Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System

Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System
Author: Thomas Schatz
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1981-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

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

Hollywood Genres

Hollywood Genres
Author: Thomas Schatz
Publisher: Random House Trade
Total Pages: 297
Release: 1981
Genre: Film genres
ISBN: 9780394322551

Genre and Hollywood

Genre and Hollywood
Author: Steve Neale
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2005-06-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134973454

Genre and Hollywood provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of genre. In this important new book, Steve Neale discusses all the major concepts, theories and accounts of Hollywood and genre, as well as the key genres which theorists have written about, from horror to the Western. He also puts forward new arguments about the importance of genre in understanding Hollywood cinema. Neale takes issue with much genre criticism and genre theory, which has provided only a partial and misleading account of Hollywood's output. He calls for broader and more flexible conceptions of genre and genres, for more attention to be paid to the discourses and practices of Hollywood itself, for the nature and range of Hollywood's films to be looked at in more detail, and for any assessment of the social and cultural significance of Hollywood's genres to take account of industrial factors. In detailed, revisionist accounts of two major genres - film noir and melodrama - Neale argues that genre remains an important and productive means of thinking about both New and old Hollywood, its history, its audiences and its films.

Film Genre

Film Genre
Author: Barry Langford
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2005
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

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

Hollywood Genres and Postwar America

Hollywood Genres and Postwar America
Author: Mike Chopra-Gant
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2005-10-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0857713280

This is a clear and engrossing account of how popular films in America just after the close of the Second World War played out America's mood at that crucial time. It is also a revisionist challenge to received scholarly understanding of this mood, which has tended to be seen as characterized by an abiding pessimism most clearly manifested in the films noir of the period. Chopra-Gant makes here an important contribution to film genre, which proposes that the 'noir and Zeitgeist' reading is based on the retrospective promotion of selected movies. He turns to the top box office successes of the period, including "Best Years of our Lives", "The Jolson Story" and "Two Years Before the Mast", finding that these films emphasise rather the triumph of American beliefs in democracy, classlessness and individualism. They deploy positive, performative masculinities and the pleasures of male friendships and celebrate the traditional American family, while recognising the problems of 'momism' and absent fathers.

Exploring Movie Construction and Production

Exploring Movie Construction and Production
Author: John Reich
Publisher: Open SUNY Textbooks
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-07-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9781942341475

Exploring Movie Construction & Production contains eight chapters of the major areas of film construction and production. The discussion covers theme, genre, narrative structure, character portrayal, story, plot, directing style, cinematography, and editing. Important terminology is defined and types of analysis are discussed and demonstrated. An extended example of how a movie description reflects the setting, narrative structure, or directing style is used throughout the book to illustrate building blocks of each theme. This approach to film instruction and analysis has proved beneficial to increasing students¿ learning, while enhancing the creativity and critical thinking of the student.

The Hollywood Film Musical

The Hollywood Film Musical
Author: Barry Keith Grant
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2012-04-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1405182539

This revealing history of the American film musical synthesizes the critical literature on the genre and provides a series of close analytical readings of iconic musical films, focusing on their cultural relationship to other aspects of American popular music. Offers a depth of scholarship that will appeal to students and scholars Leads a crucial analysis of the cultural context of musicals, particularly the influence of popular music on the genre Delves into critical issues behind these films such as race, gender, ideology, and authorship Features close readings of canonical and neglected film musicals from the 1930s to the present including: Top Hat, Singin' in the Rain, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, West Side Story, and Across the Universe

Dance on Screen

Dance on Screen
Author: S. Dodds
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2001-06-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0230509584

Dance on Screen is a comprehensive introduction to the rich diversity of screen dance genres. It provides a contextual overview of dance in the screen media and analyzes a selection of case studies from the popular dance imagery of music video and Hollywood, through to experimental art dance. The focus then turns to video dance, dance originally choreographed for the camera. Video dance can be seen as a hybrid in which the theoretical and aesthetic boundaries of dance and television are traversed and disrupted. This new paperback edition includes a new Preface by the author covering key developments since the hardback edition was published in 2001.

Hollywood Hybrids

Hollywood Hybrids
Author: Ira Jaffe
Publisher: Genre and Beyond: A Film Studies Series
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2008
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780742539501

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

Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie

Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie
Author: Frances Smith
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2018-06-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474413110

An analysis of novelistic explorations of modernism in mathematics and its cultural interrelations.