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Genre and Multiple Marketing Strategies
It has been seen elsewhere that it is possible to create a generic category by 'reading against the grain' that is interpreting the content of the output of the mainstream film industry differently. It is argued here that genre is best viewed as an important marketing tool of the full range of media industries. All these specific generic forms are appropriate for the media format being used. Genre can thus be seen as part of the institutional framework of any media system. The different generic approaches from the different media formats ensure as far as possible that the specific media product sells well. It achieves this by fitting in with established and emergent conventions of the specific media industry [1] being considered.
Horses for Courses
It is always important to bear in mind the wider institutional context of particular media formats. In the case of film the A films with a big budget and high production values which were produced at the time of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1930s and 1940s have a strong similarity to the 'Blockbuster' movies currently being produced.
The Hollywood A movie and the 'Blockbuster' movie were dependent upon a combination of utilising well known stars, directors, a broadly-based genre format, as well as a successful script or topic in the popular imagination. It is rare that the genre format is a straightforward simple genre in these high-budget movies. The point of a high-budget movie is to attract the widest possible range of people to go and see the film. The danger of being overly specific about genre is that people think that the film has low production values and is aimed at a market of enthusiasts and cultists. This would mean that it is of no interest to anybody else and would limit its market[2]. From this it can be seen that an over-reliance upon branding a film as genre specific is potentially culturally exclusive and thus self-defeating. Within industry defined boundaries the more a film costs the wider its potential audience should be. The straight action-thriller film is very unlikely to ever have such a high budget as a multi-generic or genre hybrid film as its appeal is largely to boys, young adult males and a few men who have never grown-up. By comparison the continued success of Bond movies is now dependent upon special FX, spy/gangster thriller, comedy thriller, sex-romance genre hybridity is able to appeal to wider audiences.
The sort of films produced in the heyday of Hollywood classed as B or C films involving low production values based mainly upon formulaic genre conventions as a key marketing device were aimed at less sophisticated audiences, and more working-class audiences habitually went to the cinema as their major weekly night out. These sort of films could also provide screen content at low points in the season and functioned as training spaces for newcomers to the industry. Middle-class audiences were usually more discriminating and tended to go and view specific films which might have been genre based such as literary adaptions. The 'made for TV' movie has taken over the role of B and C movies.
Minority Report (2002) is a good example of a multiple marketing strategy which involves genre hybridity as one of its key components. The multiple marketing strategy involves six main elements designed to reduce financial risk to the minimum and to increase the chances of maximising profitability by making the film genuinely 'popular' across a whole range of identity divisions such as class, gender and ethnicity.
Minority Report: A Case Study of Multiple Marketing Strategy
The recently released Minority Report provides some evidence of how a multiple marketing strategy is conducted using the following tactics:
The use and promotion of a well known semi-independent director in this case Steven Spielberg. Spielberg is associated with a long string of well made films which have a wide popular appeal and contain a generally liberal ethos, and in most circumstances are a 'safe' film to see and utilises the spectacular to generate excitement.
The use of a very well-known leading Hollywood star Tom Cruise who also runs a production company, and also in the use of Max von Sydow who would have appeal to older audiences and European audiences as well as showing that there is in depth commitment to quality actors.
The use of genre hybridity in the construction of the narrative. The film is a detective-thriller/ science-fiction/political-thriller/melodrama family tragedy. Sight and Sound has even described it as a 'future-noir'.
The use of special FX - Hollywood film history has always been concerned with being at the cutting edge of cinematic technology. This links both the circus and the spectacle, powerful contributors to cinema.
The film has been constructed as a '12' in terms of the censorship and regulatory structures, to maximise family viewing. The spectacular has always been an important element of film marketing and appeal.
These structural features of the film link into the reviews system which is an integral part of the marketing of films. Reviewers are in league with the film industry and enter into agreements not to reveal crucial elements of any twists in the plot especially the ending. This encourages the common cultural practice of 'non-revealment' embedded within the audience itself. People frequently say 'don't tell me the ending', or somebody reporting on their experience of a film says I won't spoilt the ending for you'. Mystique is an important aspect of marketing and plays cleverly upon audience desire.
The content has a very wide appeal and it is important to a big multi-generic/hybrid genre film that a general idea of the content quickly becomes widely known. Minority Report has a particular contextual appeal [3] because of the post September 11 World Trade Centre attack, the subsequent build-up of anand execution of 'regime-change' in Iraq. The content is all about arresting and incarcerating people before they commit a crime. The film can currently be read by audiences as an allegory for major political crisis in the world 2002/ 2003 - the excuse for building up massive military presence on the borders of Iraq despite any clear evidence of even ownership, let alone intention to use weapons of mass destruction. This will appeal to more politically astute and sophisticated audiences.
The 'human interest' aspect of the film comes through the family and personal break-up of the Tom Cruise character through the loss of their son perhaps through a paedophile kidnapping. This strong subplot linking into current fears of paedophilia and child pornography especially on the internet. The possibility of revenge, redemption and the re-establishment of family runs through the film linking it to revenge tragedies long established in literature. Here unlike the traditional tragedy redemption and a certain feel-good factor 'Hollywoodise' the ending.
The representation of women is more troubled and ambiguous. Women are represented as being intelligent: it was a woman who invented the 'precognitive system'. The wife of the leading character John Anderson - played by Tom Cruise - is also presented as being smart and determined, not only picking up on who the real criminal is but also having the 'nouse' to break into the high security police system and release her husband -the unlikely failure to remove John's eyeball-identity seems a crucial flaw in the plot but that is not the point here.
There is an unfortunate linkage of a gendered construction of femininity and instability of both woman and technology as being likely to go out of control [4]. This is a common feature of SF genre films. Maria, in Metropolis (1925), the T1000 robot in Terminator 2 (1991) are just two other examples of the linkage of the ambiguity and danger to the masculine status quo of feminised technology seen as 'other'. In Minority Report the key 'pre-cog' is a woman without whom the other two males are unable to function. The 'pre-cog' only ever acts ethically and the emphasis she makes upon human choice reinforces a key ideological prop of humanist liberalism against the strong cultural fears of technological take-over. This is a key element of cross-media science fiction genre. Nevertheless, the 'pre-cogs' are placed on the margins of society apparently for 'their own good'.
The police-thriller aspect is obvious by being set in a police station, with tension maintained by an ever present time-factor. The ending supports the liberal ethos that the system in combination with ethical individuals will be capable of identifying and removing those who try to manipulate it unethically along the lines of films such as The Pelican Brief (1993).
The political-thriller aspects of Minority Report are highlighted in the title itself. The title is a crucial part of marketing strategy. This title has a particular resonance in the United States because there is in general greater freedom of access to information than in the UK. In th UK censorship through the Official Secrets Act ensures that formal state control has a much stronger profile. The possible mechanisms for the suppression of information which can be reviewed through the judicial system immediately gives the film a wider impact. This occurs particularly amongst the American middle classes and the more politically aware minorities who are always concerned with issues of civil liberties and freedom of information. This links to the constitutional construction which has developed a system of 'checks and balances' to ensure that an over-mighty subject abusing power, or corporate abuse of power is apparently always controllable.
The 'romantic melodrama' subplot ensures that there is a happy feel-good ending appropriate for the pluralistic target audience. This ending also gives some depth to a future which can come to terms with tragedy and deliver a future through reconciliation and human choice. Human choice to do what is ethically right is an important component of this type of film. It adds a greater intellectual and critical dimension to a format designed to have wide appeal. Audiences are effectively engaged with some of the ethical and moral dilemmas of the imaginary situation. In this sense the best cinematic output is capable of stimulating audiences to engage in situations which encourage an engagement with issues of citizenship. Frequently the best cinematic output follows a variegated production and marketing strategy and to reduce this purely to genre specificity can fail to reveal the more complex organisational approaches at work.
Cross-Media, Cross-Genre Marketing
Outside the notion of a closed world of film genres media industries have engaged with other media genres to gain marketing leverage. This has been done by identifying the key market for a product and targeting it.
A highly successful example of this was the marketing of Trainspotting (1995) by its distributors Polygram who spent approximately 50% of the production costs on marketing[5]. Polygram employed a design agency with a client-base in pop and rock music. Polygram also entered a business partnership with EMI to launch the soundtrack.
The film was adapted to appeal to trends identified within youth culture such as 'laddism' which was a reaction to feminism in the early 1990s still current in puerile and sexist 'lads mags'. 'Laddism' itself is often read as response to the loss of traditional male jobs in smokestack industries. This links Trainspotting with films such as Brassed Off (1996), Billy Elliot (2000), and The Full Monty (1997). However, the take on work as a form of lost dignity is not a position taken in Trainspotting.
Another cross-media linkage into youth culture was through associations with the growth of 'Brit-Art' and 'Brit-Pop'. Knowing links with 60s culture a youth culture 'golden-age' were self-consciously echoed by groups such as Oasis and Blur. As well as linkages with punk in the anti-heroes style.
'"Trainspotting" shares with Brit-art the combination of a flashy, self-promotional style; a dark and sometimes grotesque humour ...an effort to join cult cachet and mainstream success, intelligence and accessibility, complexity and directness. The most concrete connection between the film and Brit-art is the soundtrack presence of Blur and Pulp' (Smith, 2002: 15 ).
Despite the relatively low budget the successful multi-marketing approach of Trainspotting played on generic plays across media formats to ensure an appealing commercial package that went far beyond simple genre formulations, by recognising the increasing sophistication and multiple audiences now found even in what was previously erroneously and simply dubbed as 'the youth market.'
The production and marketing tendencies coming from Hollywood blockbuster globalised marketing is tending to downplay specific generic aspects of the films. Stardom, the spectacular and a multi-generic framework is the current marketing formula. Specific aspects of a film can be niche marketed to fragmented media audiences as a way of trying to unify audiences in sufficient numbers to visit the cinemas and ensure healthy after-sales from TV licensing, rental and DVD markets. It has been noted by a number of writers [6] that theatre release through the multiplex system is not just simultaneous but often takes several screens at once, with audience choice paradoxically becoming more limited despite the growing number of screens in the UK. Just as the shape of the film market has changed so has the role of genre from an industry perspective.
1 [1]Please note well the linkage here with analysis of the News as a generic form of both TV and Radio.
2 [2]See under 'The Western' section on role of the market for typical audiences of the B movie western.
3 [3]See under ' Methods and Methodology in Film Research / Contextual Criticism'
4 [4]For in depth analysis of this argument see Bukatman 1994.
5 [5]Smith , Murray 2000.
6 [6] Brown, Geoff, 2000; Hanson, Stuart 2000; Todd, Peter 2000.
: 03 Apr 2007 00:04 | Tags: A Level Media Studies Film Genres Film Marketing Film Studies Genre Genre Studies Genre Theory Kinoeye | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem
Genre & Contextual Criticism: The Need for a Multi–perspectival analysis
Genre & Contextual Criticism: the Need for a Multi-perspectival Analysis
Genre criticism within film studies has frequently been concerned with its socio-cultural or contextual significance. Neale (2000) suggests that this is partly because Hollywood's genres have been considered as aesthetically impoverished. This has led to two broad approaches to genre criticism within the tradition of socio-cultural criticism: the 'ritual approach' and the 'ideological approach'. Below these two approaches are contrasted with the less well-known but increasingly important 'production of culture' perspective.
The Ritual Approach
Thomas Schatz has argued that genres can be seen as a form of 'collective cultural expression' and as a vehicle for exploring ideals, cultural values and ideas within American society. This has led critics including Schatz to postulate that some genres take place in different social spaces as a 'symbolic arena of action' such as the cowboy or gangster film. In these films specific social conflicts are acted out.
Where these social conflicts are acted out is described as determinate space. In contrast there are other genres such as the musical or social melodrama which take place in indeterminate space. In other words, the settings do not have to be repeated and the social conflicts are less concerned with control of territory but about a range of social conflicts and their reconciliation and or resolution.
An important aesthetic flaw in Schatz's case can be discerned in relation to the western. Musical-westerns such as Oklahoma (1955), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Calamity Jane (1953) are hybrid generic films. Schatz's theory of genre and its relationship to space don't hold up hold up well against these examples which suggest that the struggle for physical space is superseded by the ability to reconcile differences and attitudes. On this basis these genre hybrids can be considered as predominantly musicals rather than westerns although the settings remain a part of western genre.[1]
Another critique of ritual theory shows that textual analysis alone can lead to very misleading conclusions. This shows that within film studies a number of different research methods need to be used to gain a more accurate picture about the social context of reception and production. If a number of research methods are used together this is called triangulation.
A criticism of ritual theory suggests that many people go to see a very wide range of films and that genre and formulas are no guarantee of success but at best provide limited profits. For example western films were cheap to produce and made small but regular profits from a relatively stable audience and thus provided a low risk bread and butter income stream. The 'B' and 'C' westerns can be considered as highly genre specific and as having low production values and narrow appeal. Perhaps they are better viewed as an early form of niche marketing.
'...evidence from contemporary audience surveys suggests that westerns were produced in large numbers during the studio era despite the fact that they were popular only with rural audiences and adolescent boys and despite the fact that they were actively disliked by a majority of the viewing population as a whole' ( My emphasis: Neale: 2000 :225 ) .
Another major flaw within the ritual theory is its dependence upon the assumption that audiences are representative of the American population as a whole and that this population as a whole is always preoccupied with the same cultural issues and problems. For example, there has been a considerable amount of research into black and ethnic minority representation Hollywood films to show that they were initially addressed to a white only audience.
Another important point is that most genre theory assumes that all the audiences consume genre output in exactly the same way and also that they consume nothing else. In fact there are a number of what has been termed reader-to-genre relationships. Every reader or consumer of a text comes with a different range of preferences and interests which are unique.
Ideological Theory
Ritual theory plays down the idea that Hollywood genres are in some way coercive through the filmic texts. By comparison ideological theory argues that audiences are manipulated by the business interests of Hollywood. Neale argues that there is a danger that these theories will close themselves off by becoming self-confirming. Neale describes theories of this nature as 'Functionalist, reductive and profoundly pessimistic.'[2]
Neale's tone here seems overly dismissive and accords with many other theorists and commentators on 'popular' culture who allow their own personal tastes to subvert their critical faculties. Strangely these criticisms can be applied to both the left and right of the political spectrum.
The term reductive describes a straw figure who imagines that a cultural product contains an ideology which immediately contaminates whoever consumes this product so that they are entirely unable to be uncritical. This is often described as the 'hypodermic' theory of ideology. Undoubtedly there are a few people who hold to this simplistic notion, particularly on the right of the political spectrum, but few educated people hold to this concept.
Of more interest is the concept of 'pessimism'. Many theorists and supporters of cultural populism are concerned to criticise the left-wing members of the Frankfurt School of Social Research which started in Germany between the first and second world wars. The Frankfurt School supporters, especially Theodor Adorno, have been described as 'pessimists'.
Adorno was particularly scathing about the forms of popular culture he discovered in the United States after fleeing from Nazi Germany. For Adorno the cultural output in the United States was nearly as totalitarian in its approach as in Nazi Germany. Adorno has been written off by many commentators suggesting he was exaggerating the conditions of 'popular culture' based upon his dreadful experiences. However, many of those critics are unfamiliar with, have ignored or not researched crucial aspects about culture under the Nazis.
Much of the film culture under the Nazis was genre-based cinema. Many of the films shown in Nazi Germany until 1939 were American ones. As has been pointed out elsewhere by Hake [3] a combination of genre construction and exhibitionary restrictions helped to oil the Nazi cultural machine. There is considerable evidence that the overall Nazi strategy regarding cinema was to be able to offer serious competition to the United States. Remodelling their industry and that of Occupied France was part of the strategy. There is evidence that Germany wanted to develop the French film industry into a sort of Trojan horse to penetrate the cinema markets globally.
Evelyn Erlich argues that '...the French would supply the commercially appealing films that were necessary for the Germans to compete successfully with the Americans on the international market ...The Germans thus saw that by encouraging French film production, they could use French films as an economic wedge to force the purchase of German films' (Erlich quoted Williams, 1992 : 271).
The films produced in occupied France particularly by 'Continental Films' were genre based.
Speaking of 'Continental Films' Alan Williams notes 'Although most of the Studio's productions were relatively conventional exercises in established film genres, they were all carefully constructed and technically proficient' ( Williams, 1992 : 257 ).
It can be seen from these examples that genre production as a strategy was relevant to Nazi thinking. Evidence such as this throws some empirical doubt upon the dismissal of Adorno as a pessimist. Rather it emphasises the importance of analysing ideology and the role it plays for media institutions and their products.
Some see ideology as 'hegemonic', which is a form of social control created through generating a a broadly-based consensus of what counts as 'common-sense'. A controlling role does not entirely stop other cultural products from emerging rather it subverts and controls these through the mechanisms of the market. In the light of this sort of evidence the role and importance of sophisticated theories of ideology in relation to genre and its important role in cultural populism should not be lightly dismissed.
The 'Production of Culture Perspective'
Neale uses work by Kapsis to take into account much wider industry factors which are largely ignored by the ideological and ritual theories. The industrial process for films is best seen as variegated and multiple. Which genres finally get made depends on the assessment of the various gatekeepers within the production system itself and their views of audiences future tastes. The higher echelons of management are acutely aware of the dangers of overproduction. Too many of one type of film could mean audience saturation and a fall off at the box office.
Kapsis did a case study of horror film production in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He discovered that during the earliest phase of production there were favourable reviews and viewing figures which shifted by the late 1980s to adverse criticism. Production was cut although there was still very high demand in video rental outlets. Neither the end of the cycle nor the long-term decline in production:' ....were due to any observable decline in the popularity of horror films among audiences in America, or to any identifiable change in the basic nature of the films themselves' (Neale, 2000 :229) .
Kapsis' study shows that there are complex market research analyses continuously conducted on the market. These are cross-referenced to other institutional factors such as competition from Television - think of the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - or a shift in international markets. Other factors not mentioned in the analysis of Kapsis' work are whether other external factors in the market affected this decision. One thing is certain, any withdrawal from the marketplace shows that senior management have decided that future profitability measured against risk was not acceptable. It also indicates that highly genre specific production is not seen as a premium profit-making part of the enterprise.
All these different forms of contextual criticism have strengths and weaknesses. The ritual approach can be seen to be of relevance in more masculinised genres and it would be interesting to research Schatz's ideas in relation to the war film genre. The musical and the melodrama which seemingly contradict Schatz's theory are 'feminised' genres and emotional and psychic space is more important for women in these films. It has been suggested that there is an ideological issue of property and ownership at the root of these differently gendered genres. This doesn't fully account for the different types of socially constructed space which are privileged. Recent sociological work has argued that much of a masculinised approach to what is described as modernity deals with time and space in a way that is gendered by considering non-domestic space as a male dominated space in which women are allowed as sexualised bodies rather than more fully developed individual people. Domestic space - including arenas such as shopping space and care space such as schools - is set against non-domestic space. The social theorist Rita Felski[4] has noted that there is a fear and loathing of domestic space amongst modernist masculinity of the twentieth century. There is a mistaken concept that the rhythms of daily life are inherently conservative compared to the progressive more linear and apparently less repetitive world inhabited by men.
The production of culture approach highlights the industrial aspects of the film industry. The relative popularity of a few horror films in video-stores measured against the reduction in output of horror movies by the larger films companies indicates that these companies think that the levels of profitability are insufficient and are reducing the numbers of products on the market. The current trends in the market or how the industry wish to reconstruct the audience/ market will be much clearer to them than to the critic. Usually the least successful products are removed which means that within each genre and sub-genre there is a tendency to create a cultic canon of the best films. At the heart of this is a combination of 'quality' in negotiation with economics. Constructing markets is about creating premium products as far as Hollywood is concerned.
1 [1]Also see under 'Iconography as a defining feature of genre'.
2 [2] (Neale, 2000:228 .
3 [3]See the Boxes under 'Mapping Genres'.
4 [4]Felski, Rita. (1999-2000). As yet there has been little analysis of the representation of the everyday in films studies although there is rather more on issues of domestic space. See the commentary later on Thelma and Louise to note the spatial realignment of the film in gender terms.
: 02 Apr 2007 21:44 | Tags: A Level Media Studies Film Film Genres Film Studies Genre Genre Studies Genre Theory Kinoeye Steve Neale | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem
Mapping Genres
Genre can be used as a method of examining the history of narrative film and cinema more closely. The genres which have dominated the film market are mapped out below. These are the major genres which have been identified by genre critics. New and different genres can be added, however most of those listed below and are considered as uncontested genres have been around from very early in the history of cinema. These genres have evolved or hybridised, and in some cases, as with the western, have very nearly come to the end of the genre cycle. The social and cultural need for the western as a genre relevant to the United States in the 21st century rather than the early part of the 20th has disappeared.
Firstly the major Hollywood genres are outlined then an important genre to European cinema is briefly examined, following that the notion of sub-genre is defined.
The Main Hollywood Genres
Neale (2000) has reviewed the development of genre theory in relation to Hollywood and provides a mapping of the development of a range of genres which is drawn upon below. Genre critics and theorists have identified about a dozen major genres in Hollywood. Films which are uncontested as genres include:
The musical
The war movie
The thriller
The crime / gangster movie
The horror movie
The detective film
The social problem film
The teen-pic
The biopic
Action-adventure.
Films which have become very problematic categories and sometimes critically contested categories include: Film Noir and Melodrama.
Newer Genres
The range of available genres is not fixed and new genres are frequently in the process of emergence. For example, the 1960s mood of social and cultural liberalisation as well as the growth of widespread car ownership brought forth a new genre the 'road movie', with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) usually accepted as the first of these. Other well-known films in the genre include Easy-Rider (1969) and more controversially Thelma and Louise. Initially a masculine genre the road movie can be seen as providing a cultural replacement for the western.
Neale's work has provided a mapping of Hollywood genres, other areas of the world have developed their own genres. In India 'Bollywood' signifies a range of epic style romantic dramas, punctuated by musical fantasy sequences. Hong-Kong has been associated with the development of the 'martial-arts' movie made popular in the west through Bruce Lee Kung Fu films. These created a cult following for films starring Jackie Chan. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) signifies a Hollywood industry move into this market by creating a hybrid genre film. Hollywood achieved this by giving the film a much larger budget than the more strongly generic martial arts films. The narrative structure has also been changed to appeal to western audiences used to different narrative structures.
European Historical Costume Dramas: The 'Heritage' Film
By comparison with Hollywood the situation in Europe has been variegated but quite different. Genres have been quite weak often gaining only a localised market. There has been a penchant for the historical costume drama in Europe, which has acted in a variety of ways including reinforced a sense of national identity with inter-war examples being seen in Britain with Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry V111 (1933). This film proved to be one of the most successful British films ever made in terms of breaking into the American market, the holy grail for European film industries. On the basis of this film Korda clinched a distribution deal with United Artists, which seemed like a licence to print a small amount of money. Whilst Korda's heritage film doubled as a marker of national identity and commercial success, the emphasis on national identity in the heritage film was strongly present in a range of feature films made under the Nazis in Germany.
'The main contribution of feature films to the re-emergence of German nationalism lay in the displacement of present concerns into past events and the rewriting of collective history as individual melodrama' (Hake, 2002 : 80).
In Nazi Germany both the content and the exhibitionary context[1] worked together. A range of films being commissioned by the state to promote key concepts of Nazi ideology in propaganda form. Hake (2002) argues that because of these conditions of production these films could be seen as 'a genre to themselves' based upon Nazi constructions of the spectacular.
Nazi spectaculars were 'defined less through particular textual characteristics than through contextual qualities as the transformation of opening nights into public spectacles and the many parallels between the events on the screen and concurrent political developments' (Hake, 2002 : 63).
It is important to emphasise here that very few feature films produced under the Nazi regime were directly propagandistic. Many of the films were generic variants of standard genres such as comedy and romance. Contextual criticism relating to the conditions of viewing is very important here. All narrative feature films were accompanied by newsreels and documentaries where much of the propaganda work took place. Early in the Nazi period Jews were legally excluded from cinemas. Later nobody was allowed into shows after they had started to stop people avoiding the documentaries and the newsreel footage.
The holy grail of breaking into the American market has always been a feature of European cinema. The occasional success has frequently led to hubristic statements from a senior member of the British film establishment about the need to focus on this market which now lies at the feet of a newly revitalised film industry. The latest in this long line at time of writing being Alan Parker the outgoing chairperson of the British Film Institute in the autumn of 2002.
The greatest successes in the American market have been amongst those European filmmakers who have gone to work in America from Hitchcock to Ridley Scott. This has not stopped the European film industry from trying to invent a formula based upon high-production values (read 'big budgets'), utilising some higher profile European stars, and a hybrid or multi-genre mix. La Reine Margot ( France, 1994 ) directed by Patrice Chereau. Accessing the Eurimages fund, part of the European Union, is an example of this.
Based upon a historical novel by Alexander Dumas on the role of Catherine de Medici and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's the film fell into the trap of being over-melodramatic and as a historical film largely uninteresting, although Geoff Andrew offered a reading of La Reine Margot arguing that it was a way of referencing current French anxieties in Bosnia and the break-up of Yugoslavia[2]. Viewed ten years later references to Bosnian break-up seem largely spurious spin which can be seen as cheap opportunism to try and gain audience. This costume melodrama was reversing the trend in France to make more interesting historical films such as The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) These had challenged the way in which history represents the past. Banking upon the heritage genre alone failed to impress American audiences.
The development of other films in this genre such as 1492 (Ridley Scott:1992) about Columbus' journey 'discovering' America went down well in Spain but failed to appeal anywhere else is a good example of cultural policy initiatives prioritising industrial aspirations to increase profitability rather than prioritising the representational needs of citizens and inhabitants of Europe. Thematically La Reine Margot could have said much more about problems of intolerance, fear and identity which has existed through much of its history. The relevance today when the issue of asylum seekers has become so prominent in the latter part of 2002 and early 2003 is far better covered by Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things (2002).
Many of the genres mapped by Neale can be broken down further into a range of sub-genres such as the 'cavalry western', 'slapstick comedy', 'police thriller', 'teen-horror'. These sub-genres often relate to identified market categories. The likelihood is that the more sub-generic or further down the chain of genre influenced film-making a film is, the more formulaic it is likely to be. This is likely to limit its appeal to certain audiences on grounds of content, and quality in terms of plot and characterisation as well as technical proficiency.
It can be seen from the genre mapping provided by Neale that a category such as 'teen-pic' is far more oriented towards a specific market whilst many of the other categories have some elements of openness in their approach.
From this brief mapping of genres it can be seen that a range of influences from different parts of society create, change and render particular genres obsolete or very minor roles.
Investment decisions in what films to produce can be influenced solely by industry perceptions although these are likely to be picking up on social and technological change. The growth of the road movie and the decline of the western being useful examples. Genre such as historical costume dramas can be influenced by government and ruling elites who often have an interest in asserting a particular version of national identity especially if there is a growing feeling of crisis. This influenced both Korda's film on Henry VIII as well as the output of German cinema under the Nazis.
These sort of films have also been made recently in Europe with the backing of the European Union to try and break into the American market by producing higher value cinema. This largely industrially driven strategy of marketing heritage has not been very successful with the US audience. This shows that creating successful genres needs to have a successful domestic marketplace first. This is an area in which Hollywood has been historically very successful.
1 [1]See firstly 'Contextual Criticism' under Methods and Methodology in Film research, secondly 'the Ritual Approach' under 'Genre and Contextual Criticism' ,
2 [2]See Austen, Guy. 1996. P 168 for details on this.
: 02 Apr 2007 18:09 | Tags: A Level Film Studies A Level Media Studies Film Film Genres Film Studies Genre Genre Studies Genre Theory | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem
Genre Bibliography, Filmography and Webliography
Repetition or Revelation: Film Genre and Society. 2003
Bibliography, Filmography & Webliography
Adorno, Theodor. 1994. The Stars Down to Earth. London: Routledge
Altman, Rick. 1997 'Cinema and Genre'. In Nowell - Smith, Geoffrey. Ed : Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford : Oxford University Press
Ang, Ien. 1991. Desperately Seeking The Audience. London: Routledge
Austen, Guy. 1996. Contemporary French Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press
Bordwell, David. Staiger, Janet and Thompson, Kristin. (1985 ) The Classical Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge
Branston, Gill. 2000. Cinema and Cultural Modernity. Milton Keynes : Open University Press
Brown, Geoff. 2000. 'Something for Everyone: British film Culture in the 1990s'. Murphy, Robert. Ed. British Cinema of the 90s. London: BFI
Bukatman, Scott. 1994. Terminal Identity. Durham North Carolina: Duke University Press
Cowie, Elizabeth. 1993 . 'Film Noir and Women'. In Copjec Joan Ed : 1993 : Shades of Noir . London: Verso
Cook, Pam Ed. 1985 (First edition). The Cinema Book . London: British Film Institute
Corrigan, Timothy.1991. A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam . New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press
Christie, Ian. 2003. Interview with Martin Scorsese. Sight and Sound. January. p22
Elsaesser, Thomas. 1997. 'Germany the Wiemar Years' in Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Ed: Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford : Oxford University Press
Felski, Rita. 1999-2000. ' The Invention of Everyday Life'. New Formations, No 39, pp. 15-31
Hake , Sabine. 2002. German National Cinema. London : Routledge
Hanson, Stuart. 2000. ' Spoilt for Choice? Multiplexes in the1990s. Murphy, Robert. Ed. British Cinema of the 90s. London: BFI
Higson, Andrew and Maltby, Richard. 1999. 'Film Europe' and 'Film America' : An Introduction'. In Higson, Andrew and Maltby Richard. 'Film Europe' and 'Film America'. Exeter: Exeter University Press
<!--[if !supportLists]-->Hofman, Katja. 2002. 'Does my gun look big in this?' Sight and Sound March
Katz, Ephraim. 2001 4th Ed . Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia. Basingstoke : Macmillan
<!--[if !supportLists]--> <!--[endif]-->Mark Le Fanu. 2003. 'The dream life of architects'. <!--[endif]-->Sight and Sound March
Luckett, Moya. 2000. 'Image and Nation in 1990s British Cinema'. In Murphy, Robert. British Cinema in the 90s. London: British Film Institute
<!--[if !supportLists]--> <!--[endif]-->McNab, Geoffrey. 2002. Review of Charlotte Gray. Sight and Sound . March. p 41.
Moretti, Franco. 2001. 'Planet Hollywood'. New Left Review, Volume 2 No 9 May / June. pp 90-101
Neale, Steve. 2000. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge
Neale, Steve and Krutnik Frank : 1990 : Popular Film and Television Comedy: Routledge : London
Nichols, Bill . 1976. 'Introduction'. In Nichols Bill Ed: Movies and Methods . California University Press : Berkley
Nichols, Bill. 1985. 'Introduction'. In Nichols Bill Ed : Movies and Methods: Volume Two . California University Press : Berkley
Nowell - Smith, Geoffrey. Ed: 1997 : Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford : Oxford University Press
Pendakur, Manjunath and Subramanyam, Radha. 2002. 'Indian Cinema Beyond National Borders'. In Jordan, Tim and Pile, Steve eds. 2002. Social Change. Oxford: Blackwell
Prawer, S.S. 2002. The Blue Angel. London: BFI
<!--[if !supportLists]-->Silverstone, R. 1994. Television and Everyday Life. London: Routledge
Smith, Murray. 2002. Trainspotting. London. British Film Institute.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1997. 'The Fantastic'. In Nowell - Smith, Geoffrey. Ed : Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford : Oxford University Press
Street, Sarah. 1997. British National Cinema. London : Routledge
Sturken, Marita. 2000. Thelma and Louise. London: British Film Institute
Tasker, Yvonne. 'Authorship and contemporary film culture'. Tasker, Yvonne. Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers . Routledge : London
Todd, Peter. 2000. 'The British Film Industry in the 1990s'. Murphy, Robert. Ed. British Cinema of the 90s. London: BFI
Tudor, Andrew. 1976. 'Genre and Critical Methodology'. Nichols Bill Ed: Movies and Methods : California University Press : Berkley
Williams, Alan. 1992. Republic of Images: A History of French Film-making. Cambridge Mass: Harvard
Bibliographical Links to books not used but clearly important for Genre Theory
For teachers / FE Lecturers. The BFI Education and Resources on Genre:
Link to the Wallflower Press' useful 'Short Cuts' Series Number 33 | FILM GENRE From Iconography to IdeologyBarry Keith Grant
Refiguring American Genres:
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6928.html
International Journal of Communication 1 2007. Online review of Daniel Biltereyst & Philippe Meers, (eds.), Film/TV/Genre, Ghent Academia Press, 2004, 209 pp, €22,00
(paperback).
http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/31/4
Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition
http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780198159834
Films mentioned in the text by title and year of release.
Bladerunner (1982)
Black Widow (1987)
Body Heat (1981)
Bonnie & Clyde (1967)
Brassed Off (1996)
Brief Encounter (1945)
Calamity Jane (1953)
Charlotte Gray (2002)
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Dirty Pretty Things (2002
East is East (1999)
Gangs of New York (2003)
La Reine Margot (1994)
Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Life is Beautiful (1998)
Metropolis (1925)
Modern Times (1936)
Monty Python's Life of Brian (1978)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Mulholland Drive ( 2001)
Muriel's Wedding (1994)
Night at the Opera (1935)
North by North West (1959)
Oklahoma (1955)
Phantom Engine (1935)
Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)
Psycho (1960)
Saviour ( 1997)
Secrets and Lies (1996)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Soldier Blue (1970)
Terminator the Last Judgement (1991)
The Blue Angel (1929-1930)
The Pelican Brief (1993)
The Return of Martin Guerre (1983)
The Searchers (1956)
The Thin Red Line (1998)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Thelma and Louise (1991)
Trainspotting (1995)
Preface: At time of writing I didn't use the web for research purposes however this section will be developed as it is now a crucial part of everyday research with JISC backed organisations such as Intute organising along the lines of genre.
Link to Intute
http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/cgi-bin/browse.pl?id=artifact666
Links to New Left Review Article by Franco Moretti who as a literary professor considers the role of genre in literature. This article is a later one than the one on NLR Series 2 Volume 5 'Markets of the Mind.
http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2440
'Markets of the Mind' link http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2273
Another link to a Moretti article this time considering cultural geography and film genres. (Very interesting to me anyway :-) )
Link to Article by Tom O'Regan on the Crocodile Dundee phenomenon
http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/film/Croc.html
Link to Carol Laseur's honours dissertation Chapter 1 of The Field of Genre & Australian filmic Texts. several other chapters are also available online making an excellent open access resource!
http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/film/laseur/chap1.html
Link to: Favorite Films and Film Genres As A Function of
Race, Age, and Gender from the Journal of Media Psychology:
http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/media3.html
An Introduction to Genre Theory by Daniel Cahndler from Aberystwyth University:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre.html
Link to the Goethe Institute on documentary films:
http://www.goethe.de/kue/flm/thm/flg/en964789.htm
: 02 Apr 2007 16:19 | Tags: Bibliography Film Genre Books Film Genres Film Studies Filmography Genre Genre Studies Genre Theory Webliography | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem
An Introduction to Film Genre
Introduction to Genre
Preface. Please note that biblographic and film references can be found under the bibliography research tag in the sidebar "Repetition or Revelation....".
Genre has become a key way of thinking about film from both industrial and critical perspectives. Superficially the concept of genre seems straightforward, however, this introduction seeks to show that it is a rather more complex but also more fascinating concept than simple groupings of similar films. Genre can be used as a research methodology it can also be used as a marketing and production strategy by cultural industries. Below is a comment from cultural critic Franco Moretti who is trying to map out the extent of the penetration of the global film market by Hollywood. Moretti stresses that his methodology includes the use of genres.
...if you look at a newspaper, or walk into a video-store, the reality of film genres literally leaps at you, as each film is being sold as something: a comedy, a film noir, science fiction, whatever. Taxonomy is not a scholastic pastime, it's a product of the film industry itself, which makes it easier to recognise the film, and to buy the ticket ' (My emphasis on second emphasis. Moretti, 2001 : 92-93).
Moretti understands genre as the construction of a range of mainstream media industry products which function to safeguard the future of the industry, by maximising and controlling the marketplace. These cultural products encourage potential consumers to enter into a pact with the industry. The industry effectively offers pre-packaged products which are familiar enough to ensure the likelihood of being pleasurable. These products are also instantly recognisable as representing a particular type of pleasure. The products are sophisticated enough to ensure to be distinct from other similar media products, by giving an impression of difference.
Reducing Business Risks
Business is about maximising profits and reducing commercial risk. The ability to create and package a film which is likely to have a reasonably predictable market is part of the skills-base of that industry. Both the potential audience and exhibitors recognise a media product by its generic likeness. Cinema chains aim to maximise audiences. They can tell from past box-office records how well particular types of film have done. Films seen as 'difficult' by not being easy to categorise into a genre, will be hard to distribute. If they seem too demanding of audiences they will be left to the small independent cinema outlets and be branded as 'art cinema' which for some commentators acts as a sort of miscellaneous genre category for 'difficult subject matter'. 'World Cinema' is another rather strange category found in the video shops. The sections are usually comprised of a few martial arts movies alongside one or two films considered as canonical or fundamental to film conceived of as art.
This is not meant to imply that films classified within genres are necessarily bad. Some will be fairly low budget but clever enough to play with genre categories to escape from the prison of genre and take its audience with it. Ridley Scott's controversial Thelma and Louise (1991) often described as a 'road movie' broke through a genre mould for example. In the case study later in the book it is argued Thelma and Louise can be considered as having a 'hybrid' generic form. The section also suggests the possibility that considering Thelma and Louise in relation to Hollywood-style genres is itself a limiting category. The possibility that it should be considered as simply within the traditional literary generic category of tragedy is put forward.
Describing a film from the perspective of genre can be limiting but it can also serve to subvert the distribution system with a more radical product that might otherwise have failed to make headway. For example, war films can end up being critical or supportive of war and as media products they can be made better or worse than other movies in terms of engaging the audience as a piece of drama. Robert Altman's excellent M*A*S*H (1970) was a well-made and well timed antiwar film which when produced went straight to the heart of the major political crisis facing the USA in the late 1960s, the war in Vietnam. As a typical war movie it doesn't rate. No heroic battle scenes, rather it was comprised from satirical social commentary about war and wartime culture.
Origins of the Term Genre
It is useful at this stage to get an idea of the origins of the term genre for it is a critical category taken from other art forms and it has developed its own meanings within cinema.
The term 'genre' comes from the French meaning kind or type.
The notion of genre has played an important role in the categorisation and evaluation of literature.
During the 1890's films were usually classified by length and topic. Terms such as 'fight pictures' or 'story film' were used.
After about 1910 the number of films made finally outstripped the demand for them. The growth of this competition meant that genre started to be used by the industry to identify and differentiate the films: 'early film genre terminology served as shorthand communication between film distributors and exhibitors' (Altman, 1996 : 276).
At first the genre language of film borrowed heavily from literary and theatrical language before developing its own path. Prior to the 1st World War terms which related to the production practices such as 'trick film', 'animated film', 'chase film' were used.
After the First World War genre terminology became much more specialised. The two major genres of film were melodramas and comedies and a range of sub-genres appeared which related to these thus : ' 'slapstick', ' farce', and burlesque' became separate genres rather than simply types of comedy' (Altman, 1996 : 276).
Functions of Genre within the Cinematic Process
Genre has been seen as an important concept for each of the levels of the structure of cinema which the sections of this ebook elaborate upon in more detail:
Production. The concept of genre provided a template for production decisions. It was a form of tacit knowledge among members of the production team which laid out the general parameters of style and content.
Distribution and Marketing. The notion of genre was an important way of differentiating products. It became a mode of communication between producer and distributor, and between distributor and exhibitor. It also helped film reviewers, often non-specialists, place the product and measure it against other similar products. Reviewing is an essential part of the marketing of a film. In terms of distribution categories all films belong to some genre. It could be loose, such as 'art-house movie', or quite 'tight' such as 'teen-pic' movie. It immediately tells the exhibitor whether they are likely to be interested.
Consumption. Describes standard patterns of spectator involvement. The idea of genre facilitates communication between exhibitor and audience. Importantly this works between members of the audience and potential audience. Generic ideas create a ready-made vocabulary of concepts to describe the nature and style of the film at a relatively simple level. This can attract larger audiences.
Those critics who have worked upon genre in depth argue that some films are: 'Self-consciously produced and consumed according to (or against ) a specific generic model' (Altman, 1997 : 277). This book doesn't disagree with that approach however it does consider that films along with any other cultural products which have been developed with a commercial formula in mind frequently do this to cover up for lack of skills, imagination, finance or a combination of these elements.
The argument is developed particularly in relation to Hollywood that there is an auteur-genre continuum along which the budget and personnel of a film are chosen to meet an industry created audience 'need'. Higher budget films are less formulaic and appeal to wider audiences many of which are culturally and intellectually sophisticated and who are not interested in low quality films. In these films stars and high production values are as important as any genre assignations.
In terms of national cinemas, film industries which are just starting out are weak on establishing genre films. Once an industry is more mature it will have established a generic output such as comedies for example. Hollywood has become hegemonic or dominant at producing strong genres imposing them on world-wide audiences. Genres from other national industries have generated fewer films with a more limited audience and are often strongly influenced by Hollywood genres.
Growth of Genres
As a more generically-based production system grows so there is often a shift from defining genre mainly by content to: 'genre definitions based on repeated plot motifs, recurrent image patterns, standardised narrative configurations and predictable reception conventions' ( Altman, 1997 : 277).
The use of genre films combined with more industrialised methods of production became very important in the rescue of the one-time largest European film-making company UFA in Germany. Originally the directors were allowed a great deal of artistic freedom which produced fine films now considered canonical. The artistic freedom meant that there were huge budget and time overruns which meant in Germany that UFA was threatened with bankruptcy by Deutsche Bank unless it changed its methods of production. New management methods based upon Hollywood industrial practices were introduced. Finance was separate from and in control of production. New filmmakers were introduced who concentrated upon genre development.
Efficient genre directors such as Karl Hartl, Gustav Ucicky and above all Hans Schwarz put UFA back in the black, the latter with six films, among them some of the biggest box-office successes until then'. (My emphasis :Thomas Elsaesser, 1997 : 150)
This German example shows how important the development and maintenance of the concept of genre is, to mainstream film production. The example also supports the argument that the quality of these films was instantly forgettable. Few, other than professional researchers, now have an interest in this type of film. In a world overdosing from 'informational output' the criteria of quality seems increasingly important given the limited consumption time available.
Elsaesser's position highlights how the institution of cinema is an industrial process which requires investment and profits to operate within a capitalist oriented 'free-market' system of production. Developing an understanding of the various aspects of genre takes on a particularly important role in helping us to understand the range of film choice and the type of content which is regularly available.
Other institutional factors creating and controlling genres
Content of course is not entirely limited to genre demands. Censorship and other governmental priorities regarding cultural policy can effect what genres are produced and how they are produced. This is particularly the case in countries which take a stance in their cultural policy which is concerned to rise above the market in some way. This can be the case in authoritarian regimes, or else in countries such as France which have prioritised a defence of a well established national cinema . As a consequence it tends to make more individualised films.
Genre also exists as a critical construction which can invent genres by identifying content and cultural linkages. It also exists as an industry practice. As such the concept of genre is a double-edged weapon which can be turned to the advantage of the film industry or against the film industry.
The complexity of film noir is a case in point. Film Noir was not an industry invented category but a critical category emerging from French critics in the aftermath of war when they saw some of the US thrillers which had been produced during the war but banned in France. Since that time many books and articles have been generated debating whether the genre exists at all and what the limits of this 'genre' might be. Critics suggested that the 'genre' proffered a critique of urban American modern society and the 'American Dream'.
Film noir has been considered as too complex to deal with in depth in an introductory work. It is worth noting that the trajectory of what started as a critical category into a commercial category is unusual. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s a range of 'knowing' films were deliberately produced as neo-noirs. Deliberately copying the visual style and frequently violent content of the original films and frequently having intensely pessimistic endings these films were targeted at a 'knowing' critical market. This shows that even the critical thought can be drawn into the marketplace.
The case of film noir highlights the shifting relationship between the industry and the critics in which the boundaries between industry, critic and audience rather than being fixed are being continuously redefined and contested. Originally genre meant films which produced by a cultural industry primarily to make money rather than to open up new ways of knowing and thinking about the world. The concept of genre can be used critically to bring into existence challenges to these ways of thinking by making different links between films to the industry. The idea of "Heritage Cinema" from British critics in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s saw costume dramas and literary adaptations as a conservative 'genre' which served the aims of the then current Conservative government well. It then also shows that the original criticism of society can itself be turned into a commercial product perhaps based upon irony.
The relationship between the industry, the critics and the audience is an asymmetrical one. The industry holds most of the powerful cards. It can always control and even take advantage of criticism. Whilst the industry must create audiences by seducing viewers it is always on the industry terms rather than the viewers'.
Thinking of genre-based films as an asymmetrical arena of cultural negotiation can be useful. The multiple experiences of viewing publics who are differently positioned in terms of class, ethnicity, gender and territorial location. Because this cultural arena is subject to negotiation, the parameters of genre are constantly shifting as the industry tries to retain and recreate its audiences. This book has concentrated upon the dual aspects of genre as a tool of the film industry and as methodological way of researching the importance of film as a whole
The original book was set out in three main sections. Firstly it mapped out key genres and examined general aspects of genre theory touched upon above. It then proceeded to examine the wider cultural and industrial context in which genre operates. The final main section dealt with more specific genre areas, offering a few readings and possibilities for the reader to develop. This blog will by the nature of the way it is built differ slightly. A contents page with links will be added after the other sections have been posted.
Genres themselves are always in a state of flux, emerging and dying away as wider social conditions change. There is a mutual performativity, operating through the asymmetrical communications system, between industry and consumer. The asymmetric weighting by the very nature of genre is in favour of the industry. This in itself can be seen as a part of the greater hegemonic process by which liberal democracies function.
Cinema organised and funded in ways which represent the global complexity of our social, cultural and economic lives in different ways has been possible to only a very limited extent. The study of genre necessarily needs to consider the contextual aspects of society and its relationship to cultural production rather than be limited to pure textual analysis. These kind of issues are raised in the second part.
Many cultural critics defend cinematic genres, but more critical cinema could, and should be available. When no alternative is offered it is difficult to see beyond the horizons of what is culturally possible when these horizons are policed by genre norms. Genre can be a beneficial critical category up to a point. All films can be described by highly generalised generic categories such as comedy or tragedy. Genre boundaries instituted by the industry frequently act to limit the cultural imaginations of audiences. This attitude discourages risk-taking as producers and consumers. This is because genre is by its very nature intimately bound up with the construction of a sophisticated marketplace organised to promote certain cultural products at the expense of others.
Issues of what is now being understood as cultural citizenship are not often raised within film and cinema studies. A useful critical perspective to be constantly thinking of is the question of whether cinema alongside other cultural products produced primarily for profit is in the best interests of society as a whole and offers a wide diversity of representations of the society in which the viewers are based. Perhaps a cultural production system which is less market-oriented and more citizen oriented is what is required for advanced democracies?
: 02 Apr 2007 14:48 | Tags: A Level Film Studies A Level Media Studies Film Genres Film Studies Franco Moretti Genre Genre Studies Genre Theory Kinoeye | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem
Making a Genre Reading of Thelma & Louise
Making a Genre Reading of Thelma and Louise
This posting is a section of my book on genre Repetition or Revelation: Film Genre and Society 2003. Coventry: Kino-eye. This is primarily aimed at year 1 undergraduates and A2 students as well as interested general readers. Other sections will be posted onto the blog in due course. This is all fully copyrighted material please ensure that any references are properly acknowledged.
This section examines how a methodology (in this case a feminist methodology analysing the film from the perspective of feminism) can be applied to make a genre based reading of a film. The case study here is based upon Thelma and Louise, directed by Ridley Scott.The article also reviews and compares Thelma & Louise with a range of typical Hollywood genres. The conclusion to the article questions whether even placing Thelma and Louise within a complex of Hollywood films is adequate to the task of explaining why it works so effectively and appeals to a wide range of audiences.
It is argued here that the film is a tragicomedy hybrid genre with the emphasis being ultimately placed upon the tragic. While it can be meaningful to relate the film to other Hollywood output it seems more appropriate to view it in the pantheon of tragedy in a cross media and trans-historical way.
That the film can be read as a tragicomedy isn't the only possible reading and in my piece on Thelma & Louise I question whether the film is possibly best understood as a feminist dream or fantasy.
Thelma and Louise
Marita Sturken in a short monograph on Thelma and Louise in the British Film Institute Modern Classics series uses a feminist methodology, applying this through the lens of genre based analysis to provide a reading which differs from the readings which many reviewers, audiences and scholars have made. As the methodology section points out, to use particular methods to inform critical analysis is to examine a cultural object from a particular perspective to enhance our ways of looking at the world and to thus increase our knowledge about social reality.
To talk in terms of providing readings is not to say that something is necessarily "true" or "false". It functions to open out different perspectives and possibilities concerning the object of our enquiry. The first question to be asked when considering Sturken's views is to consider whether she has used the combination of genre and feminist methodologies effectively to provide a 'strong reading' or a 'weak reading' of the film.
Below there is a synopsis of Sturken's reading of Thelma and Louise concentrating on the points where she has analysed the film through both genre and feminist methods. To gain a thorough understanding of her points it would be helpful to see some of the following films:
Thelma & Louise : Used as a core film for analysis this should be seen at least twice.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
Body Heat (1981).
Genre 'Bending'
Sturken (2000) has argued that Thelma and Louise is strongly reliant upon 'bending' traditional genres. She argues that the film is established as setting the viewer up for a light-hearted 'screwball comedy' of two women away for a weekend free from unsatisfactory lives and relationships.
It is crucial to the film's relationship to genre that 'Thelma and Louise' do not set out to become criminals, they become them unintentionally ...It is this shift from screwball comedy to buddy movie to road movie to outlaw movie, that gives this film its hybrid genre status, but also , importantly makes it a rereading of several classic film genres'. (Sturken , 2000 : 23
Sturken points out that many critics have tried to make a reading of Thelma and Louise using genre based methods. She proceeds to argue that part of the films cleverness is the playing upon these codes.
Thelma and Louise' has been situated by numerous film scholars in a wide range of genres, from the fairy-tale and the screwball comedy to the rape-revenge film and the buddy movie. In deploying many of the conventions of a variety of genres, the film can be seen as both naively and shrewdly playing off these codes and formulas. Primary among its references is the outlaw film, which has a long tradition in American cinema as both westerns and road movies ( Sturken , 2000 : 23 ).
Sturken notes that the outlaw has been both an icon and a mythology of a person who defied the system and brought vicarious pleasure to the law-abiding citizen. Thelma and Louise plays off outlaw conventions established in the 1960s through the star vehicles of Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid These films affirmed a sixties version of the genre reiterating the conventions within a sixties ideology of liberation which can be seen as being aimed at the youth market of the time?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a mixture of crime, screwball humour and a buddy movie. In Thelma and Louise there is a gradual switch in the film between the characters with Thelma becoming the more confident and determined one of the pair. In outlaw films other characters appear but must be relatively peripheral in order to affirm the primary relationship. Another feature of outlaw films is that the characters are understood to be on the way to their fate and get stripped of their possessions along the way. The fact that they are accidental criminals is essential to the reworking of the genre. They are crimes of impulse which become crimes of necessity.
Thelma and Louise lose the accoutrements of traditional femininity and take on several signifiers of masculinity and the road during the film. Their dress code changes with frilly items being replaced by jeans and an engagement ring is exchanged for a hat. Compared with the male characters of the sixties who are on a journey of nostalgia, their journey is 'inexorably away from the past' (Sturken, 2000 : 31).
The Use of Space and Place
There is an iconic use of space within the film carefully avoiding 'the road' constructed in the image of MacDonald's for an older style of America. Ridley Scott has commented on his deliberate choice to do this:
I felt it was better to lean to the vanishing face of America, which is Route 66 rather than the new face of America , which is malls and concrete strips(Ridley Scott quoted Sturken , 2000 : 36 ).
The romantic even nostalgic atmosphere is also enhanced by the soundtrack of steel guitar from German composer Hans Zimmer. It is thus worth considering whether this is a European take on America. This is a generic landscape which moves to a culminating romantic icon of the canyon in Moab, Utah and then to the lower reaches of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Moab has been the site of many John Ford westerns, science fiction films and Easy Rider. Here, the emulation of a visual style can be argued as generic. There is also a play on the recuperation of these male spaces by women.
A Shifting Multi-generic Film
There is little doubt that Thelma and Louise is a complex film and reading it through the lens of a genre throws up interesting questions. Whilst Sturken has categorised the film as a genre hybrid, it is worth considering whether it can be considered as more of a multi-generic film. The reason for suggesting this is that the complex shifts which are made throughout the film moving through a range of genres is a little different to being a combination of two or three genres. The film has its comic parts, but it is not considered as a comedy or even a comedy-thriller. Below the generic complexity of the genres the film has been associated with are explained and examined.
Road Movies
The classic road movies are about male privilege, the right to hit the road without worrying about children or destination. Women weren't the protagonists of road movies, rather women were often what men were running away from. Corrigan (1991) describes the classic road movie as having 4 defining features:
Breakdown of the family unit
The context in which events are acted upon characters and obstacles being constantly put in the way
Protagonist who is readily identified with their means of transportation
A focus upon men in the absence of women.
Many critics have credited Thelma and Louise with reviving the road movie genre and opening it up to new identities. Thelma & Louise follows the tradition of road movies where the protagonists are most happy when they are actually on the road. As soon as they stop they get into trouble. The film continually reiterates the duality of space contrasting the open road with a claustrophobic domestic environment. This is a reversal of the traditional theme of men riding through a landscape which is usually coded as woman/ nature.
The men in the film are forced to participate in female codes of behaviour. The men are forced to wait for them whilst previously the women were forced to wait on them. This sense of movement versus stasis is achieved through the technique of crosscutting from the car racing through the landscape making whistle-stops, to the unchanging domestic interior for example. This functions to reinforce the stereotype of domesticity and interiors as female non-progressive space.
The Buddy Movie
The film embraces a basic aspect of the buddy movie which is that men understand each other better than they understand their women. The primary relationship in this film is between the women who understand each other's ways of being in the world better than their men do.
The Screwball Comedy
Screwball comedy is a genre which was very popular in the 1930s. It is usually based upon the clever sexual banter of a couple who don't know that they are supposed to be together, but who eventually find their way to each other through a set of foibles, mistaken identities and other plot ploys. Classic example Frank Capra's It Happened One Night.
In Thelma & Louise screwball humour is apparent in the scene when the motorcycle cop pulls them over. There is a panic mode akin to that used in screwball comedy. The film plays with the audience using suspense when the cop is put into the boot Thelma tells him to 'be sweet to em' (his wife and kids) in a screwball mode. Thelma's relentless optimism 'is central to providing the film's screwball tone' ( Sturken, 2000: 60 ).
Female Revenge Film
Thelma & Louise is often interpreted as a "female revenge film". This is a genre construction which could be seen as misogynistic (misogyny is hatred of women). 'Female revenge' films feature female characters in which the potential of women for violence is contained within plot scenarios that either demonise them or destroy them in some way (Fatal Attraction, Body Heat, Black Widow (1987). They are films in which femme fatales wreak havoc on the lives of innocent men. The films above are often considered by some critics as neo-noirs.
However, this isn't a revenge movie for past acts committed against them, rather Thelma and Louise are on a search for liberation from oppressive patriarchal structures (patriarchy is where everything is ruled by norms established by men).
Revenge is not the motivating factor in their decisions - escape to better social conditions is. Despite the obvious histories of forms of sexual abuse the attempted rape on Thelma and the unspeakable past of Louise there is no talk of revenge. There were plenty of opportunities for a range of violent acts on men. They could have blown away the lorry driver after all as well as the policeman. The hitchhiking lover who stole their money could have been murdered. Those critics and reviewers following that line of thinking were clearly motivated by something other than clear analysis.
For this writer at least there is something unsatisfactory about trying to slot Thelma and Louise into various complexes of Hollywood genres. My initial view was that the film is based upon classical tragic drama and even after reading Sturken's analysis my view is unchanged. Fate dealt Thelma and Louise a cruel hand and ethically they had decided that they would take a certain course in which the options continually narrowed until death was the only option.
Where this film differs from the tragic classic genre of theatre is that the heroes of the film are everyday characters who had started out on an everyday weekend outing which was pretty much the highlight of lives which were very narrow. This is very different from the Greek tragedies or those of Shakespeare which were based on powerful people making and taking important decisions.
Thelma and Louise appears more like a popular version of this very old generic form and in that sense it can be a useful description of the film. Whether that would have proved attractive to the potential audiences in terms of marketing is impossible to say.
Sturken's analysis of genre hybridity seems to relate strongly to the comments Neale has made concerning 'New Hollywood' critics who, inspired by 'post-modern' thinking, are seeking 'hybridity' under every stone. Neale points out that it is important to distinguish between hybridity and allusion to other films often achieved through a sort of pastiche. Arguably Thelma and Louise remains a classic tragedy rich in allusions to well known Hollywood films. Thinking of the film in these terms seems more likely to open up questions among the audience about the nature of the human condition at the time the film was mad
From my own perspective which is keen to engage with concerns of cultural citizenship and the deeper contextual meanings which may be contained within the content it does seem that the critical debates revolving around genre have failed to get to the heart of this film. Indeed, trying to make out that the film is rape-revenge movie is a reading perverse to the point of misogyny.
The genre readings of the film don't appear to open out any useful insights about the relationship of the film to the film industry of the time in terms of marketing or reasons for the film in the first place.
The film is taken as a classical tragedy transposed from the standard conventions of this wider genre from the character in high society to the background of two ordinary women somewhere in rural America. The plot hinges on an ordinary weekend trip featuring a dramatic turning point where a brutal prior experience combined with the arrest of a brutal act which temporarily prompts an act of transgression born of uncontrollable emotions.
From that point on the tragedy unfolds. The breakthrough of the film that two ordinary women can become the subject of tragedy signifies that Hollywood can play a progressive role in raising deeper questions about social reality. Arguably, it is the fact that the film is very weak in Hollywood genre terms which allowed it to have such an effect on a wide range of audiences.
The film's form makes it more than just a tragedy however. Starting in a light-hearted vein and having recourse to a range of comic moments which serve to alleviate what would be a dour fatalistic narrative. The blowing up of a petrol tanker, the near slapstick of the incompetent husband stepping in pizza, the turning of the tables upon the traffic-cop, and the insertion of a Rasta cyclist serve as comic high-points, which also function to highlight the underlying implications of the story which is a strong critique of individual violence against omen and a critique of institutionalised sexism which fails to deal with this.
To engage in arcane debates about Hollywood generic affiliations risks either scholasticism or critics who find the implications of the film too challenging trying to close down the deeper questions which the film is trying to raise. This means that the major points the film is raising for discussion can be obscured. Seen as a tragicomedy this film justifiably can be described as a modern classic because it is modern in its content and classic in the way that it is modelled on a traditional literary genre.
: 02 Apr 2007 11:59 | Tags: A Level Film Studies A Level Media Studies Film Genres Genre Genre Studies Genre Theory Road Movies Thelma And Louise Women And Film | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem
Spione, 1928: Dir. Fritz Lang
Eureka DVD Cover for Spione
This post is currently what I'm describing as a 'phase one' post. A synopsis and contextual and critical comments will be added at a later date. Through the webliography below this post thus serves to act as a resource page. This will allow prospective course members and other visitors to conduct some basic research into the relevant film. For further research you may also consuly the relevant bibliography. Please use the bibliographies tag in the sidebar to access this resource.
At the time of writing the following sites I consider the best researched academically or else are present because of the quality of their links. This is searched down to page 30 of Google. Overall it appears as though Spione is very underwritten.
BFI Magic of Lang Link
http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/lang/magic.html
BFI Lang filmography
http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/lang/filmography.html
BFI dtabase entry on Spione
http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/352682?view=credit
BFI Sight & sound Article by Thomas Elsaesser on Lang:
http://secure.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/43/
Senses of Cinema link to Fritz Lang Article by Daniel Shaw
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/lang.html
Link to site about Fritz Arno Wagner one of the leading Weimar cinematographers who did the cinemaphotogrphy for Spione:
http://www.cinematographers.nl/GreatDoPh/wagner.htm
At the time of writing the following sites I consider the best researched academically or else are present because of the quality of their links. This is searched down to page 10 of Google.
: 30 Mar 2007 16:27 | Tags: European Cinema Film Genres Fritz Lang German Cinema Kinoeye Open Studies Spione Summer Term Films 2007 Weimar And Nazi Cinema Weimar Cinema | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem
Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, 1922: Dir. Fritz Lang
Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler
Eureka DVD Dr. Mabuse the Gambler
The film and DVD are divided into two parts. The first DVD is 155 minutes long with the second being 115 miutes long. The DVD material is licensed from Transit films who painstakingly reconstructed the film as well as possible. Transit are the firm behind many of the German Weimar films which Eureka are distributing in the UK. The quality is very good. The newly commissioned soundtrack is very effective and goes well with the film unlike say the Michael Nyman soundtracked version of Man With a Movie Camera for example. The subtitling isn't up to the standards of many of the Eureka films with a clearly literal translation from the German which is certainly apparent to native English speakers.
On the matter of translation, the film is marketed in the UK under the title of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler. This is not the best translation of the title for although Mabuse makes plenty of money targeting wealthy gamblers he is anything but a gambler, rather he is a 'control freak'. The meaning of term
spieler as player is far more appropriate, for Mabuse likes to play with people as much for the power and the pleasure in it as for the money. I shall thus refer to the film as player / gambler to emphasise this tension in meaning.
The film was originally from the Dekcla Bioskop group Uco-Film GMBH of Berlin. It was produced by Erich Pommer.
Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Thea von Harbou German version) & Fritz Lang (not accredited)
Director of Photography : Carl Hoffman
Dr. Mabuse: Rudolf Klein-Rogge
State Prosecutor von Wenke: Bernhard Goetze.
Below ihn confrontation with Klein-Rogge's Mabuse
Dancer Cara Carozza: Aud Egede Nissen (Norwegian)
Below surrounded by flowers after her nightclub performance
The first part is called "A portrait of out time: The Player/Gambler". Certainly it refers to the post-war mayhem which occurred in Germany and also many other parts of Europe in the aftermath of World War One. It must be remembered that there were attempts at social revolution or at the very least serioius industrial strife in many countries outside of Germany in the early 1920. As Lutticken below comments, the plot is 'meandering'. This is largely because it is more of a filmed series of separate stories which are held together after the first act through the character of the state prosecutor. For those who don't have the time to take all the film in one sitting (who has nowadays?) then it can very successfully be watched as a series of 'acts' which are more akin to watching 'Life on Mars' or some other TV series which is linked by an underlying thread.
Some episodes seem disassociated from others. The first act centered upon creating and exploiting a Stock Market rumour had little to do with the illegal gambling episodes which dominate much of the rest of the first part of the film. Similarly the forging of dollars using blind people to package them seems dissociated from the key plot. Rather it is a passing reference to certain types of illegality and allowed a wry comment on the state of European currencies of the time against the successful Amercian economy but it isn't developed further. Another theme which isn't developed is the pyschoanalytic aspect of the work. Clearly a reference to Freudian ideas by then becoming more widely known. Freud of course had access to many of the Viennese upper middle classes particualrly dealing with hysteria which Freud comes to understand and a societal and gender issue. For Lang it provides some sort of excuse for Mabuse to gain access to the Countess' mansion although the audience would have largely forgotten the presentation Mabuse made presumably to gain a reputation amongst the well off who were his primary target.
It is this aspect of the representation of the upper-middle classes which is of interest and might have influenced Kracauer's analysis of the film in his From Caligari to Hitler. There are many displaced and slightly confused upper class people who seem to have plenty of money but no real sense of purpose. There is a class idenity which seems to have ben fragmented by the war and subsequent relovuitions and uprisings. It is this vacuum which Mabuse is exploiting mercilessl. It is as though the elites are behaving like Ostriches. We don't see them represented as industrialists or leaders politically or socially. The State prosecutor seems to be acting as an isolated representative of the new social order struggling to gain legitimacy. The analysis provided by Kracauer which is quoted below is focusing on Mabuse as a tyrant, and when Mabuse talks of excercising will to play with people you could start to agree with Kracauer. But Mabuse seems to like playing for the sake of playing, it is his raison d'etre. One could almost see it as a self-parody of cinema itself with the incessant round of different costumes to 'entrtain' people.
Unlike tyrants who need to be seen as a part of their superior charisma Mabuse goes to extreme lengths not to be seen. Only a few close associates know exactly what he looks like. Mabuses' secret of creating mayhem is based upon invisibility. There are similarites there with 'M'. No the problem is legitimacy and an apparent problem of social anchoring. The presence of Mabuse requires an absensce of legitimacy. It is again a theme which Lang returns to in 'M' and is perhaps a preoccupation of von Harbou as a scriptwriter. Interesting of course that she stays in Nazi Germany where Hitler for a short time at least seemed to have solved the legitimation crisis. Like Mabuse 'M' too can strike fear into citizens through invisibility. Ironically it is the blind who make 'M' visible.
What the Web Critics Say:
There is some interesting material available on the web on the whole of the Mabuse cycle, not least from Thomas Elsaesser one of the leading critics on German cinema. I have extracted the relevant section of the article however it is well worth going on to read the whole thing as Elsaesser is reviewing the case often cited against Lang of being rather reactionary. It will make viewing the film in the light of these comments interesting.
Here Thomas Elsaesser (Sight and Sound 2000) puts the case for the Dr Mabuse trilogy as a radical critique of surveillance culture. http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/43/
Dr Mabuse was Lang's breakthrough film in Germany, as well as an early example of a marketing ploy in which the serialised novel and the film became each other's mutual selling points. Announcing itself in its title as a "portrait of its time" (part one: The Gambler ) and "of its men and women" (part two: The Inferno ) it was loosely based on motifs from Norbert Jacques' tabloid opus, peppered up with topical material by Lang and his then wife, the successful novelist and Germany's top screenwriter Thea von Harbou. The four-hour film starts at a furious pace, with a meticulously timed train robbery leading to a stock-exchange fraud. It then concentrates on Mabuse hypnotising a young American industrialist into running up large debts at gambling, after which the master criminal wins the favours of an aristocratic lady, drives her husband to suicide and eventually kidnaps her. Time and again outwitting the public prosecutor by a mixture of brutality, practical jokes and agent provocateur demagoguery, Mabuse is finally cornered in his secret hideout and either goes mad or feigns insanity when he is finally captured.
Social References to the destabilised Weimar Republic
The film is said originally to have had a pre-credits sequence depicting street battles from the 1919 Spartacist socialist uprising in Berlin, the assassination of foreign minister Walther Rathenau and other scenes of disorder masterminded by Mabuse ("Who is responsible for all this? - Me" was apparently the first intertitle). Although this opening is now lost or was never made, the various scams Mabuse is involved in (industrial espionage, stock-exchange fraud, forged banknotes) as well as the felonies he perpetrates (he runs a lab manufacturing cocaine, his gang controls gambling and prostitution and plots assassinations) all vividly point to the immediate post-World War I era, especially to Germany's raging hyperinflation between 1921 and 1924 and its black-market economy that pauperised the middle classes while creating a new urban subculture of war profiteers, Mafia-like racketeer organisations and vigilante units recruited from the growing army of the unemployed. The political references were not lost on contemporary reviewers or the censors, and even today Mabuse's several disguises seem taken out of a catalogue of Weimar types familiar from the drawings of Otto Dix and George Grosz: stockbroker in a top hat, derelict drunk in a housing tenement, Jewish peddler at the street corner, bearded rentier in a flashy limousine, industrialist with monocle and moustache, pimp, psychiatrist, the hypnotist and opium-smoking Tsi-Nan-Fu in a gambling den.
Elsaesser's comments are interesting but need to be considered a little bit cautiously for at times he seems to be waxing poetic and eliding a lot of years together when there were dramatic differences between them. Firstly the film premiered on April 27th 1922 in Germany. Inflation whilst high was by no means near the extraordinary levels it was to reach in the latter part of 1923. By July 1922 notes Richard Evans $1 US cost 493 marks. In November 1921 $1 cost 263 marks:
In the period up until the middle of 1922, economic growth rates in Germany were high, and unemployment low. ... The German economy managed the transition to a peacetime basis more effectively than some European economies where inflation was less marked." (Evans Richard, 2003, p 104)
The film itself was being made when conditions were still ostensibly OK although, as Evans points out, they were built on sand. Below Elsaesser notes that Mabuse was at least in part a reference to Hugo Stinnes who was an industrial magnate who was very successful after World War 1. Unsurprisingly Stinnes held right-wing views and in 1919 he joined with Alfred Hugenberg to establish the German Nationalist Party (DNVP). Where Elsaesser rails against the profiteers it is worth reminding readers that the remarkable success of the German post World War 1 film industry was founded on this high level of inflation. UFA like other successful entrepreneurial businesses was able to borrow cheaply in marks and pay the money back later with the same number of marks but which had become devalued through inflation. Furthermore the successful 'art' type films which we watch today were aimed at international audiences. As a result the hard currency could buy a lot of marks to reinvest in the next production. This was why Hollywood films had a hard time entering the German market prior to the Dawes plan of 1924 and the currency stabilisation.
Mabuse was taken to be modelled on Hugo Stinnes, a steel magnate who from humble beginnings amassed a fortune and occupied a key position in the post-World War I rearmament industries (illegal, according to the Treaty of Versailles). But Mabuse also doubles as a Houdini-like vaudeville artist, passes himself off as a soul doctor from Vienna and even has a dash of the Bolshevik agitator in the Karl Radek mould. The final showdown was modelled on the famous shoot-out between the police and the 'Fort Chavrol' bankrobbers from a barricaded house in the Parisian banlieue in 1921. In short, Lang's "portrait of its time" gathers up a fair number of contemporary references.
Elsaesser usefully comments on the post Second World War discourse about Germany in which Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler played an important role when it came to discussing the role of culture in Weimar Germany.
It was after World War II that Dr Mabuse in the eyes of the critics took on a less topical and more overtly metaphoric mien. As indicated, Kracauer ties virtually every significant trend in his diagnostic psychogram of Weimar veering towards totalitarian madness to one of Lang's films:
"[ Dr Mabuse ] succeeds in making of Mabuse an omnipresent threat that cannot be localised, and thus reflects society under a tyrannical regime - that kind of society in which one fears everybody because anybody may be the tyrant's ear or arm."
Lang later argued back, pointing out that if he had predicted the rise of Hitler in his films, then Kracauer was pinning the blame for the bad news on the messenger.
Elsaesser's comments below seem very pertinent. He ties Mabuse into the trend for 'expressionism' and recognises it in a self reflexive cinematic moment as a mechanism for creating audience. In some senses Mabuese's comment " Everything today is make-believe", resonates with a society which was struggling to reinvent itself. The defeat in the war saw the collpse of the political system which had been forged by Bismarck and had provided the cornerstone for Germany's successful rise to being the World's second largest economy. The Versailles Treaty saw the loss of 10% of Germany's population and 13% of its territory. The Saarland was 'lopped off' (Evans), and the Rhineland was under occupation for most of the 1920s. Germany was literally a shadow of its former self. A metaphor which could easily be read into the expressionist films of the time. Evans is less keen to emphasise a black market economy in the post war years than to emphasise the growth of semi-autonomous mainly right-wing nationalist paramilitary organisations who also ran assassination squads seeking out those they deemed as traitors. These included Ratthenau of the Social Democrats but also, the socialist Hugo Haase and the Centre Party deputy Matthias Erzberger. The key element was one of gaining political legitimacy. With 20 different cabinets between 1919 and January 1933, the coalition governments represented the deep political fissures present within the German body politic itself. Mabuse predates Germany's descent into total economic chaos. It was at the height of hyperinflation that starvation and rioting took palce (Evans pp 106- 107). However Evans notes the diaries of victor Klemperer who commented upon how many had taken to gambling on the stock market whilst making some modest gains compared to Professor Forster an well know anti-semite has said to be "making half a million marks a day playing the markets". Evans (p 107). It is therefore reasonable to suppose that Lang was being speculative about a growing trend which was discernible even when the film was being made.
Evidently the film's immense popularity at the time and subsequent status as a classic testify to a surplus of meaning, best readable perhaps across the designation of Mabuse as "der Spieler", meaning the gambler but also the dissembler or pretender. Highlighting both playfulness and risk, a refusal of identity and a slippage of reference, the epithet announces the question of what kind of agency Mabuse embodies as he 'stands behind' events as well as 'fronting' a conspiratorial gang bent on mayhem and mischief. One could call Mabuse a disguise artist, dissimulating both identity and agency, and suggest that he belongs to a rather large family of such creatures in Weimar cinema, whose kinship, but also generic diversity (Caligari and Nosferatu, Die Nibelungen 's Hagen and Spies ' Haghi, Tartuffe and Mephisto), allow some conclusions about the self-analysis of cinema during the Weimar period. Mimicry as metaphor, metaphor as mimicry. If Lang's German films are inventories of styles and if he provided much of the wallpaper for Weimar Germany's national or avant-garde ambitions, he also showed how flimsy it was. Take expressionism, the style intended to create an internationally valid brand name for German cinema in the early 20s - as Mabuse himself says: "Expressionism! - it's a game of make-believe! But why not? Everything today is make-believe." Mabuse both implicates and distances himself, in a gesture that joins mimicry and parody, a mottled person for a mottled ground.
Of course sentiment in stock markets in 'normal times' is moved on both rational analysis but also on rumour and speculation, "greed and fear" are the prime motivators. In an increasingly unstable society the class of people represented by Dr. Mabuse would have had increasing sway:
There are many such moments in Dr Mabuse . One would be the scene of Mabuse at the stock exchange in which he destabilises both stock prices and currencies by selectively planting information gleaned from the treaty captured during the train robbery. The scene ends with the superimposition of Mabuse's face on the emptied stock exchange, gradually surging from the background like a watermark on a banknote held against the light, as if Lang had tilted the world we have just witnessed and something else had become visible: not the truth, but the recto of a verso. What is left is a kind of hieroglyphic world, barely readable, strange, but consisting of all but the most familiar elements.
Sven Lutticken in New Left Review largely agrees with Elsaesser's take on Dr. Mabuse. It certainly seems to be representing and possibly contributing to the drift towards a 'casino economy'. Both Elsaesser and Lutticken focus on the key metaphor of hypnosis, and in many ways this could be read as a critique of the politicians and the politcal parties who for all their talk were allowing the country to slip into what many must have been feeling was an impending chaos.
Lang used lavish sets, leading actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge and a meandering storyline to paint a panorama of a decadent society—Weimar Germany—so weak that it can easily fall prey to the evil master-mind Mabuse, a hypnotist who can submit people to his will. One of the most memorable scenes shows Mabuse's head, facing the camera against a black background, growing ever closer and appearing to hypnotize the audience as well as his unfortunate opponent in the film. With its overt ambition to give a portrait of the times, and Lang's highly stylized and sumptuous scenes, the first Mabuse film claimed both artistic value (as opposed to 'unsophisticated' Hollywood entertainment) and kulturkritische ambition …For all its production values and aspirations to social critique, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler has a hopelessly hackneyed and melodramatic plot." (Sven Lutticken Planet of the Remakes: New Left Review 25, January-February 2004
This webliography has at the time of writing identified what are considered to be the most useful and best researched links on the Web. Currently the search is going down to page 10 of Google.
Link to Deutsche Film Portal coverage:
Part 1: Der Spieler
Part 2: Inferno
Link to 1992 lecture given at the Sidney Museum of Contemporary Art by Ingo Petzke:
http://www.fh-wuerzburg.de/petzke/mabuse.html
Deutsche Film Portal link to biography of Frit Lang
http://www.filmportal.de/df/77/Uebersicht,,,,,,,,EFC121B064DE6C3FE03053D50B3736F2,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,.html
Link to British film Insitute pages on Fritz Lang
The Chiarascuro site has some excellent large size screen shots as well as some basic information about the Lang's next film in the Mabuse cycle; The Last Testament of Dr. Mabuse:
http://www.celtoslavica.de/chiaroscuro/films/testamentm/testmab.html
Link to a useful brief profile of Lang as well as a filmography on the Senses of Cinema site:
Link to Senses of Cinema site article by Michael Koller on the second of the Mabues Films The Tesatament of Doctor Mabuse:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/04/testament_dr_mabuse.html
German Films Archive Entry on Fritz Lang:
http://www.german-films.de/app/filmarchive/film_person_view.php?film_person_id=1773
Dr. Mabuse a Modern German Myth:
http://mabuse.de/mab-drmabuse.mhtml
Link to New Left Review article by Sven Lutticken on remakes which includes analysis of Spione and Dr Mabuse:http://newleftreview.org/A2491
: 30 Mar 2007 14:19 | Tags: Doctor Mabuse Erich Pommer Eureka Video European Cinema Film Genres Fritz Lang German Cinema Kinoeye New Left Review Summer Term Films 2007 Thomas Elsaesser Weimar And Nazi Cinema Weimar Cinema | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem
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