths and stereotyped images linked to the famous adventurer and subtly questions them. It also highlights the contradictory nature of the character, reproducing many of the oppositions which underlie the original text of the memoirs.

From Ruptures to Continuities: Czechoslovak Cultural Heritage in Non-Fiction Cinema 1948-1956

The article examines the post-war trajectory of the Czechoslovak politics of cultural heritage, its public presentation and circulation through the medium of non-fiction film. Specifically, it investigates the genres of ethnographic, geographic, and art films released after the political transformation in 1948 that brought the country under the direct influence of the Soviet Union. It describes the professional infrastructure and networks within which the fields of cultural heritage preservation and non-fiction cinema were operating and analyses their interactions in the realm of film production. Through the analysis of the film production background, audio-visual content itself, and related period visual ­culture, it finds a set of different narrative strategies used for public presentation of cultural heritage. These narratives are then placed in the context of the official cultural ideology. It exposes continuities that can be traced between the communist cultural politics introduced after the communist takeover in 1948 and the pre-WWII Czechoslovak cultural politics. The analysis shows the diversity within the film production whose primary goal was to celebrate and represent the national cultural heritage in and outside the country, and therefore understands these films as important tools of national and international cultural politics.

Analysis on Horror Genre Films - Taking Us as an Example

Horror movies are usually regarded as empty calories for audiences to watch. The film industry did not pay much attention to horror genre movies. But since Get Out (2017) and Hereditary (2018) was released, horror films begin a new era. They have respect from the studios and their audiences and contain many cultural things and become more thought provoking. The paper, through a method of literature analysis, explores some deep meanings behind nowadays horror movies and how they achieve these by using cinematography, color elements and metaphors, especially in Us (2019), which is directed by Jordan Peele. In the film Us, us vs. them mentality is presented. Duality is also a significant idea in the film. Jordan Peele employs visual design like red clothes and gold scissors and uses low key lighting, diverse colors and a lot of props. The paper also emphasizes the political issues that are revealed in the film. The paper finds that horror movies can help people relax themselves and at the same time, reveal humanities, realistic problems and social situations.

A woman should be scared: maternal ambivalence in Under the Shadow

ABSTRACT Mothers in horror films have been theorized as monsters through concepts such as the monstrous-feminine (Creed, 1993) and the monstrous-maternal. In this paper, I examine how this figuration of the maternal is taken up in the British-Iranian horror film Under the Shadow (dir. Babak Anvari, 2016). The film hybridizes the ‘maternal horror film’ with the genre of the Iran-Iraq war film, which also bears a complex relation to the figure of the mother. Drawing on the concept of maternal ambivalence, I argue that Under the Shadow posits in the mother protagonist and the feminine jinn (spirit) that haunts her a tension that unsettles the longstanding dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers in horror films. The film’s ambivalent position on mothers is expressive of a general cultural ambivalence toward mothers in post-revolutionary Iranian cultural politics.

The Idea of Genre in the Algorithmic Cinema

This article questions the way that movie recommendation systems designed to microtarget spectators are thought to operationalize microgenres, highly specific groupings that appeal to narrow niches. If industry leader Netflix’s “altgenres” can track fluid preferences and reconceive audience groupings continuously to effectuate “deep personalization,” such trends towards individualization would undermine canonical genres and their study. But in clarifying the differences and similarities between microgenres, altgenres, subgenres, and cycles, this article situates digital microgenres beside long-standing Hollywood practices, discovers traditional genres enduring at the heart of industry applications of data science, and argues for analytics as a potential boon for film genre studies.

Perfilman Nasional Tahun 1970-an Hingga 1980-an

This research aims to look at the development of Indonesian film from the 1970s - 1980s based on the increase in film genres and the increase in film production in Indonesia, so that the technology that began to become sophisticated in Indonesian filmmaking was a form of the glorious decade of film. The results of this study are the number of films produced during the years 1970-1980 as many as 618 titles. With a classification of 370 drama genres, 72 action genres, 23 horrors, 26 fantasy, and 127 comedy titles. The 1970-1980s also gave birth to phenomenal artists and films such as Remadja Bride (1971), Sidoel anak Betawi (1973), First Love (1973), My Love on the Blue Campus (1976), Hurricane Pasti Berlalu (1977), Sexy Waitress Inem (1977), and Gita Cinta dari SMA (1979) also gave birth to the nickname Sex Bomb for female artists who dared to appear open to the adult scene in the film, Suzana, Yati Oktavia, is an artist who gets the nickname Sex Bomb.

A Comparative Analysis of “Rural Science Fiction”, a New Chinese Film Genre

Abstract “Rural Science Fiction” (RSF) is a new category of science fiction comedy film, which has recently emerged in China. In RSF, modern farmers are presented as the protagonist, and alien visitors as the other. In the context of changing rural environments, two opposing views are expressed, which leads to a unique comedy: on the one hand, the vision of longing inspired by the trends of commercialization, industrialization, and urbanization; and on the other hand, the worthlessness of these trends. In RSF, thoughts concerning the prospect of technology, the future of human beings, and the interstellar interactions are mainly carried out from the perspective of country folks, whose wisdom is shown through indigenous methods that are adapted to local conditions. As a result, the “low-tech” earthmen typically defeat the “high-tech” aliens.

The Brief Film Analysis of Carry on Dancing/Gai Juk Tiu Mou

This brief film analysis will look for a comedy Carry on Dancing/Gai Juk Tiu Mou, co-directed by Leung Po-chi and Kam Kwok-leung in 1988. It will provide a closely content analysis from aesthetic perspective on how the film language participates in the shape of personae for different characters. By this analysis, I aim to provide a typical examplar on the coalesce between personae shape in textual sense and its artistic visual representation by film language inr Hong Kong genre films.

Book Review: Transformation of Contemporary Film Genre: The Aesthetics of Chinese Mainland Mainstream Cinema

Book Review: Transformation of Contemporary Film Genre: The Aesthetics of Chinese Mainland Mainstream Cinema

Polish Reception of Roman Polanski’s Films. Outline of the Main Tendencies in Film Criticism and Film Studies

The article is devoted to the reception of Roman Polanski’s cinema in Poland. The author examines both critical-film articles (opinions formulated in reviews after the first viewing of a movie) and academic articles and monographs. Instead of criticizing the existing readings of the director’s works, the author considers which frames they were inscribed into by the reviewers and how this placement influenced the interpretations and evaluations of the films. As he argues, Polanski’s artistic propositions did not quite fit the vision of great cinema shared by Polish journalists at a given moment. The author shows that the reception of the artist’s work is a testimony to the changes in Polish critics’ attitude towards genre cinema and to the gradual mending of the division between high and low art. When commenting on the director’s works, Polish critics and scholars have had to struggle with a socialist realist view of art, an aversion to popular culture, and finally, postmodern prejudices against the “classic” form of cinema. The Polish researchers have not always overcome the limitations of dominant discourses, but it seems that Polanski’s cinema shaped and changed these discourses to some extent.

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

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

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.

Breathing Back the History of German Modern Dance through the Horror Film Genre in Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018)

Director Luca Guadagnino's film Suspiria (2018) depicts the dancer Susie Bannion joining a dance academy secretly run by a coven of witches in Berlin during the German Autumn of 1977. This article analyzes how Mary Wigman's Hexentanz II, contemporary dance, and horror film practices inform Susie's neo-expressionist movement form, which is also steeped in the discourse surrounding the RAF (Red Army Faction), the West German far-left militant organization, and fascism. I argue that “historical breathing”—breaths and sighs—takes on a sensorial mode by surveying the past and current situation of the dance school. By inhaling, Susie embodies the dance Volk (1948) and can feel its vexed choreographic history—its occult origins and Ausdruckstanz practices. Furthermore, her dance futilely attempts to comes to terms with the Nazi past but inevitably replicates the violence of the RAF.

Adaptations versus original film premieres trends in broadband society: a comparative analysis

In the era of the Broadband Society, cloud journalism, and streaming, the film industry is trying to modify traditional distribution channels. The adaptation of literary classics was one of the most widespread practices to obtain well-known, quality material for new productions. The objective of this research is to understand empirically what differences are involved in industry’s major production and distribution companies’ choice between adapting preexisting material or creating an entirely new film, as well as the benefits of adaptations. The methodology is comparative and quantitative, consisting of collecting data on films from the five major distributors (Universal, Warner Bros, Disney, Sony, and Paramount) from 2010 to 2019 and analyzing variables to detect market trends related to adaptations during that decade. We observed a higher percentage of adaptations as well as correlations between adaptations and film genre, distributor and genre, adaptations and awards, awards and genre, and genre and the film’s evaluation, as well as between distributor and average budget, adaptations and budget, adaptation and opening weekend box office takings, genre and profit, adaptations and worldwide box office revenues, ratings and worldwide box office takings, and awards and worldwide box office takings; however, this was not observed between adaptation and profit and the breakeven point. It is concluded that, despite the fact that the trend of using this practice has not increased in recent years, it provides a great advantage compared with debuting new intellectual property.

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

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

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes

Reviewed by: Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes Micah Mckay Fornoff, Carolyn and Gisela Heffes, eds. Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. State U of New York Press, 2021. xiii + 361 pp. ISBN 978-1-4384-8404-4. What can the consummately human medium of film—movies are, of course, made by and for human beings—tell us about the needs, perspectives, and realities of nonhuman beings? And what can film do to interrogate its own seemingly inherent anthropocentrism? These are two of the fundamental questions addressed in Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes's edited volume Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, the first book to bring to bear the preoccupations of ecocriticism, new materialism, and posthumanism on the study of Latin American film and an essential contribution to the burgeoning field of environmentally-minded Latin American cultural studies. To name just one other recent example, Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant's edited volume Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (2020) shares with Pushing Past the Human the desire to show how Latin American cultural texts can help us see beyond the notion of the human in order to better understand our place in the larger web of life. But, as Fornoff and Heffes put it in the introduction to their volume, this emerging critical enterprise highlights the fact that the epistemological move "beyond the human" does not mean leaving the human or human concerns behind; rather, it "warn[s] against losing sight of the human altogether" and "dramatiz[es] the inextricability of planetary care and social justice" (12). The productive tension between human and nonhuman concerns, social justice and planetary care, is one of the elements that gives Pushing Past the Human a sense of coherence and a sense of urgency in the context of ongoing and ever-accelerating environmental crises that are exacting heavy ecological and social tolls. Pushing Past the Human gathers together fifteen essays (including the introduction) written by scholars whose institutional homes are largely found in universities in the Unites States and Europe. Fornoff and Heffes's introduction makes a clear and concise argument for cinema's unique ability to allow viewers to consider the world beyond anthropocentric perspectives through technological innovations and filmmaking techniques that disrupt human timescales and represent ecological relationships that are difficult for the human sensorium to fully grasp. What is more, Fornoff and Heffes make a compelling case for the ability of Latin American cinema in particular to intervene in the theoretical and political debates of ecocriticism and posthumanism due to the region's history of colonialism, its experience of extractive capitalism, and the various modes of decolonial, and posthumanist thought that those experiences have given rise to (they engage, for instance, with Macarena Gómez-Barris's notion of "submerged perspectives" and Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's distillation of Indigenous people's experiences of the end of the world). In addition to providing a solid theoretical grounding for the volume, the introduction offers useful information about the development of ecocinema in Latin America and the wide array of film festivals that showcase it. The volume's other fourteen essays are divided into three thematic sections that address questions of cinematic genre, the staging of human/nonhuman difference, and [End Page 162] indigeneity. The first of these, "Genre Beyond the Human," features essays on the road movie, disaster films, documentary, and slow cinema. By paying close attention to the conventions of each of these genres (and the ways the films each author studies push against those conventions), these chapters offer valuable insights on, for example, the damages wrought by extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon (Patrícia Vieira) and the way cinematic depictions of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake are paradigmatic examples of Anthropocene cultural texts because they stage the interaction between deep time and human history in a way that complicates clear distinctions between "natural" and "human-made" catastrophes (Fornoff). The five chapters in "Encountering Difference," the volume's second section, engage with portrayals of animals raised for slaughter, the vibrant materiality of objects in film animation, lush rural landscapes...