Genre and Hollywood

Steve Neale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134973453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Genre and Hollywood provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of genre. In this important new book, Steve Neale discusses all the major concepts, theories and accounts of Hollywood and genre, as well as the key genres which theorists have written about, from horror to the Western. He also puts forward new arguments about the importance of genre in understanding Hollywood cinema.
Neale takes issue with much genre criticism and genre theory, which has provided only a partial and misleading account of Hollywood's output. He calls for broader and more flexible conceptions of genre and genres, for more attention to be paid to the discourses and practices of Hollywood itself, for the nature and range of Hollywood's films to be looked at in more detail, and for any assessment of the social and cultural significance of Hollywood's genres to take account of industrial factors.
In detailed, revisionist accounts of two major genres - film noir and melodrama - Neale argues that genre remains an important and productive means of thinking about both New and old Hollywood, its history, its audiences and its films.

Part I Genre

Definitions and concepts

1 Definitions of genre

DOI: 10.4324/9780203980781-2

‘Genre’ is a French word meaning ‘type’ or ‘kind’. As we shall see, it has occupied an important place in the study of the cinema for over thirty years, and is normally exemplified (either singly or in various combinations) by the western, the gangster film, the musical, the horror film, melodrama, comedy and the like. On occasion, the term ‘sub-genre’ has also been used, generally to refer to specific traditions or groupings within these genres (as in ‘romantic comedy’, ‘slapstick comedy’, ‘the gothic horror film’ and so on). And sometimes the term ‘cycle’ is used as well, usually to refer to groups of films made within a specific and limited time-span, and founded, for the most part, on the characteristics of individual commercial successes: the cycle of historical adventure films made in the wake of Treasure Island (1934) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1934), for instance (Behlmer 1979:12; Taves 1993a:68–9), or the cycle of ‘slasher’ or ‘stalker’ films made in the wake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978) (Clover 1992; Dika 1990).

As these examples illustrate, the definition and discussion of genre and genres in the cinema has tended to focus on mainstream, commercial films in general and Hollywood films in particular. Sometimes, indeed, genre and genres have been exclusively identified with these kinds of films. ‘Stated simply’, writes Barry Keith Grant, ‘genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations.’ ‘They have been exceptionally significant’, he adds, ‘in establishing the popular sense of cinema as a cultural and economic institution, particularly in the United States, where Hollywood studios early on adopted an industrial model based on mass production’ (1986b:ix). However, if (for the moment at least) we accept that genres are simply types or kinds of films, there is no logical reason for excluding either such non-American instances as the Indian mythological, the Japanese samurai film, or the Hong Kong wu xia pan or swordplay film, or such ‘non-commercial’ or non-feature length instances as the documentary, the animated short, the avant-garde film or the art film. Although writing can be found which considers these types of film from a generic point of view, most of the writing on genre and genres in the cinema has focused on the commercial feature film and on Hollywood.¹

There are a number of reasons for this. Most can be found either in the history of the study of the cinema, or in the history of genre as a concept within the fields of written fiction and drama. Given that this book will also concentrate on the feature film and on Hollywood, it is important to highlight these reasons at the outset, and to expose some of the limitations and problems to which they have given rise.

Genre criticism and genre theory in the 1960s and 1970s

In her survey of writing on genre in The Cinema Book, Christine Gledhill (1985a: 58) points out that books and articles on individual Hollywood genres began to be published in the US and in Europe (especially in France) in the 1940s and 1950s, notably by Bazin (1971a, 1971b), Chabrol ([1955] 1985), Rieupeyrout (1953) and Warshow ([1948] 1975a, [1954] 1975b). However, it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that the study of genre and genres began to establish itself more fully in Britain and in the US, in tandem with the establishment of Film Studies as a formal, academic discipline. As Gledhill goes on to indicate, there were two main reasons for the appearance of genre and genres on the agenda of theorists, critics, and teachers of film at this time. One was a desire to engage in a serious and positive way with popular cinema in general and with Hollywood in particular. The other was a desire to complement, temper or displace altogether the dominant critical approach used hitherto—auteurism.

There had always existed reviewers and critics (like James Agee, Manny Farber and Parker Tyler) who had discussed Hollywood films with some sympathy, intelligence and insight. But they had also always been the exception among those who wrote about film in the US and Britain. For the most part, intellectuals, critics and reviewers had been at best patronizing and at worst overtly hostile to Hollywood and its films—on the grounds that they were commercially produced, that they were aimed at a mass market, that they were ideologically or aesthetically conservative, or that they were imbued with the values of entertainment and fantasy rather than those of realism, art or serious aesthetic stylization.

During the late 1950s, the 1960s, and the early 1970s, a generation of intellectuals who had grown up with and who for various reasons liked and valued elements of commercial popular culture in general, and American popular culture in particular, began to debate and to re-assess its value.² By then the French film journal Cahiers du cinema had pioneered an approach to the cinema that Francois Truffaut called ‘la politique des auteurs’ (Truffaut [1954] 1976), and that came in the US and in Britain to be known either as ‘the auteur theory’ (Sarris 1968) or else, more simply, as auteurism. Cahiers’ auteurism was founded on three basic premisses. The first was that despite the ostensibly collective and impersonal nature of film production, the cinema could be, and often was, a realm of individual and personal expression. The second was that in the cinema, the figure equivalent to the artist or author(auteur) in painting or in literature was—or could be—the director. And the third, and by far the most radical, was that directorial artistry and cinematic authorship were to be found not just within the culturally respectable realms of international art cinema (a common idea at that time), nor even, as far as Hollywood was concerned, solely within the realms of the occasional prestige or maverick project (another common idea), but also, perhaps especially, within the realms of its routine output (Hillier 1985b:7).

Adapted, modified, reworked in various ways, these premisses were adopted by Andrew Sarris, film critic for The Village Voice in the USA, and by Movie magazine, and later The Brighton Film Review, Monogram and Cinema, in Britain (Caughie 1981). The impact of auteurism on film criticism in general and on the criticism and appreciation of Hollywood films in particular was immense. It enabled both a systematic charting of a great deal of Hollywood's output, and much detailed discussion of form, style, theme and mise-en-scène. It thus provided those wishing to analyse—and validate—Hollywood cinema with a valuable critical stance and with a valuable set of critical tools. However, given its evaluative base (auteurs were preferred to non-auteurs and to mere ‘metteurs-en-scène’), and given its commitment to individual directors and hence to individualized corpuses of films, auteurism was of little help in dealing with the range of Hollywood's output overall, or in charting broader trends and developments within it. Moreover, the third of Cahiers's premisses in particular required the adoption of a ‘perverse’ attitude to Hollywood, a way of looking at and thinking about its films which neither Hollywood itself nor society at large encouraged. (Hence the tendency of Cahiers in particular and of auteurism in general to lapse into cultishness.) It thus encouraged an approach to Hollywood films which either ignored or defamiliarized their institutional status, their institutional conventions and the audiences to whom they were principally addressed. It is precisely for these reasons that the auteurism of Cahiers, Movie, Sarris and Monogram was—and is—of interest. However, it was for these reasons too that those interested in identifying these conventions and in taking account of the institution and its audiences found untrammelled auteurism unhelpful. Towards the end of the 1960s, they began to turn their attention instead to issues of genre.

As Gledhill has pointed out, an American art critic, Lawrence Alloway (1963, 1971), had already made the case for paying more attention to genres and cycles, arguing that they were fundamental not just to Hollywood cinema but to popular art as a whole. ‘Alloway…resists the temptation to establish “classic” timeless dimensions in popular forms’, she writes. ‘He insists on the transitional and ephemeral character of genres, of cycles, and of any individual popular film (1985a:59–60). In an overview of the writing on genre that followed, Tom Ryall restates the case against auteurism and reiterates Alloway's point about the nature of popular art: ‘The auteur theory, though important and valuable during the 1950s and 1960s for drawing attention to the importance of the American cinema, nevertheless tended to treat popular art as if it were “high art”’ (1975/6: 28). He also makes explicit the importance and the role of the audience. And he offers a definition of genre itself. ‘The master image for genre criticism’, he writes, ‘is a triangle composed of artist/film/audience. Genres may be defined as patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the film maker, and their reading by an audience’ (ibid.).

I shall return to this definition in a moment. However, at this point it is worth stressing the extent to which Ryall is critical of some of the writing on genre that immediately preceded his own. ‘By and large’, he writes, ‘genre criticism has confined itself to producing taxonomies on the basis of “family resemblances”, allocating films to their position within the generic constellation, stopping short of what are the interesting and informative questions about generic groupings’. (1975/6:27). To a degree these remarks are well-founded. Some of the writing that preceded (and followed) Ryall's article was indeed taxonomic, devoted to the discovery and analysis of the components of individual genres rather than to the pursuit of theoretical questions about the nature of genre as such. However, while writing of this kind has its limitations, it also has its uses, providing as it does an initial means of ‘collating the range of cultural knowledge…genres assumed’ (Gledhill 1985a:61).

Moreover, not all the writing on genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s was taxonomic in kind. Both Buscombe (1970) and McArthur (1972), for instance, were concerned, among other things, to demonstrate the active role played by genre conventions in shaping the form and the meaning of individual Hollywood films. Here, for example, is Buscombe on Guns in the Afternoon (a.k.a. Ride the High Country) (1962), a western:

Knowing the period and location, we expect at the beginning to find a familiar western town. In fact, the first few minutes of the film brilliantly disturb expectations. As the camera moves around the town, we discover a policeman in uniform, a car, a camel, and Randolph Scott, dressed up as Buffalo Bill. Each of these images performs a function. The figure of the policeman conveys that the law has become institutionalised; the rough and ready frontier days are over. The car suggests…that the west is no longer isolated from modern technology and its implications. Significantly, the camel is racing against a horse; such a grotesque juxtaposition is painful. A horse in a western is not just an animal but a symbol of dignity, grace and power. These qualities are mocked by it competing with a camel; and to add insult to injury, the camel wins.

(Buscombe 1970:44)

He later continues:

the essential theme of Guns in the Afternoon is one that, while it could be put into other forms is ideally suited to the one chosen. The film describes the situation of men who have outlived their time…

The cluster of images and conventions that we call the western genre is used by Peckinpah [the film's director] to define and embody this situation, in such a way that we know what the West was and what it has become. The first is communicated through images that are familiar, the second through those that are strange. And together they condition his subject matter. Most obviously, because the film is a western, the theme is worked out in terms of violent action. If it were a musical, the theme might be similar in some way, but because the conventions would be different, it would probably not involve violence… And if it were a gangster picture, it seems unlikely that the effect of the film's ending, its beautifully elegiac background of autumn leaves, would be reproduced, suggesting as it does that the dead Judd is at one with nature, the nature which seems at the beginning of the film to have been overtaken by ‘civilization’.

(Buscombe 1970:44–5)

In this particular essay, Buscombe attempts also to advance a general theory about the aesthetic characteristics of popular genres. He borrows the concepts of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ form from Warren and Welleck, who argued that ‘Genres should be conceived as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (specific metre or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose—more crudely, subject and audience)’ (1956: 260). These particular concepts were not taken up by subsequent writers. But in illustrating the idea of ‘outer form’, Buscombe talked about ‘visual conventions’. His work here thus drew on and fed into a concept that was to become much more influential—the concept of iconography.

Iconography

Along with its twin, ‘iconology’, the term ‘iconography’ derives from art history, and in particular from the work of Erwin Panofsky. Panofsky himself discussed the application of these terms to popular cinema ([1934] 1974), but it was Lawrence Alloway who sought to apply them in a systematic way to the analysis of genres and cycles (1963).

In ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art’, first published in 1938 and reprinted in his Meaning in the Visual Arts, Panofsky distinguishes between three possible levels or stages in the a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Front Chapter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Genre: Definitions and concepts
• Part II Genres
• Part III Hollywood’s Genres Theory, Industry and History
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index