John Dahl is now known more for his work in television,
directing episodes of prestigious series such as Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Vampire Diaries, Homeland, Hannibal, Justified and the first two episodes of Outlander.
I hope this short study of Dahl’s films shows that auteurism and genre study can be reconciled. There is no absolute opposition between auteurism and genre study, since they occupy different positions along a continuum. The more we study subgenres within genres, the more we narrow down the films we group together, until we reach very special subgenres (as do Cavell and Doane, for example), or the work of a particular director.
1950s science fiction
The science fiction film of the 1950s shares some of the paranoia and insecurities of the film noir. Indeed one film, Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), combines attributes from both genres. It contains the attributes of film noir, from its expressionistic lighting to the conflict between a detective and a femme fatale. Kiss Me Deadly is dominated by a search for a mysterious glowing box which, by the end of the film, 144
the femme fatale opens, with deadly consequences. The box evidently contains nuclear material that, in the wrong hands, unleashes havoc on the world.
The 1950s science fiction film is a favourite of genre critics who undertake the task of interpreting the function of genre films.
Before we discuss the function of this genre, we shall briefly have a look at some of its common attributes. It usually consists of: 3
3
a meditation on the implications and consequences of
scientific and technological advances
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space travel and/or contact with aliens
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3
a setting in the distant future.
These three attributes are obviously linked, since the genre considers how science and technology in the future can take humanity into the distant realms of the universe and possibly come into contact with other life forms. This then leads to a number of science fiction films taking on some of the attributes of the horror film as the aliens, codified as monsters, become a
‘supernatural’ threat to humanity.
However, the science fiction films of the 1950s are not usually set in the future, but in the present, since they meditate on the implications and consequences of scientific and technological advances in the newly created nuclear power. The implications and consequences are usually (but not always) coded as
negative. In Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954), for example, a race of giant ants is found to be living in the desert of the American Southwest. The cause of these giant ants, which threaten humankind’s existence, is identified as nuclear fallout from atomic tests. Similarly, in When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951), earth is threatened and, in the end, destroyed by a runaway star. The star can be read as an allegory of an approaching nuclear war and the destruction of the earth is the inevitable consequence. In these, and many other science fiction films of the 1950s, humanity is indirectly identified as the ultimate cause of the threat unleashed upon it. Humans are their own worst enemy. The fear manifest in 1950s science fiction films is a fear that, for the first time in history, humankind 4 Film genres: defining the typical film 145
is able to destroy itself, by means of its own science and technology. Humanity has become decentred and vulnerable to extinction. Such films can therefore be read as reflecting the anxieties of the American public in the 1950s.
However, the threat is not always read by genre critics as a threat from ‘humankind’, but as a threat from a part of it, namely, communists. The science fiction films can therefore be understood as allegories of the Cold War. Ants are an appropriate metaphor for communists in Them! because ants are a war-like mass of undifferentiated, regimented soldiers, who are depicted in the film as threatening the lives of the American public. Such was the ideological image of communists perpetuated in America during the Cold War.
But the most celebrated film to be read as an allegory of the Cold War is Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956).
The film depicts the inhabitants of a small town in California being gradually replaced by pod people, who grow out of pods and look exactly like the people they replace, but with one crucial difference: they lack emotions and feelings. One message this film seems to perpetuate is that communists may look just like us, but they lack a crucial human trait. The film indirectly represents the result of a communist invasion and takeover of American minds by means of communist ideology. In effect, the film is depicting the result of communist brainwashing: one will become an emotionless robot passively conforming to the totalitarian state.
This, at least, is the standard way to read Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But is it the only way? It is certainly possible to give the film an almost opposite reading: it can be interpreted as a criticism of placid conformity to American Cold War ideology.
The ideology perpetuated by the American government about the threat of communism to the American way of life instilled fear in the American public. The American government’s
ideology (as with all ideology) imposed a restriction on the way the public thought about and lived their everyday lives.
This ideology established hysteria about an imminent invasion of America by Soviet communists, who would be aided by
members of the communist party in America. This ideology 146
encouraged the American public to root out the communists (the aliens) living among them, because they posed a threat to national security. Each individual’s allegiance to the American way of life had to be affirmed and demonstrated, otherwise they were considered to be a traitor to the American way of life, for which they must be marginalized and punished.
For an ideological position to be successful, it must appear to be natural. During the 1950s, the ‘Red Scare’, as it came to be known, was very pervasive, which allowed the American government to justify its ‘witch hunt’ of communists, as well as its stockpiling and testing of nuclear weapons.
But not everyone bought into this ideology. Both Don Siegel, the director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the scriptwriter, Daniel Mainwaring, were highly critical of the process of ‘pod-like’ social conformity, the repression of free speech and the loss of individuality that American Cold War ideology produced.
Mainwaring was associated with communism in the 1930s,
while Siegel’s films of the 1950s depict a recurrent theme: the lone individual’s defiance towards conformity, which shows Siegel to be a director with a liberal social conscience. From this perspective, the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers can be read as representing the American public’s complacent conformity to their government’s Cold War ideology, not as a threat of communist ideology to the American way of life.
However, both Siegel and Mainwaring could not risk openly opposing the Cold War ideology, so they disguised their
opposition in an allegorical science fiction story. Allegorical stories flourish in a time of censorship and repression.
The fact that the same film can be read from two completely different political perspectives raises problems about genre study.
One of the biggest problems with the external approach to film studies, of which genre studies is the representative example, is being able to establish a causal link between a film and its social and historical context. As we saw with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the same film can be given an opposite meaning when related to its context (in this example, American society of the 4 Film genres: defining the typical film 147
1950s). Invasion of the Body Snatchers can be read as either supporting or opposing American Cold War ideology. What role does the film’s historical and social context play? Does the film’s context constitute evidence that supports an argument?
The purpose of the functional approach to genre studies is to bring a film back into the realm of the everyday, or, more accurately, to relate a fiction film to its n
on-fictional context.
Genre critics do this in order to answer the questions: How do films speak to us? What events in our everyday lives are they indirectly representing? These questions are necessary because they explain why millions of people go to the cinema every week. The answers genre critics give to these questions are plausible but not conclusive. Additional work needs to be carried out into the cultural meanings of the cinema.
Digdeeper
Alloway, lawrence, ‘iconography of the movies’, Movie 7 (1963), pp. 4–6.
Altman, Charles [Rick], Film/Genre (london: British Film institute, 1999).
An important book that has the virtue of being organized around a series of problems relating to the study of genre. moreover, these problems are stated in the title of each of the 12 chapters, for example, ‘Where do genres come from?’, ‘Are genres
stable?’, ‘Why are genres sometimes mixed?’, ‘What role do genres play in the viewing process?’ and ‘What can genres teach us about nations?’
Byars, Jackie, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-Reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama (london: Routledge, 1991).
A feminist reading of popular melodrama from the 1950s,
especially douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life, as well as the male melodramas of James dean: Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden and Giant.
Cavell, Stanley, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 1996).
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Cavell’s idiosyncratic (and rather unevenly written) study of a genre he has christened the melodrama of the unknown woman.
Copjec, Joan (ed.), Shades of Noir (london: Verso, 1993).
this theoretically informed anthology reassesses the status of film noir as a genre, and argues that such a reassessment is necessary for two reasons: the re-emergence of film noir in contemporary Hollywood and the uneasy sense that film noir was never adequately discussed in the first place.
doane, mary Ann, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (london: macmillan, 1988).
doane’s book is a sophisticated and lucid study of four types of 1940s women’s films – films dominated by medical themes, the maternal melodrama, the classic love story and the paranoid woman’s film.
Gledhill, Christine (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (london: British Film institute, 1987).
A seminal collection of (occasionally difficult) essays on the melodrama, including thomas elsaesser’s foundational essay
‘tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family melodrama’.
Grant, Barry Keith (ed.), Film Genre Reader (texas: university of texas Press, 1986).
A comprehensive anthology of 24 essays, divided evenly into theoretical approaches and studies of individual genres.
Jacobs, lea, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film: 1928–1942 (Wisconsin: university of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
An articulate and well-researched study of the representation of fallen women in the 1930s melodrama, demonstrating how censorship has influenced the genre.
Kaplan, e Ann (ed.), Women in Film Noir, Second edition (london: British Film institute, 1998).
this is the authoritative guide to the way women are represented in film noir. it is concise, lucid and accessible. essential reading.
4 Film genres: defining the typical film 149
Klinger, Barbara, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: indiana university Press, 1994).
Klinger looks at the way douglas Sirk’s films have been
promoted and discussed in reviews, by fans and by academics, and studies in detail Rock Hudson’s star image.
lynch, david and Gifford, Barry, Lost Highway [script] (london: Faber and Faber, 1997).
Neale, Steve, Genre and Hollywood (london and New York: Routledge, 2000).
this book offers a detailed investigation into existing accounts of genre, plus a new account of film noir and melodrama. it is organized into three distinct parts: 1) definitions and concepts of genre; 2) a comprehensive examination of all the major genres, plus the way they have been previously studied; 3) theories, descriptions and industry accounts of Hollywood genres.
Neale, Steve, ‘melodrama and tears’, Screen, 27, 6 (1986), pp.
6–23.
An important essay explaining why we cry when watching
melodramas.
Palmer, R Barton (ed.), Perspectives on Film Noir (New York: G K
Hall & Co., 1996).
this anthology republishes a representative set of French and Anglo-American essays that first identified film noir as a distinct style or genre of film-making.
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focuspoints
✲ Genre studies is divided up into a descriptive approach and a functional approach.
✲ The descriptive approach classifies films within a particular genre according to the common attributes they possess.
✲ The functional approach attempts to relate a film to its historical and social context and argues that genre films embody the basic anxieties and values of a society.
✲ The film melodrama is frequently defined as a woman’s genre because it represents the anxieties women experience living in a patriarchal society.
✲ Recent studies of melodrama have identified the following subgenres: the fallen woman film, the unknown woman film and the paranoid woman’s film.
✲ The film noir is dominated by a femme fatale and an alienated detective hero; both are symptoms of the upheavals
witnessed during the 1940s in North American society.
✲ The science fiction films of the 1950s meditate on the implications and consequences of scientific and technological advances in the newly created nuclear power and on the
‘threat’ of communism to the American way of life.
4 Film genres: defining the typical film 151
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5
The non-fiction
film: five types of
documentary
Inthischapteryouwilllearnabout:
3
3 the common assumptions film spectators
hold about documentary films
33 the differences between fiction and
documentary films
33 five types of documentary film (as
identified by Bill Nichols): expository,
observational, interactive, reflexive and
performative.
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What kind of world do we inhabit, with what risks and what prospects? Tales we label fiction offer imaginative answers; those we label non-fiction suggest possibly authentic ones.
Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, p. ix
What makes a film a documentary? We can begin to answer
this question by identifying some of the basic premises film spectators normally hold about documentaries:
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3
First, the events filmed must be unstaged; that is, the events must exist above and beyond the activity of filming them. In fiction films, by contrast, events are staged for the express purpose of being filmed. The unstaged nature of the events in documentaries therefore suggest that the events have an existence independent of the cinema. This is what gives them their authenticity.
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3
Secondly, documentaries are conventionally understood to be non-fiction films. In other words, they must be sharply distinguished from fiction films. The world depicted in the documentary is real, not imaginary.
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3
Thirdly, it is often assumed that the documentary film-maker simply observes and makes an objective record of real events.
In recent times, all three assumptions have come under attack.
In this chapter, I shall question in particular the third point.
It is n
ow commonplace to argue that the very presence of the camera influences the filmed events. Moreover, documentary film-makers employ a wide variety of techniques in putting their films together; they do not simply point the camera towards their subject and let the camera roll. The documentary film-maker cannot simply observe and objectively record
because he or she makes technical choices – selecting the camera angle, camera lens, film stock, deciding how to edit shots together and so on. This seems to make the documentary personal and subjective.
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Spotlight
The selection and emphasis of particular events by means of film techniques seems to betray the documentary film-maker’s particular perspective on the filmed events. What is valorized by the auteur critics in relation to Hollywood fiction films is condemned in documentary films.
But by what standard of objectivity are documentary films being judged? All films necessarily involve selection and editing.
No film is therefore purely objective, if by objectivity we mean that the events are seen from no particular perspective. This is an unreasonable standard by which to judge documentary films. The issue is not so much whether they are based on selection but how the selections made by the documentary film-maker manipulate the events. Because all documentary films ‘manipulate’ events, then it may be better to use a more neutral term, such as ‘shape’ events. We can reserve the term
‘manipulation’ for documentaries that can be categorized as propaganda – those that hide from the spectator the processes they use in shaping events.
Spotlight
The Times of Harvey Milk (Robert Epstein, 1984) was a breakthrough documentary. It portrays the life and assassination of gay activist and politician Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The film won the 1984
Film Studies- An Introduction Page 18