Information from the book Film/Genre by Rick Altman
Genre is a useful category, because it bridges multiple concerns
Comic books are full of contraptions capable of performing multiple tasks. Genre is usually seen as just such a device. Genre endures within film theory because of its ability to perform multiple operations simultaneously. According to critics, genres provide the formulas that drive production; genres constitute the structures that define individual texts; programming decisions are based primarily on generic criteria; the interpretation of generic films depends directly on the audience's generic expectations. It would appear that genre is not your average descriptive term, but a complex concept with multiple meanings which we might identify as follows:
1. genre as blueprint, as a formula that precedes, programmes and patterns industry production.
2. genre as structure, as the formal framework on which individual films are founded.
3. genre as label, as the name of a category central to the decisions and communications of distributers and exhibitors.
4. genre as contract, as the viewing position required by each genre film of its audience.
(P14)
Genres have clear, stable identities and borders
The theoretical clarity of film genre criticism is quite obviously challenged at every turn by the historical dimensions of film production and reception. Where film genre theory assumes coincidence between industrial and audience perceptions, history furnishes example after example of disparity. Linnaeus' scientific binomial nomenclature model assumes pure specimens, genre history offers crossbreeds and mutants. Yet film genre studies have too great a stake in generic purity to pay overmuch attention to history. Though the history of cinema might well have turned the study of film genre towards romantic notions of generic mixing, the theoretical programmes adopted by genre critics depend instead on careful adherence to classical standards, not only in terms of genre separation, but also in terms of rule-based creation. The reasons for this because genre is conceived as a conduit down which are poured textual structures linking production, exhibition and reception. In order to furnish appropriate material, critics have regularly performed two complementary operation. First, they have systematically disregarded films that fail to exhibit clear generic qualifications. Second, each major genre has been defined in terms of a nucleus of films obviously satisfying the theory's fourfold assumptions:
1. each film was produced according to a recognisably generic blueprint.
2. each film displays the basic structures commonly identified with the genre.
3. during its exhibition each film is regularly identified by a generic label.
4. audiences systematically recognise each film as belonging to the genre in question and interpret it accordingly.
(P16-17)
Individual films belong wholly and permanently to a single genre
Just as genres must have clear borders in order to facilitate the kind of generic criticism, so the individual films of any particular generic canon must clearly serve as examples of that genre. While a film may be seen as combining several lighting or camera styles, as juxtaposing radically different sound models, or as mixing location, studio and process images, it is usually treated as either a Western or a film noir, either a musical or a melodrama, either a historical adventure film or a biblical epic. When Hollywood converted to sound, films were designated by percentages, as 20% talkie or 50% talkie, or even all-talkie. With genres, no such gradations are commonly deemed possible. Because of the uses to which the notion of genre is put, only an all-or-nothing approach to corpus building has appeared acceptable. If spectators are to experience films in terms of their genre, films must leave no doubt as to their generic identity; instant recognisability must be assumed. Statements about generic spectatorship typically take this for granted. A text conflating two genres, say romantic comedy and documentary reporting or exploitation violence, might well put spectators in a potentially uncontainable quandary. Where one genre seems to assure the young lovers' safety, the other offers only an atrocious death. This too is a type of reading that could be made possible by 'the existence of genres', but it is emphatically not the one regularly chosen by recent critics. For this reason, terms used to describe relationships between individual films and genre typically follow the type/token model. That is, each film is imaged as an example of the overall genre, replicating the generic prototype in all basic characteristics.
(Page 18)
Genres undergo predictable development
By defining genres in a transhistorical fashion, recent critics facilitate the identification and description of genres, while stressing the extent to which genres regularly repeat similar strategies. Yet genres do exist in history. Unlike the exact replicas produced by other consumer industries (clothing, appliances, cars) genre films must not only be similar in order to succeed, they must also be different. As Robert Warshow has pointed out, "variation is absolutely necessary to keep the type from becoming sterile; we do not want to see the same movie over and over again, only the same form". Genre critics have long deemed it necessary to construct a model that would properly describe and account for this tendency towards variation. The notion that a genre grows according to a human developmental scheme accompanies a more general anthropomorphism whereby genres are regularly said to develop, to react, to become self-conscious, and to self-destruct. Whether the parallel is simply suggested metaphorically or programmatically developed, generic anthropomorphism always provides a rhetorically effective model of variation within a context of fundamental fixity. Convinced of the sacrosanct nature of personal identity, our society easily accepts the human life metaphor as a guarantor of continuity.
(Page 21)
Why are genres sometimes mixed?
In the history of criticism, genre mixing in primarily European romanticism. As a model for the study of film genre, the historical opposition of neoclassical pure genres to romantic mixed genres is not without its problems, however. Justifying an explanation of genre mixing that stresses historical contingency, the classical/romantic opposition makes it all easy to conclude that genre mixing results from no more than the stylistic preferences of a particular period, studio or director. Some Hollywood directors, such as Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lubbitsch, Minnelli and Sirk, it is said, have a predilection for pure genres, while others, such as DeMille, Renoir and Welles, excel at mixing genres. Our notion that genres are more or less mixed in the films of any given period or director derives heavily from the way in which those films have been described, categorised and labelled. The descriptions, categories and labels in question of course appear in texts that have their own audience and purpose. Only by attending to this discursive orientation can we understand what is at stake in identifying films as examples either of pure genre or of genre mixing. In other words, we will do well to consider the mixing of generic terminology prior to inspection of specific genre mixing instances.
(Page 123)
No comments:
Post a Comment