Week 3 - Genre

Hutchings' Genre Theory and Criticism provided a very novel and thoughtful overview of the first stirrings of identifying film by genre and its implications. I knew I would have to really pay attention (but really get something out of the reading, too) when I had to pause for a moment and think about how "genre as a subject for discussion has always transcended the traditional boundaries of film studies." Normally, that's a sentence that I would just gloss over, seeing it but not really reading it. It has buzzwords of academia: transcend traditional boundaries. Now you know that must be important! All kidding aside, what it really means is that in this case film is a tool to convey a universal message that plays off of or reinforces other commonly divulged information. This could be true of another film, a book, something verbally communicated, maybe, dare I say it, even static art. But I digress...

Bazin is just everywhere. There's no getting around him, but I'm usually accustomed to seeing André invoked with regard to auteurism. It was refreshing to see that even Hutchings noted Bazin's very old-school analysis and that it should be taken with a grain of salt when used to examine more modern cinema. I think he used the word "baroque," which I think even Bazin would enjoy. It's an admission that film theory and criticism thereof is imperfect, as addressed later in questioning the western genre and wether in the 1970s strict genre theory and criticism may have restricted films to being 'classical' westerns and not allowing the genre to be 'mercurial' as nature deemed, as described by Kitses.

Another thing I found interesting, though, was how Hutchings noted that genre was often built off of auteur tendencies. In a way, genre theory highlights commonalities across films in the same way auteur theory demonstrates common threads between a filmmakers works. It's like industrial auteur theory! OH, now THAT'S something! Cool. I like this Hutchings guy...

Grant, on the other hand... well, I'm not exactly enamored. Long story short, he invokes film textbook gods Bordwell and Thompson, explains formal decisions and implications by genre, and provides lots (AND LOTS) of examples. Granted, they are very good examples, but it's kind of like being taught the color wheel: we each know what colors look like to our own eyes, delving any deeper is for artists (which I guess, actually, we are... ah, the life of a film student!) or the very, very literal. Come to think of it, my mother would like reading this. She's an antitrust lawyer. Explaining mise en scene was a fun discussion that turned into three hours of ranting about the film "Blow Up", rotten fruit, and, ultimately, I gave up.

I hadn't thought about genre in a while, actually, before last weeks class. In day-to-day conversation, at least, genre seems to be dismissed as a way to sort through which movies you might want to watch on Netflix or rent/buy at a store. How clever it is to think of it the other way around! Besides providing a proven framework of success for our lovely capitalist industry to pop out another movie, it also provides audiences with a pre-coded way to process the information. It's a key! When we're prepared to see an action movie, we know exactly which parts to pay attention to (pace slows, important dialogue, closer camera shots) and which parts are spectacle (MichaelBay'Splosion). I used to think that making a film that fit so nicely into a genre would be, well, generic in a not-so-good way. In reality, it's in playing with genre, maybe subverting a few qualities here and there, making the audience comfortable enough to be able to question things and recognize key differences and points of uniqueness, that a truly intriguing film is made.

On the flip side, there's something to be said for sitting down to watch a completely hokey old B-movie. I LOVE bad sci-fi monster movies. They are, for the most part, very formulaic but occasionally you get one that tried to do something out of the ordinary and failed miserably. Something about that, though, is kind of charming. I'm talking Plan Nine from Outer Space, The Monster That Challenged the World, The Blob... well, Forbidden Planet was actually pretty good, it even had some impressive special effects animation. I guess modern relatives of these movies would be anything in the Megashark vs. family. These movies totally bomb but still get made, right now Megashark vs. Mechashark is in production. I wish I knew why. But you know what? I'm still going to watch it. I know it's a bad movie, but there's something comfortable, like going to the book store to pick up a Pullitzer Prize-winning novel and then on the way out the door also grabbing some cheesy comic from the bargain bin that's so bad it's hilarious.