Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond
Barry Langford
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0748619038
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond provides a detailed account of genre history and contemporary trends in film genre, alongside the critical debates they have provoked. The book ranges widely across the field, dealing separately and in detail with not only classic genres - including the Western, the musical, the war film, the gangster film, and film noir - but also more recent trends such as body-horror, Holocaust film, and the action blockbuster. Throughout the book, genre is presented as a constantly evolving phenomenon. Writing in a sophisticated yet accessible style, Barry Langford shows how notions of genre help shape the ways that filmmakers, critics and audiences view films and how the often complex scholarly debates around genre reflect important differences in the ways cinema is understood in relation to its social and historical contexts. The book encourages students to interrogate and broaden received ideas about genre.
Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture
Bram Stoker's Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997
Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music
Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action: A Different Tune (Routledge Advances in Film Studies)
Arthur Penn: American Director (Screen Classics)
content. Enquiry of the st~tdents \\'ho are producing these teasing simulacra (textbook examples of !e,ln Baudrillard's notion of the perfect imitation \\ith no original) reveals 'th,lt \\hile sometimes they will ha\e seen part or all of DIIIIMe !/ldemnitv (I <).j.-f.), often their knO\\ledge of /lilir is con Ii ned to \'iewings of recent neo/lillI'S such as the Coen brothers' Bllllld Silllple (198-1-) or John Dahl's The Lasl Scdwi io/l (199-1-). These films are kno\\ingly allusi \'e, richly
affinity of major Hollywood genres - in particular the contemporary action blockbuster (see Chapter 10) - with the melodramatic, while also clearly allowing room for classic Hollywood 'women's films', which 'llthough they largely lack moral polarities and sensationalism are certainly rich in pathos and other overwrought emotions. Sing-er's 'constituti'"e factors' still fall, as he himself acknowledges, into the category of 'ncess'. Howe,er, 'excess' here is reconceived not in relation to a
the g-Iobally dominant industry. The \var also made plain lilm's unprecedented potential as a 1001 for disseminating inf()rmation and propag-,mda, resulting- in sig'nificant changes to the relationship bet,veen g'overnments ,1I1d national film industries. In the CS ..\, as \LInt (19 8 :;) argues, although lilm h'ld only a limited impact upon .\merican audiences during the brief CS il1\ohement in hostilities, intlustrygo\'ernment collaboration on \\ ar bond dri\ es led to former Trelsury
:\xis powers are rarely seen and hence little known except hy specialists. There is, howcyer, a t:lirly considerable literature on Nazi film generally, including war films, of \vhich probably the best known is the historical epic A"o/lierg (11)-1-.5), produced under Goebbels' personal supenision (but ironically barely seen by German audiences beftlre the war's end since Allied bombing had closed most German cinemas by the time A"o//Icrg premiered in Januar~ J<)-I-.5). Japanese \\ar films are
cannot be transcended, but ultimately extends its ruthless logic. (Mason, 2002: q3) The film's bootlegging and union racketeering milieu exploits similar material to Llldij' Lad)' and F*I*S*T, two routine and unsuccessful earlier entries in the Mob nostalgia cycle. However, the film's formal complexities ,- which ha\e some similarities to The G()((/il!her, Parl II, and like that film I I I GA~GSTER FIL:\t: GENRE A~O SOCIETY 151 encompass at once the gangster's myth of origins, the