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Rituals, Conventions, & Archetypes. Rituals, Conventions, & Archetypes. Genre-category or classification of a group of movies in which the films share similar subject matter and similar ways of organizing the subject
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Rituals, Conventions, & Archetypes • Genre-category or classification of a group of movies in which the films share similar subject matter and similar ways of organizing the subject • Cultural Rituals-the repetition of formulas that help coordinate our needs and desires • Generic conventions-are isolated properties or figures that that identify a genre through such features as character types, settings, props, or events that are repeated from film to film
Rituals, Conventions, & Archetypes • Iconography-image or image patterns with specific connotations or meanings • When generic conventions are out in motion as part of a plot, they become generic formulas, the patterns for developing stories in a particular genre. • Generic expectations-describe a viewer’s experience and knowledge while watching a film that help to anticipate the meaning of particular conventions or the direction of certain narrative formulas
Rituals, Conventions, & Archetypes • Hybrid genres-are those created through the interaction of different genres to produce fusions, such as romantic comedies of musical horror films • Subgenres-are specific versions of a genre denoted by an adjective, for example, the spaghetti western or the slapstick comedy
Comedy Subgenres • Slapstick comedies-marked by physical humor and stunts, comprised some of the first narrative films • Screwball comedies-transformed the humor of the physical into fast talking verbal gymnastics, arguably displacing sexual energy with barbed verbal exchanges between men and women • Romantic comedies-humor takes a second place to happines
MeloDramas • Word itself indicates a combination of the intensities of music (melos) and the interaction of human conflicts (drama). • Fundamental Formulas & Conventions • Characters defined by their situation or basic traits-struggle to express their feelings and emotions • Narratives rely on coincidences and reversals and build towards emotional or physical climaxes • Visual style that emphasizes emotion or elemental struggle
MeloDramas • Develop conflict between interior emotions and exterior restrictions, between yearning and loss and satisfaction and renewal. • Physical Melodramas focus on physical plight and material conditions that repress or control the protagonist's desires and emotions. • Family melodramas elaborate the confines and restrictions of the protagonist by investigating the psychological and gendered forces of the family.
MeloDramas • Social Melodramas extend the melodramatic crisis of the family to include larger historical, community, and economic issues. • Other subgenres: musicals, animated musicals, horror, crime films, gangster films
Significance of Film Genre • Prescriptive approach-assume that a model for genre preexists any particular films in that genre • Descriptive approach-a genre develops and changes over time; a successful genre film builds on older films and develops in new ways