2 Types of Films and Film Genres: Expectations and Conventions

What Do We Expect When We Go to the Movies

This semester, most of our films will share the following characteristics:

• 90-120 minutes
• Narrative
• Fiction
• Created using photographic motion picture cameras
• Intended for theatrical distribution

When most of us think of “watching a movie,” we are often thinking of films that share these characteristics. For example, if someone invited you to go out to watch a film and then took you to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) you would likely feel you had been deceived. After all, The Clock is generally shown as an art installation in museums, not in movie theaters; furthermore, it is entirely comprised of clips from film and television in which clocks appear. However, I suspect what would surprise you the most is the fact that The Clock is 24 hours long.

If, next, your friend took you to see Wang Bing’s Crude Oil (2008), you might be relieved by its comparatively modest 14-hour runtime; however, you would likely still feel misled that instead of a narrative fiction you had been taken to a documentary about the everyday experience of labor for Mongolian oilfield workers.

Still, your friend was not lying to you in either case: these are both movies. Movies come in many shapes and sizes. And they can be about anything—including, as in the case of some experimental film, being about nothing you can easily identify.

We are focusing in our screenings on narrative fiction films released for commercial exhibition. In other words, our object of study will be films designed to tell stories, to be shown in movie theaters, and to make a profit (or at least recoup the original investment required to make the movie). The shared characteristics of the majority of our films is the result of a long period of trial and error in which the movie industry figured out how to tell stories as efficiently as possible, how long people would be willing to sit in a movie theater, and how to provide the best guarantee possible of making money to support the careers of the many artists and craftspeople needed to make a film. The solutions arrived at were not the only possibilities, of course, even if to our eyes they now seem inevitable. The history of film—like all history—is a story of roads not taken.

In 1924,  the filmmaker Erich von Stroheim set out to adapt McTeague, a long realist novel by the American author Frank Norris.  In working on the screenplay, Von Stroheim found himself frustrated by the cuts required to bring the film in at under two hours. Why, he wondered, were such cuts and compromises even necessary: why not adapt the whole of the novel? And so it was that Von Stroheim showed up to a select preview screening with Greed, a film more than nine hours long.

When it was over, several members of that select audience were convinced they had just seen the greatest movie ever made. That may have been true, but they would be the last to ever see it. Because in the audience was the studio’s producer,  Irving Thalberg, who took the film away from Stroheim and had it edited down to two hours.

Stroheim’s ambition to adapt the whole of a long novel looks absurd to our eyes; but in those early days of the film industry, less than a decade established in Hollywood, the conventions had not yet been fully naturalized. Even the role of the studio producer—someone with the power to fire a director and re-edit their film—was new to the industry in 1924. Had Stroheim tried his experiment just a few years earlier it might have worked, and our understanding of what film looks like in terms of scale and length might have been a different thing entirely.

All of which is to say that the characteristics of a narrative film with which this chapter opened were not inevitable, and they change all the time.  For example, in 1940, weekly attendance at U.S. movie theaters was roughly 80 million, with well over half of Americans attending at least one movie every week. Today more than half of the U.S. population sees no more than one movie in theaters in an entire year, preferring instead to watch most of their films on televisions and other smaller screens at home. In 2024—and even before the pandemic—an invitation to “watch a movie” is more likely to involve sitting in front of a television or laptop than queuing up for tickets at your local theater.

A 1936 advertisement for a prestige (“A”) film, promising also a newsreel and  a cartoon

Other conventions have changed as well. For example, an invitation to go to the movies in the 1930s was generally a commitment of an entire evening. On top of the main feature (often a “prestige” or “A” movie), there would often be a second (“B”) feature as well. In addition, the evening’s entertainment—especially at the swankier downtown movie palaces—would almost certainly involve other kinds of films as well. This could be a mixture of comedy or musical short films, animated shorts featuring characters such as Mickey Mouse or Betty Boop, and newsreels—short documentary films showing images from the headlines of the previous week. Finally, there might be an installment of a popular serial, films which told their stories over the course of a dozen or more weekly episodes, complete with “cliff-hangers” to keep the audience returning to the same theater in order to find out whether the protagonists had survived whatever dilemma the serial had left them in at the end of the previous installment.

By the time I was a kid in the early 1970s, most of this cinema world of the 1930s was already gone. Television had taken over the responsibility for sharing the news, music, and serials, leaving the movie industry to focus almost exclusively on the feature film. Double-features were still a convention in my youth, especially for second-run films, but most of the rest of what my parents remembered about their own childhood movie-going experiences sounded far-fetched even 50 years ago.

As a young movie fan, I saw most of my movies in the new multiplexes that were springing up across the country in the 70s, most of the old movie palaces having been abandoned or torn down in the 1960s as deindustrialization and suburbanization gutted urban downtowns. Where my parents could remember spending four or more hours at the movies on a Friday evening, I would hunker down in my multiplex seat and watch Star Wars (1977) three or four times in a row—or sneak from one theater to another within the multiplex to put together my own unauthorized triple-features.

But if short films and documentaries had ceased to exist as a regular feature in the downtown commercial movie theater, they did not disappear, as a quick survey of the annual Academy Awards categories demonstrates. These films have continued to be made even if they were no longer shown in commercial movie theaters. Short films and documentaries would  find new venues for exhibition, including international film festivals such as Cannes or Sundance, or more specialized festivals devoted solely to documentary, short film, or animation. And of course today we also have new venues to share these kinds of films.

In fact, there are more short films and documentaries being made today than ever before in the history of the medium. With increased access to affordable means of production (from the iPhone to a RED digital camera) and distribution (from YouTube to local film festivals), short and documentary film allows independent and aspiring filmmakers to produce films without taking on massive debt or sacrificing their vision to the will of investors. Streaming services such as Netflix and HBO have proven receptive to documentaries, which are cheaper to license than large studio-produced feature films, and, in the 21st century, documentaries have become increasingly profitable.^[1]

Meanwhile, the old serial films that were a regular feature in movie theaters from the teens through the 1930s were of course reborn in a new venue: television. Even they, however, can find their way back into movie theaters. In 2010 I found myself at the Gateway Film Center near campus watching an episode of The Walking Dead with an audience of strangers. Like others struggling for attendance in the 21st century, this theater had begun opening weekly free screenings of popular serial television shows, making enough on concessions to justify the use of the space and reminding college-age audiences of the unique pleasures of the movie theater. Aside from a handful of big “event” films—Avatar (2009), Iron Man 2 (2010), and Toy Story 3 (2010)—these programs provided some of their most reliable audiences that year.

Serial films have re-emerged in recent years also in Disney’s Marvel movies, now almost 30 movies into an ongoing serial narrative (complete with old-fashioned cliffhangers). For the first time in film history, we see big budget feature films exploring serial storytelling.

All of which is to say that the conventions with which we began this chapter cannot serve as universal characteristics of film. None of the familiar features of movie theaters in the 1930s—short films, animated films, documentaries, serial films—would fit those conventions, and yet all of them were clearly understood as movies.

So, does this mean that all forms of moving image entertainment are film? Of course not. While we can recognize that many video games and television shows have become increasingly cinematic (and vice versa), there are important reasons to maintain a difference and a distance between these very different industries and mediums. In recent years it has become common to talk of “media convergence”—the breaking down of boundaries and distinctions between different narrative media—a convergence accelerated by massive media conglomerates and the portable screens on which we consume formerly discrete narrative media. Yet even as we watch movies and television series or play video games on our laptops, we continue to recognize and largely agree upon distinctions, turning to each with an understanding of the different demands and skillsets these narrative media require of us. Similarly, we can recognize and prepare our expectations based on differences between broad types of film—narrative, documentary, experimental—and, in the case of narrative film, much more granular distinctions between films, especially through the powerful if mutable category of genre.

Narrative, Documentary, Experimental

Narrative film is what we are spending most of our time with in this class, and it is, as we have discussed, the default place most of us turn to when we think about film. We can define narrative film according to the following principles:

Because narrative film lies at the center of our study this semester, we will unpack in detail what we mean when we talk about narrative, story, and plot in the next chapter. Let us therefore set narrative film aside for a now and focus on the two types of film with which most of us have spent less time: experimental film and documentary film.

Although we bracket documentary film from narrative film, both are equally invested in storytelling. When a film identifies itself as a documentary, however, we are promised that what we will watch is not a fiction or a fictional recreation of an historical event. Instead, we expect to see actual people as they exist and events as they happen in the world. While most narrative film relies heavily on actors, screenplays, sets, costumes, and makeup, documentary largely avoids anything that might be perceived by the viewer as violating the promise of real objects, people, and events. Documentary as a mode of film is dedicated to opening up a truth about the world in which we live, generally something that the viewer did not know before watching the movie. One would not, for example, make a documentary about how the sun sets in the west, or about how 1+1=2; these are things on which we all already agree. Aside from universal truisms, however, anything can be a viable topic for a documentary.

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (dir. Seth Gordon; 2007) tells the story of a modest underdog who manages to defeat the arrogant reigning world-record holder for high score in the arcade game Donkey Kong. In putting together this documentary, the filmmakers combined interviews, video game history, and events that were unfolding as the filming was underway.

How to Survive a Plague (dir. David France; 2012) tells the story of the AIDS activists who fought local and national officials and a largely indifferent public for support and research necessary to combat the epidemic. Here the events have happened in the past, and much of the film is made up of historical footage from news and home video, combined with present-day interviews with survivors who had been on the front lines at the time.

Looking at these two films, we see somewhat different goals. King of Kong tells a story of an unlikely drama (complete with “hero” and “villain”) unfolding in a space most in the audience do not know. In How to Survive a Plague, on the other hand, the filmmakers are motivated by a pedagogical and political desire to pass on to a younger generation the hard-earned lessons of the AIDS era.  Both of these films are documentaries, but How to Survive a Plague has a clearer educational mission; King of Kong, meanwhile, explores how something as mundane as competitive arcade video game playing can make for a drama every bit as captivating as a work of fiction.

Documentaries can have strong positions on the subjects they address on the screen. The documentaries of Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine [2002], Sicko [2007]) foreground the director and his outspoken political opinions throughout. Other documentaries, by contrast, strive for a kind of objective neutrality, often removing the filmmakers as much as possible from the screen and allowing the subjects to speak for themselves. A good example of this would be Hoop Dreams (dir. Steve James; 1994), which follows two Chicago highschoolers recruited to play for an elite suburban high school with the hopes of ultimately being recruited to a college program that might lead to an NBA career. An honest and at times heartbreaking portrait of the sacrifices young athletes endure in the hopes of being able to lift themselves and their families out of poverty, the filmmakers had little sense of what to expect when they started filming their subjects. The film studiously maintains a neutrality with regards to the story that is being told, letting the young men and their families speak for themselves.

Of course, no film can be wholly objective or neutral. Any time we tell a story, we are organizing it in ways designed to emphasize certain ideas or issues. We are always leaving things out in order to foreground the issues we believe carry the most importance. This is all the more the case in film, where every decision of where to point the camera involves infinite other choices discarded, where every cut involves leaving something on the cutting room floor. Nonetheless, we can imagine a continuum in documentary film which runs from those that strive for as much objectivity as possible on one end of the scale, to those that seek to manipulate the audience towards very specific beliefs and actions on the other:

These distinctions are porous. Even the most neutral documentary likely has a point of view that seeks to educate or persuade, for example. But it does help us identify something roughly equivalent to the genres in narrative film we will discuss. For educational (or instructional) documentaries we might think of some of the films we watched in high school classes—for example, a sex-ed film designed to spare the teacher the embarrassment of addressing the topic with their students (“No laughing!” I recall my teacher shouting from the back of the room while we watched two teenage actors earnestly asking questions about safe sex, which of course only set us into still more fits of giggles). It could also be a documentary about a historical figure, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. or Florence Nightingale.

Of course, such films will likely have persuasive goals as well, but an instructional documentary strives for more objectivity than a persuasive documentary that seeks to combine education with a call to action. Here we can think of a film such as Inconvenient Truth (dir. Davis Guggenheim, 2006), which focuses on Al Gore’s efforts to educate people about climate change. Much of the film is made up of the former Vice President giving lectures on the subject, aligning it with the educational documentary. But this is a film that seeks to motivate action on the part of its audience: asking them to make personal changes in behavior and to agitate for policies that address climate change. It makes few pretenses to neutrality on the subject, identifying climate change as a crisis that must be addressed immediately.

Those who believed in 2006 that climate change is a “hoax” regarded An Inconvenient Truth not as a persuasive documentary, but as a piece of “propaganda.” As one anonymous reviewer on imdb.com described it: “This movie is nothing more than unscientific propaganda.”^[2] Indeed, the distinction between persuasive and propaganda films can be contested, and when we identify a documentary as “propaganda” we are in general challenging its motives and accusing it of violating the minimum levels of objectivity we expect of a documentary. Propaganda seeks not to educate people into making different decisions, but to spread and reinforce certain beliefs through the manipulative powers of cinema. Often a government group or other larger organization is responsible for the creation of an explicitly propaganda film.

Perhaps the most infamous uses of government-sponsored propaganda films came from Adolph Hitler’s Germany, including a series of antisemitic documentaries seeking to dehumanize German Jews in the eyes of the audience to prepare the populace for its participation in the Holocaust. Upon securing control of the German government, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Geobbels, set about establishing a national film industry dedicated to selling and reinforcing Naziism throughout the country. The 1934 Nuremberg Rally was filmed by director Leni Riefenstahl, and the footage was used to create the propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will  (1935), designed to represent Germany as the superior nation on the planet and to popularize the monstrous myth of Hitler as “chosen one” who would lead the nation to world-domination. There was nothing neutral about the choices Riefenstahl makes in the film: every edit, every camera angle, every choice of lens—all are designed to reinforce the film’s overarching message, promising a glorious destiny to all who join the Nazi cause and the destruction of all who oppose it.

We might justifiably find ourselves skeptical about a documentary claiming to be purely objective because we know that all of us bring perspective and opinion to the stories we are telling. And of course we should always be skeptical of pure propaganda, which seeks nothing less than to take away independent rational thought and individual action. Between those two extremes, however, we will find most of the world’s vast library of documentaries.

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Our third major category is experimental film. This is a cinema that is in general not primarily concerned—as both narrative and documentary films are—with storytelling. Here we are looking at films that explore other possibilities for film outside of narrative and commercial viability. These are often personal films, made by a small group of collaborators, and, unlike classical Hollywood films, these films often refuse easy comprehension or packaged meanings. Instead, the individual viewer is asked to bring their own meaning, to complete the film in their mind.

One of the most famous experimental films is Un Chien Andelou (1929), directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. As you can see in watching the film below, Un Chien Andelou has no conventional plot, and it willfully frustrates our attempts to try and put events into some kind of narrative order—even as it teases us with the apparatus of storytelling (“once upon a time,” “eight years later”). It also deploys images designed to shock and even outrage the viewer, such as the image of an animal’s eye (not the young woman’s as might first appear due to a rapid cut) being sliced by a razor. At the end, we are left unsettled and uncertain how to make sense of what we have just seen.

Commercial narrative film is governed by conventions. As we will discuss in the next chapter, there are good reasons for this in terms of what is sometimes termed “narrative economy.” But of course there are also good reasons in terms of the more literal economy: conventions make filmmaking more efficient and therefore more profitable. The films we see in the theater are for the most part expensive productions; every day on set and in post-production involves staggering expenses (personnel, rentals, equipment). Conventions and standardization allow this time to be used efficiently, reducing the need to “reinvent the wheel.”

Experimental film, by its nature, is all about refusing conventions, about approaching each film as if there were no rules. Even without reading a review, we walk into a narrative film in our local movie theater already armed with many expectations, based on the casting; the trailer, poster, or other advertising; and, as we will discuss below, genre. With experimental film, we enter completely unarmed, with no sense as to what to expect. This is the pleasure and the frustration of experimental film.

Personally, I find I have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy an experimental film. At the Wexner Center for the Arts here on campus, they regularly offer free experimental short films in a small theater called the Box near the cafe. It was there, a couple of years ago, I saw the enigmatic short film, one is too few two is only one possibility (2017) by Emma Levesque-Schaefer. Levesque-Schaefer’s film turned out to be fairly relaxing at first, with soothing sounds and gentle images of lavender fields and shimmering water. Nonetheless, as the film proceeded I found myself increasingly unsettled by the overlay and challenging juxtapositions of images and sounds. By the end, even the soothing soundtrack had become uncomfortable. I remember walking out of the Box, annoyed that I had spent ten minutes on something that seemed designed simply to frustrate interpretation. But despite my frustration, something stuck with me from this challenging film, and I found images and sounds returning in weeks to come.  For better and worse, this is often the experience with experimental film.

Genre in Narrative Film

In the previous section we discussed ways of broadly breaking down documentary film along an axis from objective to propagandist. In the case of narrative film, we traditionally use categories of genre to classify similarities and differences between films. Here is a (far from exhaustive) list of some of the most familiar genres of twentieth-century film in the Hollywood tradition:

Even if you can’t identify all the images attached to the individual genre names above, I bet each of you could come up with examples of each genre from your own history of movie watching. Nonetheless, we also recognize some of these genres—all at one time or another extremely popular—are less popular in 2023. Take, for example, the Western. As we saw last week, one of the first longer narrative films ever filmed was the Western, The Great Train Robbery (dir. Edwin Porter; 1903). After the film industry migrated from the east coast to Hollywood beginning in 1914, Western films became one of the most familiar genres, well into the 1960s. However, the last fifty years has seen the genre diminish in popularity. Westerns are still made, such as 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma (a remake of a 1957 film by the same name) or the Coen brothers’ 2010 True Grit (itself a remake of a 1969 film starring John Wayne). But where in the 1940s as many as 100 western films were produced in a given year, today we would not expect to encounter more than a couple.

Other genres that rarely achieved meaningful popularity in the first hundred years of film history are today among the most popular. Here I am especially thinking about the superhero movie. So marginal were superhero movies to Hollywood before the 21st century that most would have considered them at best as a sub-genre of the action or science fiction genres. Nonetheless, they did exist, early on in the form of serials. Superman, Batman and Captain America all had serial films in the 1940s. Much later, 1978’s Superman (dir. Richard Donner) played a crucial role in launching the blockbuster era. Despite some notable exceptions (including Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman), however, most superhero films of the 20th century were underwhelming both critically and financially.

All of that changed with the full arrival of digital film making (which we will discuss in more detail later this semester). Beginning with X-Men (dir. Bryan Singer; 2000) and Spider-Man (dir. Sam Rami; 2002), superheroes and their powers could at last brought convincingly to the screen. Where previously films like 1978’s Superman succeeded despite the failure to represent him flying in a way that felt believable, now Spider-man could be seen web-slinging his way through the streets of New York and—thanks to the increasingly seamless overlay of live action green-screen images and digital effects and animation—it required no willful suspension of disbelief to accept it was really happening before our eyes.

Twenty years ago, most film critics and historians believed the sudden box office success of the superhero film would run its course in a few years’ time. Needless to say, that is not what has happened. More than two decades on, this genre now accounts for six of the top twenty biggest box office films of all time. In both 2021 and 2022, five of the top ten box office films were superhero movies. While there have been recent signs of some audience exhaustion with the genre, there is no reason to believe the genre will fade into obscurity any time soon.

Of course, superhero films is not the only genre ever to seemingly appear out of nowhere. It probably goes without saying that before the introduction of sound in motion pictures, musicals were not a genre one would encounter on the big screen. It probably will also not be very surprising that shortly after the arrival of sound film in 1927, musicals took off with a vengeance. The novelty of the new technology and the long tradition of musical theater made for an easy transition into the top of the charts for this new genre. And yet, by the 1960s, the music had diminished greatly in popularity, taken over increasingly by the Disney animated feature which would continue to nurture it in the decades to come. Recently we saw something of a mini-renaissance of the genre with the success of the Pitch Perfect series and star vehicles such as A Star is Born (dir. Bradley Cooper; 2018). Overall, however, we still tend today to associate the musical first and foremost with the animated feature, or, in live action, with classical Hollywood.

In exploring why genres rise and fall in popularity, we can learn a bit more about how genres work. Westerns were a dream come true for the early film industry, especially after it moved our west. In California in the 1910s and 20s, they found plenty of underemployed cowboys and a landscape and abandoned towns that needed no set design to get looking like the “old West.” And since much of a western film takes place outside, little was needed in terms of lighting either. If Hollywood could have made nothing but westerns, they would have: they were cheap, easy, and efficient to produce.

However, genre is a complicated negotiation between filmmakers and audiences;  the industry does not get the final say. Had the western not also been popular with audiences in the early decades of the 20th century, they would have disappeared quickly. After all, if no one goes to see a film, a genre will not last long. What made westerns popular initially so popular had a lot to do with the announcement in 1890 by the Census Bureau that the Western “frontier” was now “closed.” Three years later, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s declared that it had been the possibility of the western frontier that defined and shaped American character and values. With no frontier left to “tame,” what would become of “American exceptionalism”?

Today we are rightly skeptical of such proclamations, and indeed any assertion of a national “character” or universal set of values is likely to be greeted with eye-rolling (especially when coupled with the glorification of the genocidal dispossession of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands). Nonetheless, in the early years of the 20th century, especially after the United States emerged for the first time as a major world power following World War I, this narrative carried weight for a large segment of the population. As the real frontier “closed,” the wild popularity of the western as a genre of romantic adventure opened up, first in dime novels at the end of the 19th century and then in film. Going to the westerns was not just a form of entertainment—it was also a way virtually to experience the now-lost values of the “frontier.”

So it was that Hollywood and its public formed a compact around the western genre that lasted for some time. Producers got cheap and efficient movies. Audiences got fantasy that fulfilled a need at a certain time. But it did not last forever. As films grew more complex and sophisticated, so did its audiences, and westerns began to be perceived as kids’ stuff. Eventually, in order to win back adult audiences, Hollywood started producing more ambitious westerns, with stronger scripts, better actors and directors, and more mature themes (the “adult western,” as it came to be known). Some of the best films in the history of the genre emerge from this transitional period, from The Ox-bow Incident (dir. William Wellman; 1943) to High Noon (dir. Fred Zinnemann; 1952). But bigger stars and better scripts also meant higher budgets, and bigger budgets meant fewer films could be made per year.

Still, the genre persisted and produced some remarkable films in the final decades of its dominance in Hollywood. But the 1960s saw a youth culture increasingly skeptical of the myths of American exceptionalism and critical of the underlying racist logic of many traditional western films. The civil rights movement and the opposition to America’s participation in the Vietnam War led to a rejection of the kind of logic that had inspired the original success of the genre at the start of the century. Most westerns after 1968—and some great ones continue to be made occasionally—are likely to be “deconstructions” of the genre, seeking to critique the conventions and blind spots that were once the reasons for its popularity.

We have already seen how superheroes burst into the scene because of the digital revolution in film making at the end of the 20th century, just as musicals had following the introduction of sound film in 1927. The decline of the musical might offer some vision of what the eventual decline of the superhero film might look like, although one must be careful about drawing strict historical parallels when the global economy of film is today so completely transformed. Unlike the western, musicals were not linked with ideology and historical romance but with entertainment and fantasy. Musicals offered Americans in every part of the country privileged access to the kind of theatrical entertainments previously only available to people in large cities; and they offered fantasies of escape—from the grueling realities of the Depression in the 1930s to the bland suburban conformity of the 1950s. The rise of television, however, placed film genres under new competition in the 50s and 60s; no longer did film have a monopoly on mass mediated musical spectaculars. Perhaps more urgently, the collapse of the studio system in the early 1960s meant the end of studios’ “stables”: the stars, directors, composers, and choreographers they had long held under brutally restrictive long-term contracts. By the 1960s, every film was effectively a new studio to be assembled from the ground up. All the efficiencies of scale the studio system depended on to produce musical spectaculars were no longer at their disposal.

As we can see, when genres rise, it tends to be a happy coincidence of technological innovation, industrial efficiency, and a cultural appetite driving audiences to seek these films out. A change in industrial structures or in the cultural mood, and the genre will decline for a generation or more.

Sometimes genres emerge when one studio lucks into a film by accident. For example, while there were films about gangsters before 1930, few people ever talked about the “gangster film” as a genre. But in 1931, Warner Bros. produced two gangster films in quick succession—Little Caesar (dir. Mervyn LeRoy) and Public Enemy (dir. William Wellman). These films proved tremendously popular, sparking a demand for more of the same. Warners rushed to get more gangster films in the pipeline, fearing their competitors would jump on the bandwagon. Needless to say, within a matter of a very short time almost every major and minor studio was producing gangster films.

What contributed to the popularity of this genre at this time? First, again, we must look to sound. Sound film was less than four years old when Little Caesar premiered, and for the first time audiences could hear the screech of tires and the rat-a-tat of machine gun fire (the machine gun itself being a recent invention). In addition, and perhaps more exciting, the gangster films seemed to be ripped from the day’s headlines, as news of gang wars in Chicago and other major cities gripped the nation in the wake of Prohibition, which had gone into effect in 1919 but which was approaching its end in 1931 as the consequences of this national policy became clear. Finally, we have to look to the Depression, which saw an unprecedented number of Americans out of work, with even those still able to secure employment found themselves barely scraping by. In this context, the story of powerless immigrants fighting their way to the top and showering themselves in wealth and power was an exhilarating fantasy for many filmgoers who had lost everything following after 1929.

On the side of the studios, these were dream productions: low-budget, not dependent on big stars or special effects, they could be made quickly and cheaply on standard city sets in studio back lots. And they were proving very, very popular.

Indeed, the gangster genre might have dominated the 1930s and 40s had it not been for this very popularity, which terrified many of the cultural gatekeepers (teachers, politicians, ministers) who saw in these films a glorification of crime and signs of an increasingly powerful film industry without any moral compass. The gangster film became the cause célèbre for an increasingly organized confederation of reformers eager to reign in the growing influence of Hollywood. By 1934, reformers had pressured Congress to threaten Hollywood with government censorship if they did not get their house in order, and the studios agreed to adopt a system of self-censorship known as the Motion Picture Production Code. Among many other restrictions (including a ban on showing pregnant women, or a man and a woman in a bed together), the Code banned any film about crime that could be perceived as glorifying the criminal, demanding instead that the focus of films about crime should be on law enforcement and the institutions of justice. And with that, until the Code came to an end in the 1960s, the gangster film was effectively in the doldrums.

This is a rare instance of outside forces interfering in the genre contract between producers and audience, but it is far from the only one. Think, for example, about the changing “obscenity” laws and policies. In some countries, even today, some slasher films (such as Texas Chain Saw Massacre; dir. Toby Hooper, 1971) remained banned. Hardcore pornographic films would never been found in commercial theaters until changes in obscenity laws and in the exhibition business made it possible in the early 1970s; with the rise of DVD and the internet in the late 1990s, the XXX theater would largely disappear from the American landscape once again. But for the most part genre remains a complicated contract, renegotiated with every new film, between film producers and audiences, with film reviewers and critics playing a minor (and occasionally meaningful) role in giving retrospective shape and definition to a genre.

With the rise of the blockbuster era came the rise of the hybrid genre. However it was not new to blockbusters like Star Wars (science fiction/western) and Alien (science fiction/horror). Arguably the first major hybrid genre was the romantic comedy, a mashup of the melodrama, or “women’s picture,” popular in the 1920s and 30s, with the anarchic, fast-paced comedy of the early sound era. Beginning with films such as Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), the romantic comedy quickly developed its own conventions—combining the impossible love affair of melodrama with the fast-paced comedy of the Marx Brothers into a story of an unlikely couple that can’t possibly end up together—but who nonetheless, following a series of mishaps and misunderstandings, come together at the last in an impossible but satisfying union. As you can recognize by my plot summary, this genre formula has remained largely intact from the 1930s to the early 2020s.

We go into a film which advertises its genre (in the poster, title, casting, etc.) with expectations that many of its conventions will be met in the story we see on screen. We will talk more about narrative next week, but we know that almost all narratives have certain elements, including plot, characters, point of view, setting, theme, conflict, and style.  This is true of narrative in all media, including novels, plays, narrative video games, and even that interminable story your roommate told you about their bad date. When we consider some of these elements of narrative in relation to genre, we realize that we have certain expectations for each based on the genre even before we have seen the film in question. Here are a couple of examples, although all the expectations for characters, setting, conflict, style and resolution could easily be expanded based on one’s experience with the genre:

The contract between producers and audience around genre is a dynamic one, and a couple of key points are worth underscoring:

Genres change, rise and fall in popularity, and today often come together in unions as surprising as the couple in the beginning of a romantic comedy (horror-comedy; space-western). But even as genres become more modular and dynamic, the basic principle remains as it was at the beginning of the modern film industry a century ago. Genre is a mode of classifying films, implicitly agreed upon by producers and audiences together, around similar conventions, subject matter, settings, and narrative and stylistic patterns. After all, when your friend invites you over to see a movie, they might ask you what you are in the mood for—thriller? comedy? horror? Oscar-bait drama? Or how about this new film they just heard of: a comedy-sports-horror-musical film everyone has been talking about.