genre
james r. elkins
"[T]he assignment of a text to a genre influences how the text is read. Genre constrains the possible ways in which a text is interpreted. . . ." An Introduction to Genre Theory: Working Within Genres (David Chandler) |
David Chandler, in "Introduction to Genre Theory," poses some questions about genre, which I have reforumlated and present here: How was this genre encountered? What expectations do you have of films in this genre? What conventions are common to the genre? How do these genre conventions constrain your interpretation of the film? What purposes does the genre serve? What ideological assumptions and values seem to be embedded in the genre? What "pleasures" do you associate with the genre? To what audience is the genre directed? What do we learn, if anything, in taking up stories we already know, that is, genre stories that we know, even as we set out, how they progress to a necessary end?
These questions (adapted from David Chandler) should set us to thinking about the lawyer film genre. Does such a genre exist? If so, what are its narrative conventions? What can lawyers learn from the genre (if indeed it exists and one can expect lawyers to learn from such texts)?
On the Film-Theory discussion group (Spoon Collective, University of Virginia) someone says, "I have a question: What is a genre?" The responses from a group of sophisticated film enthusiasts (and film studies teachers) were not all that instructive. I was able to distill only two comments (which I have taken the liberty to edit) of interest:
"I would use the term [genre] if the films use similar narrative conventions. Genre is based on narrative form--how time and space are used to tell a story. The setting itself is not, in my view, enough to constitute a genre or story type."
We'll need to do substantially better than this if we are going to understand genre and whether in lawyer films a genre has been created.
Notes
<1> Notes on genre from Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988):
"Form inheres in the very substance of social life. Form not only determines cognition, how one experiences the world; it also determines the shape of social institutions, practices, and values." (267).
"Genres hold the world in place, establishing and enforcing a sense of propriety, of proper boundaries which demarcate appropriate thought, feeling, and behavior and which provide frames, codes, and signs for constructing a shared social reality. We are speaking now of genres in a broad sense which includes the different areas of social behavior--public as well as private. Each area is a locus of conventionally determined behavior. . . . Film genres participate in this process by sorting out the different values and ideals a social order requires to be internalized if it is to survive. The traditional western, for example, aided the construction of a social reality in which it was believed that males appropriately dominated the public sphere, while the traditional melodrama constructed a social reality, a commonly held set of precepts, attitudes, and beliefs, which promoted the domestic sphere as the one appropriate to women." (77).
"Genres depend on receptive audiences who are willing to grant credibility to the conventions of the genre to the extent that those conventions become invisible. Once that is accomplished the generic illusion can assume the character of verisimilitude. It no longer seems to be constituted through the manipulation of coded formulae. A certain occlusion of rhetoric and convention, therefore, is crucial to the successful transmission of ideological beliefs to the audience. What this means, however, is that once the generic conventions are foregrounded, the genre can no longer operate successfully as a purveyor of ideology. The conventions become unstable and variable; history increasingly intervenes in the realm of myth; and the generic signifiers themselves increasingly become signifieds, the referents of films rather than the active agents of cinematic practice, a matter of content rather than a vital form." (78).
"All genres create a tradition that can become an object to be cited, an occasion for reflexivity." (79). The authors give an example of Westerns which had, they contend by the early 70s tended "either to demystify the myth of the West or to depict the closing of the frontier and the end of the mythic space of the traditional western (Will Penny, Monte Walsh, etc.). During this period, the western undergoes a process whereby its conventions are made visible; it increasingly assumes the form of a tradition that is reflected on and referred to in film." (79-80).
"The eclipse of the western was thus fostered both by the subversion of its generic conventions and by its exhaustion as a mode of ideological legitimization." (81).
One might also see something of the film noir genre in lawyer films. Ryan and Kellner note that:
"Traditionally the film noir of the late forties and early fifties depicts a dark world of contending, sometimes ambiguous, moral forces, in which deception, treachery, and murder are commonplace. Dialog is frequently abrasive, and the style is usually characterized by night shooting, dark shadows, sharp lighting contrasts, askew camera angles, symbolic environments and convoluted narratives. . . . These films frequently feature detectives who operate on the edge of the law as hard-bitten loners only marginally able to relate to women (who are frequently the source of evil). The films usually expose corrupt wealth and power; crime and business often seem interchangeable." (83).
"Indeed, the noir world is characterized by crossed boundaries." (83).
"The contemporary noir revivals can be said to pertain . . . to that strain of populist distrust or loss of confidence. . . . The rich and powerful are usually portrayed as corrupt. . . . (84).
<2> "The genre is a network of codes that can be inferred from a set of related texts. A genre is as real as a language and exerts similar pressures through its network of codes, meeting similar instances of stolid conformity and playful challenge. No one who has ever studied seriously the history of any art can doubt the importance of precedent, schema, presupposition, convention--all those things that in literary study we call genre and style--in the actual production of texts. The more one knows about a given historical situation the more one realizes the struggle behind even the smallest innovations in any art or craft, a struggle first to master and then to transcend a given generic or stylistic practice." [Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English 3 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1985)]
<3> Bibliographical Sources: Nick Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Arthur Asa Berger, Popular Culture Genre: Theories and Texts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1992); Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1989); Steve Neal, Genre and Hollywood (New York: Routledge,1989)
Genre
Cinematic Genre
WikipediaAn Introduction to Genre Theory
Critics Corner: A Guide to Film Critique
Favorite Films and Film Genres As A Function of Race, Age, and Gender
Film Noir
Bibliographical Note: Norman Rosenberg, "Law Noir," in John Denvir (ed.), Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts 280-302 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996)
Film Noir
Wikipedia
Narrative Innovations in Film Noir
High Heels on Wet Pavement: Film Noir and the Femme Fatale
No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir and Other Essays
Film Noir: "You sure you don't see what you hear?"
Bibliography: Film Noir: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library. See also: Paul Duncan, Film Noir (Pocketessentials, 2000).
The Western
Western (Genre)
Wikipedia
