Genre: Transforming Genre Flashcards
What are the common catalysts that spur on generic transformation of genre?
Technical changes, Industrial changes, Sociocultural changes
What are examples of technical changes, industrial changes, and sociocultural changes in the western genre?
- Technical: widescreen technologies
- Industrial: dismantling of the studio system, change in conventions, lead to a more individual approach
- Sociocultural: more violence to keep pace, changes in protagonist (women & black men became protagonists)
Film genres allow for society to tell itself the same basic story over and over in an almost ritualistic fashion… what is this?
Myth
What is Claude Lévi-Strauss known for?
Claude Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist that studied myths that exist in society
What genre has been changing the most overtime?
The Western genre - not noted for originality but for their deep structure shared with other films of the genre, meant for an audience familiar with it
Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed the structure of myths to be what? And with what purpose?
Structure: binaristic
Purpose: “to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction”
Western understood by mythical terms to possess binary oppositions such as what?
Individual/community, town/wilderness, order/anarchy
Screwball understood by mythical terms possess binary oppositions such as what?
Man/woman, aversion/attraction, social norms/transgression of norms
What conventions did the Western possess?
Visual, aural, technical: cowboy, horse, hat, gun, landscape, long and xl shots, widescreen, spurs, slow talking, abrupt bursts of gunfire, non diegetic music
Narrative: hero enters arena, hero eradicates threat to community, hero exits arena
Thematic: resolution of social order, masculinity, the law of the gun, the nature of honour, the doctrine of manifest destiny
