Andrew M Butler The Pocket Essential Film Studies (pdf)

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ANDREW M. BUTLER
includes spaceships ignoring Metropolis and Alphaville
or aliens ignoring Gattaca. Sf is a series of narratives
about the interaction of humanity and technology
except that this would then require us to consider
Apollo 13 (1995) and The Dish (2001) as science fiction.
Several of these films are other things as well:
Metropolis is a dystopia, The Day The Earth Stood Still a
cold war thriller/parable, Star Wars by turns a Western,
a comedy or a war movie and Gattaca a murder
mystery. Many sf films can also be thought of as horror,
from the Universal films of the 1930s through 1950s
monster movies, Alien (1979) and Pitch Black (2000)
and beyond.
We anticipate different aspects of individual films:
characters, plots, locations, audience responses, mises en
sc�ne, themes and structures. A film with cowboys and
Indians is a Western; with a detective and criminals it is
crime; with gangsters (surprisingly) it is a gangster flick,
and so on. One in which a crime is committed and
then solved is also a crime movie, one in which obsta-
cles postpone the love between two characters is a
romance. Films set in Monument Valley are Westerns,
those set in space (excluding Apollo 13) are science
fiction. If the audience laughs, it is a comedy; if they
scream, it is horror. If the film features dark shadows
and odd camera angles, then it is likely to be a film noir.
But structures can be problematic because they are
replicated from genre to genre. Ten Little Indians (1965),
Halloween (1978), Alien and Pitch Black each feature
narratives where a group of characters are killed off one
by one; Alien is country house murder enacted on a
spaceship (and The Thing (1982) does it at an Antarctic
base), or a haunted house in outer space (ditto).
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Underlying almost all plots is the structure equilibrium,
disaster, chaos, restoration or new equilibrium
whether Casablanca (1942) or Reservoir Dogs (1991).
When a film does not follow this structure, the tension
created by its divergence is often the point.
Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc, in their Pocket
Essentials guide to Horror Movies, adapt this to find a
three-act structure, plus optional prologue and
epilogue, for horror. First a normal, if idyllic, commu-
nity is established, before something comes into the
community to shatter the piece. One or two heroes
(and often a heroine) come together to fight back and
defeat the evil, restoring normality or creating a new
society. In prologues sometimes at the start of the
movie, even pre-credits an original murder or trauma
is shown as the root cause of the chaos. In Halloween it
is Michael Myers s murder of his sister, before the
action cuts to fifteen years later; Friday the 13th (1980)
and A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) imply such an
event. The (optional) epilogue reveals the villain isn t
dead after all (Halloween), and even has him coming
back to try to kill the heroine (I Know What You Did
Last Summer (1997)).
Similar structures can occur in crime thrillers: an
initial crime, or the origin of the criminal, the everyday
world of the detective, the discovery of a pattern of
crimes, progress towards solving the crime and
restoring order, and then, sometimes, a twist in the tale.
Seven (1995) broadly fits this pattern, as does Blue Steel
(1989), which slightly distorts the order: the conven-
ience store robbery in which the villain gains a gun,
Jamie Lee Curtis s career as a rookie cop, the series of
murders which she helps to solve, and then the final
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ANDREW M. BUTLER
proof of the villain s guilt. Crime and horror films both
deal with the breaking of laws whether laws of crim-
inality or nature.
Equally, a film may use a generic element, without
joining that genre. The majority of films have some
element of romance, without that ever becoming
central to the narrative. On the other hand, sometimes
peripheral elements define a genre.Take the war movie
genre. Casablanca is set during wartime, is located in
occupied French territory, has Nazis as villains and ends
with characters either escaping to then neutral territory
or going to join the Resistance, but otherwise does not
depict fighting. Whilst the narrative could omit the
Second World War (see Barb Wire (1995)), it neverthe-
less needs to be considered a war movie, if only for its
anti-isolationist propaganda directed at an America that
had not yet joined the war.Vietnam War movies rarely
depict conflict in The Deer Hunter (1978) it only takes
up a few seconds of screen time. Apocalypse Now (1979)
and Casualties Of War (1989) focus on a group of men
and offer narratives that would fit in any war.
Modelling Genres
Rick Altman offers a model of genres that draws on
structuralism: genres are semantic or syntactic. In
semantic genres we expect a certain number of
elements: a Wild West town, a sheriff, good and bad
cowboys, raiding Indians, deserts, six-guns and horses.
Once this set of criteria is fulfilled, then the genre is
defined as, say, a Western. On the other hand, a syntactic
genre is one in which a certain narrative structure is
expected, for example a film in which a woman meets
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FILM STUDIES
a man she doesn t like but eventually falls in love with
is a romantic comedy.
Unfortunately, we might feel that we could describe
a film as being both part of a semantic genre or of a
syntactic genre.Westerns often have an element of the
revenge plot about them, whether it is John Wayne as
the uncle tracking down his kidnapped niece and
seeking revenge on the Indians, or feuding families in
various versions of the Wyatt Earp and OK Corral story
or High Noon (1952), whilst still fulfilling the semantic
criteria for Westerns.
The History Of Genres
Each genre has its own history and arguably every
genre follows that history, although it may take different [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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