Genre and Hollywood

Author: Steve Neale
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134973454
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
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.

Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System

Author: Thomas Schatz
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
The central thesis of this book is that a genre approach provides the most effective means for understanding, analyzing and appreciating the Hollywood cinema. Taking into account not only the formal and aesthetic aspects of feature filmmaking, but various other cultural aspects as well, the genre approach treats movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its audience. This process, embodied by the Hollywood studio system, has been sustained primarily through genres, those popular narrative formulas like the Western, musical and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts throughout this century.

Film Genre

Author: Barry Langford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
This book provides a detailed account of genre history and contemporary trends in film genre, alongside the critical debates they have provoked.

Film Genre

Author: Barry Keith Grant
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231850069
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
This is a concise evaluation of film genre, discussing genre theory and sample analyses of the western, science fiction, the musical, horror, comedy, and the thriller. It introduces the topic in an accessible way and includes sections on the principles of studying and understanding "the idea of genre"; genre and popular culture; the narrative and stylistic conventions of specific genres; the relations of genres to culture and history, race, gender, sexuality, class and national identity; and the complex relations between genre and authorship. Case studies include: 42nd Street, Pennies from Heaven, Red River, All That Heaven Allows, Night of the Living Dead, Die Hard, Little Big Man, Blue Steel, and Posse.

Pursuits of Happiness

Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674739062
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Looks at seven classic romantic comedies of the thirties and forties, and compares what each film expresses about marriage, interdependence, equality, and sexual roles.

Classical Hollywood Comedy

Author: Kristine Brunovska Karnick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135213232
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Book Description
Applies the recent `return to history' in film studies to the genre of classical Hollywood comedy as well as broadening the definition of those works considered central in this field.

Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood

Author: Mary Harrod
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030709949
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
Despite the widely publicised prejudice faced by women in Hollywood, since around 1990 a significant minority of female directors have been making commercially and culturally impactful films there across the full range of genres. This book explores movies by filmmakers Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig, including many which are still critically neglected or derided, seeing them as offering a new understanding of genre filmmaking. That is, like many other contemporary films but in a striking proportion within the smaller set of mainstream movies by women, this body of work revels in a heightened genre status that allows its authors to simultaneously address ‘intellectual’ cinephilic pleasures and bodily-emotive ones. Arguing through close analysis that these films demonstrate the inseparability of such strategies of engagement in contemporary genre cinema, Heightened Genre reclaims women’s mainstream filmmaking for feminism through a recalibration of genre theory itself.

Film Genre Reader IV

Author: Barry Keith Grant
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292745745
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 785

Book Description
From reviews of the third edition: “Film Genre Reader III lives up to the high expectations set by its predecessors, providing an accessible and relatively comprehensive look at genre studies. The anthology’s consideration of the advantages and challenges of genre studies, as well as its inclusion of various film genres and methodological approaches, presents a pedagogically useful overview.” —Scope Since 1986, Film Genre Reader has been the standard reference and classroom text for the study of genre in film, with more than 25,000 copies sold. Barry Keith Grant has again revised and updated the book to reflect the most recent developments in genre study. This fourth edition adds new essays on genre definition and cycles, action movies, science fiction, and heritage films, along with a comprehensive and updated bibliography. The volume includes more than thirty essays by some of film’s most distinguished critics and scholars of popular cinema, including Charles Ramírez Berg, John G. Cawelti, Celestino Deleyto, David Desser, Thomas Elsaesser, Steve Neale, Thomas Schatz, Paul Schrader, Vivian Sobchack, Janet Staiger, Linda Williams, and Robin Wood.

Genre and Contemporary Hollywood

Author: Steve Neale
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838715894
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 548

Book Description
This wide-ranging text is one of the first to look in detail at some of the principal genres, cycles and trends in Hollywood's output during the last two decades. It includes analysis of such films as Sense and Sensibility, Grifters, The Mask, When Harry Met Sally, Pocahontas, Titanic, Basic Instinct, Coppola's Dracula, and Malcolm X.

Hollywood Hybrids

Author: Ira Jaffe
Publisher: Genre and Beyond: A Film Studies Series
ISBN: 9780742539501
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
'He wanted to move in and out of the various signature styles of all these genres_Western, melodrama, thriller, horror, ' said cinematographer Robert Richardson of Quentin Tarantino's goals in making Kill Bill: Vols. 1 & 2. Through close readings of work by major U.S. filmmakers such as Tarantino, David Lynch, Errol Morris, Todd Haynes, and Joel and Ethan Coen, Hollywood Hybrids studies provocative, disorienting strategies of genre mixing in contemporary cinema. The book also investigates foreign parallels to U.S. hybrid cinema in films by such directors as Pedro Almod-var (Spain) and Stephen Chow (Hong Kong). Rather than explore genre primarily from the standpoint of movie critics, producers, marketers, and spectators, Hollywood Hybrids focuses on genre mixing as a key creative interest motivating celebrated filmmakers. The book thus relates genre to auteur theory. Hollywood Hybrids also links recent hybrid cinema to earlier instances of hybrid form in film and other arts, including painting, music, literature, and architecture. The book concludes that hybrid films allude not only to multiple films and genres, but also to hybrid features of consciousness and identity that increasingly heighten as well as complicate human experience.