Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
NOTES ON SOME IMPORTANT TERMS FOR FILM STUDIES
Gopa B. Caesar:
Narrative Development
Film narrative usually is linear and driven by cause-and-effect relationships among characters and events.
To stimulate interest in the narrative, films typically present characters with whom viewers can identify. The characters are assigned certain traits and motivations that propel the events of the film to their conclusion.
Although most films are character-driven, other forces can affect the course of the narrative, such as the natural world, societal structures, and historical events.
The beginning of a film often establishes a conflict that is then resolved, after a turning point and a climax at the conclusion of the narrative.
Films that follow this normative pattern of conflict resolution (common in Hollywood films) are said to have a closed ending.
A film with an open ending never fully resolves the conflicts it initiates.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Narration
Narration is the process by which the film reveals relevant information to the viewer.
Since in most cases the audience initially knows nothing about the world of the film, early scenes typically involve exposition, wherein a large amount of information about characters and events is provided.
If a film reveals all the relevant information required to understand the story, and the audience knows more than the characters in the film do, the film is using omniscient narration.
If a film allows the audience to know only as much as, or less than, the characters in the film do, the film is using subjective narration.
Films sometimes employ a narrator, whose voice can be heard on the soundtrack in the form of a voice-over, to deliver critical information to the audience.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Narrative Meaning
Films are not self-enclosed entities but make statements about the world in which we live. Films create meaning through the use of symbols, metaphors, and motifs, which are repeated techniques, objects, or thematic ideas.
In allegorical films, plot events take on meanings that are greater than their function within the logic of the narrative. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, for example, can be interpreted as an allegory of American militarism in Vietnam.
Contemporary film narratives are often highly intertextual, referring to previous cultural works, whether in the cinema, television, or the other arts.
Films depend on a willing suspension of disbelief that allows audiences to believe temporarily in the events and characters of the films’ fictional narratives.
Filmmakers who want audiences to take a more critical position use alienation effects to remind viewers of the constructedness and unreality of their narratives.
The profit motive driving Hollywood studios leads producers to repeat, with some variation, formulas that prove financially successful. This practice has led to the establishment of familiar categories of films, known as genres, some of which are first developed in literature and then adapted for the screen. Some genres, like the western and the screwball comedy, are quintessentially American, while others, like the musical and the melodrama, are popular around the world.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Genre Theory
As audiences become acquainted with particular genres, they come to expect a specific type of viewing experience from films of that genre.
Genres typically have a life cycle, progressing from uncertain beginnings to stable maturity and parodic decline.
Though generic similarities between films have existed since the beginning of cinema, it was the advent of semiotics and structuralism that gave scholars a sophisticated methodology with which to analyze film genre (see Film Theory).
Jim Kitses defined genre in terms of structuring oppositions, such as the wilderness-civilization binary found in westerns.
Rick Altman divided genre into the semantic (iconographic elements such as the cowboy hat) and the syntactic (structural and symbolic meanings).
Recent genre theory has emphasized the postmodern mutation of genres toward hybridity and reflexivity .
Gopa B. Caesar:
Gangster
The gangster genre emerged during the Depression era with sound films such as Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1930), William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931) and Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932). These films embodied Americans’ ambivalence with law and order, chronicling the spectacular criminal exploits of Prohibition-era gangsters in ways that enabled audiences to both identify pruriently with them on their rise to power and cheer moralistically at their inevitable downfall.
In the 1940s and 1950s, gangster films became much darker, adopting a film noir style that was defined by low-key lighting, a claustrophobic urban setting, a morally compromised protagonist, and seductive, deceptive female characters known as femme fatales. In these psychologically complex films, such as Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), the line between criminality and law and order is blurred beyond distinction.
The Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy era (see Postwar Period) shifted the thematic emphasis of the genre away from social criticism, as in Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), toward anti-Communist paranoia, as in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953).
Contemporary gangster films have focused almost exclusively on Mafia families, most notably in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films (1972–1990) and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) and Casino (1995).
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