Film/Genre

Rick Altman

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Film/Genre revises our notions of film genre and connects the roles played by industry critics and audiences in making and re-making genre. Altman reveals the conflicting stakes for which the genre game has been played and recognises that the term 'genre' has different meanings for different groups, basing his new genre theory on the uneasy competitive yet complimentary relationship among genre users and discussing a huge range of films from The Great Train Robbery to Star Wars and from The Jazz Singer to The Player.

1

What’s at stake in the history of literary genre theory?

We discover that the critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it. The very word ‘genre’ sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable and alien thing it is. Most critical efforts to handle such generic terms as ‘epic’ and ‘novel’ are chiefly interesting as examples of the psychology of rumor.

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957, p. 13)

Of all the concepts fundamental to literary theory, none has a longer and more distinguished lineage than the question of literary types, or genres. From Aristotle to Todorov and from Horace to Wellek and Warren, the topic of genre has remained one of the staples of theoretical discourse. As much as has been written on genre, however, the historical study of genre theory can hardly be characterized as a satisfying enterprise. The debate over genre has consistently taken place in slow motion. The decades – or even centuries – that have separated major genre theory statements have all too often led the debaters alternately to take disputed propositions for granted or to forget the very topic of the debate.

The history of genre theory thus traces a particularly zigzag trajectory. Sharing major claims with their predecessors, theoreticians on the straight stretches evince no need to justify their positions, while genre theorists in the turns rarely explain why a change of direction is necessary. Yet, quietly, the genre theories of the past have nevertheless set certain standards that continue tacitly to underlie recent attempts to theorize genre. If this chapter contains many of the familiar names of generic thinking, it is not, however, simply to rehearse what these thinkers have said about genre. In other words, what follows is in no sense a history of literary genre theory. Rather, in the hope of discovering the origins of our own blindness, the purpose here is to highlight the very claims that genre theorists have failed to recognize they were making, the constitutive assumptions that theoreticians have neglected to acknowledge in their own work, the habits and positions that have been silently passed on, often at cross-purposes with official positions and conscious claims.

Classical genre theory

‘I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each’, says Aristotle at the outset of Poetics.

Epic poetry and tragedy, comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects – the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.

Certainly, one of the most attractive features of Aristotle’s famous treatise – and one of the sources of its continued influence – is the clarity, indeed the apparently incontrovertible simplicity, with which every claim is made. Everything is straightforward. Or rather, as with all great rhetoricians, every claim is made to seem straightforward. In fact, every one of Aristotle’s apparently transparent expressions conceals a set of assumptions tacitly adopted by virtually every subsequent genre theorist. An expanded version of the first sentence of the Poetics should help to underscore the assumptions that Aristotle asks us to make with him:

I propose to treat of the form of activity that our society has labeled poetry which I claim can best be considered as an isolated phenomenon in itself and of what I will treat as its various kinds, noting or rather claiming that there is such a thing as the essential quality of each.

In order to begin his work, Aristotle must define an object of study. By borrowing an already defined object rather than defining his own, however, Aristotle provides a model for centuries of genre thinkers. Surprisingly, this most careful of thinkers thus opens his thought to whatever Greeks the Trojan horse of ‘poetry’ might carry. Who defined poetry? To what end? On the basis of what assumptions? With what ramifications for the proposed generic breakdown? Aristotle’s spare, declarative style makes it unlikely that these questions will be asked, and very likely that subsequent theoreticians will remain oblivious to the slippery slope of the underlying terrain on which their theories are built.

The very notions that poetry exists ‘in itself’ and that a kind can have an ‘essential quality’ involve unsubstantiated claims with far-reaching effects. These unopposed assumptions justify Aristotle’s famous claim that the types of poetry differ in medium, object and manner of imitation, along with the implication that no other differences are involved. Note that the author of the Nicomachean Ethics does not suggest that the types of poetry differ in the uses to which they are put, the places in which they are used, or the groups that use them. He does not propose distinctions based on the actions that differing types of poetry inspire, but instead assumes that poems with similar ‘essential’ qualities will produce similar effects on their audiences. Thus all poems that arouse pity and fear are not necessarily tragedies, but all tragedies may be expected to arouse pity and fear.

My purpose here is not to show that Aristotle is in any way wrong, but rather to show that (a) the Poetics is based on unspoken and apparently incontrovertible assumptions, (b) these assumptions sanction certain types of conclusion, while precluding others, and (c) alternatives do exist to the positions taken by Aristotle. For example, given the origin of Greek poetic forms in diverse rituals, a categorization of poems based on their differing ritual uses would have produced a fascinating and fully defensible generic breakdown. From within the Poetics, however, such an approach remains invisible, unthinkable – not only to today’s readers, but more importantly to readers across the ages who have taken their generic cues from Aristotle. As influential as it may have been, Aristotle’s categorization of the kinds of poetry has had the effect of narrowing genre theory ever since. By accentuating poetry’s internal characteristics rather than the kinds of experience fostered by poetry, Aristotle set genre theory on to a virtually unbroken course of textual analysis. Not that textual concerns and experiential concerns are entirely unrelated, but their relationship requires theorization – and that is precisely what Aristotle’s spare style and unanswerable rhetoric preclude.

By the time Horace drafted his Ars Poetica, three centuries after Aristotle’s death, the Greek philosopher’s arguments about poetic types had achieved the status of received truth. Whereas Aristotle opens his Poetics with the stealth of a rhetorician schooled in the delicate art of Platonic debate, Horace begins his epistle on the art of poetry with all the bravado of an author sanctioned by the ancients.

Suppose a painter meant to attach a horse’s neck to the head of a man, and to put fancywork of many colored feathers on limbs of creatures picked at random; the kind of thing where the torso of a shapely maiden merges into the dark rear half of a fish; would you smother your amusement, my friends, if you were let in to see the result?

Believe me, Pisones, a book will be very much like that painting if the meaningless images are put together like the dreams of a man in a fever, to the end that the head and the foot do not match the one body.

Wrapped in the authority of (his culture’s notion of) nature, Horace need not argue for the existence of genres. The only natural and healthy thing to do, Horace implies, is to recognize the differences among genres. If nature and health exist, then so do genres. Confident as if backed up by the combined Roman legions, Horace leaves the recipient of his epistle little room to manoeuvre. Each genre must be understood as a separate entity, with its own literary rules and prescribed procedures. Tragic verse forms, Horace affirms, must not be used for comic situations. ‘Let each form of poetry occupy the proper place allotted to it.’ Inaugurating a long tradition whereby genre and decorum are allied in critical discourse, with proper behaviour expected of literature and citizens alike, Horace also initiates the equally tenacious tradition according to which the authority behind the ‘proper’ and the method of allotting a separate place to each form of poetry remain outside the genre theorist’s range of analysis.

Quoted continually from the late Renaissance to the eighteenth century in support of neoclassical poetic and theatrical practices, Horace’s Ars Poetica contains more than detailed prescriptions regarding specific genres. More important are two changes in emphasis with relation to the Aristotelian model. For Aristotle, imitation means mimesis, sketching from nature; for Horace, the same term implies imitation of a literary model and adherence to the standards represented by that model, as described by distinguished critics (such as Horace himself). In other words, the notion of genre is now fully conscripted into the legion of techniques whereby writers are trained to respect current standards of cultural acceptability.

With this redefinition of generic imitation as a major form of cultural indoctrination, a fundamental bifurcation occurs in generic thinking. Whereas Aristotle aims primarily at description of existing works of art, sometimes speaking solely as critic, sometimes addressing the problems of poets and their audiences, Horace is mainly concerned to prescribe appropriate modes of writing poetry. Having devoted the first half of the Poetics to a historical and theoretical analysis of poetic genres, only in the latter half of the treatise does Aristotle begin to sketch out appropriate writing practices. To the Greek master’s historical preterites and descriptive present tenses correspond Horace’s incessant imperatives:

– Let the work of art be whatever you want, as long as it is simple and has unity. (96)

– Adopt material to match your talents . . . (96)

– Let each form of poetry occupy the proper place allotted to it. (97)

– Do not bring out on stage actions that should properly take place inside, and remove from view the many events which the descriptive powers of an actor present on the stage will soon relate. Do not have Medea butcher her sons before the audience . . . (100)

– Do not let a play consist of less than five acts. . . . Do not have a god intervene. . . .

Have the chorus carry the part of an actor . . . and do not let them sing anything between the acts which does not contribute to the plot and fit properly into it. (100)

–Whatever you have in the way of a lesson, make it short . . . (103)

At every turn, Horace is concerned to provide clear rules for generically faithful literary composition. To Aristotle’s concern for the structure of generic texts is now added a durable interest in the production of generic texts.

Curiously, for all his emphasis on the production of poetry, Horace radically dissociates the processes of creation and criticism. The critic does the reading of previous poetry and criticism, while the writer carries out the critic’s prescriptions. As we will see in later chapters, this split has a significant effect on the future of genre theory. Whereas Aristotle saw history and theory, criticism and practice, audience and poets, as somehow all intertwined, Horace sets up a simple generic model for the ages: poets produce by imitating a predefined original sanctioned by the literary-critical oligarchy.

Neoclassical genre theory

As filtered through Horace and the power of Roman literary institutions, Aristotelian notions of genre provided the very foundation of the neoclassical critical system. Rediscovered by Italian Renaissance authors, Aristotle inspired virtually non-stop publication of poetic treatises throughout the sixteenth century – in three volumes (Marco Girolamo Vida, 1527), in six (Ugento Antonio Minturno, 1559), in seven (Julius Caesar Scaliger, 1561), or in a single-volume summary (Lodovico Castelvetro, 1570). For nearly two centuries, the adaptation of neo-Aristotelian principles would be chronicled and justified in the writings of such important writer-critics as Torquato Tasso, Pierre Corneille, Nicolas Boileau, John Dryden and Alexander Pope.

Perhaps the most celebrated cause of this period is the battle over the ultimate generic crossbreed: tragicomedy. Ever the incontrovertible naturalist, Horace had set limits on the poet’s right to mix genres: ‘it does not go to the extent that savage should mate with tame, that serpents should couple with birds, or lambs with tigers’. Reacting strongly against the medieval grotesque tendency to mix the sublime and the ridiculous, the sacred and the secular, the tragic and the comic, seventeenth-century French neoclassical critics at first found it quite impossible to accept the new composite. Yet little by little the production of new plays by Pierre Corneille and Jean Mairet in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, along with the apparent Roman precedent of Plautus’ Amphitryon, broke down critical resistance and led to acceptance of the hybrid genre.

For our purposes, one particular lesson stands out from this unexpected development. That a new genre should be born in an expanding culture hardly provides cause for surprise. More important is the way in which this genre develops out of the coupling of two genres previously thought diametrically opposed. In spite of the Horatian commitment to keep genres separate and the neo-Aristotelian refusal to recognize genres not mentioned by Aristotle, the rise of tragicomedy demonstrates the possibility of generating new genres through the monstrous mating of already existing genres. For the first time, genre theory must accommodate itself to genre history, rather than vice versa.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, a new genre began to edge its way between tragedy and comedy. At first called simply the ‘serious genre’, as opposed to the classical genres, deemed incapable of dealing with contemporary reality, the new genre was denigrated as the ‘weepie genre’ (genre larmoyant) by its conservative opponents. Eventually baptized simply ‘drama’ (drame) by its radical supporters (Denis Diderot, Pierre de Beaumarchais, Louis-Sébastien Mercier), this is the theatrical form that would eventually give rise to melodrama – the most popular theatrical mode of the nineteenth century and cinema’s most important parent genre. The details surrounding the new genre’s rise to popularity and its post-revolutionary transformation into popular melodrama are less important here than genre’s new role as the object of critical and political strife.

If Aristotle has remained a favourite with twentieth-century genre theoreticians, it is in part because his primary purpose was to describe and codify existing practice rather than to exercise any direct influence over that practice. While most recent genre critics and theorists continue to accept genres – including melodrama – as classically attested pre-existent forms, the history of (melo)drama reveals that critics once understood their role as far more active and interventionist. The example of melodrama stresses the critic’s potential role in making genre a living, changing, active part of cultural development and self-expression. From this point on in the history of genre theory, classically motivated genre separation will never again hold sway, yet, as we shall see, many of the hidden institutional commitments underlying the classical system will never fully die.

Nineteenth-century genre theory

As with the classics, so with the romantics, but in reverse. Whereas the neoclassical approach to all composition began with identification and separation of genres, romantic inspiration was based on the breaking down of all generic differences. German theoretician Friedrich Schlegel provided the philosophical underpinnings, recommending abolition of all generic classifications in his Dialogue on Poetry (1800), while two French renegades led the assault. Stendhal spearheaded the first attacks in his tract, Racine et Shakespeare (1823 and 1825), with Victor Hugo’s theatrical works and their prefaces soon providing able reinforcement (Cromwell in 1827, Hernani i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. What’s at stake in the history of literary genre theory?
• 2. What is generally understood by the notion of film genre?
• 3. Where do genres come from?
• 4. Are genres stable?
• 5. Are genres subject to redefinition?
• 6. Where are genres located?
• 7. How are genres used?
• 8. Why are genres sometimes mixed?
• 9. What role do genres play in the viewing process?
• 10. What communication model is appropriate for genres?
• 11. Have genres and genre functions changed over time?
• 12. What can genres teach us about nations?
• Conclusion: A semantic/syntactic/pragmatic approach to genre
• Appendix: ‘A semantic/syntactic approach to film genre’
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright