While genre criticism has been around since the beginning, its modern use began after World War II. Its late use was due to film wanting to break away from its literary history (Cook, 58). It was at this time that critics believed that the director is an artist and each film is different, despite a genre's conventions, making it impossible to categorize. Tom Ryall, a film critic, thought this theory made "high culture" out of popular art (Cook, 58).
Hollywood films were more widely available and at the same time artists were being seen as a voice of social dissent, which aided in the role of the auteur theory (Cook, 119). Created by Alexandre Astruc, auteurism was a cry for a new cinema, one that allowed an artist to "express his or her thoughts, using the camera to write a world-view, a philosophy of life" (Cook, 119). Astruc was a left-wing writer in a time when stabilization was needed for the individual (Cook, 119). Filmmakers and critics questioned form and mise-en-scene in relation to the artist, the product, and society. Tom Ryall sees the auteur theory as a way to turn popular art into high culture (Cook, 58). He also describes the auteur system as linear, from artist to audience, with no processing (Cook, 58).
About the mid-60s and early 70s, a new science was rising in popularity, a study of language and signs, called Semiotics. Critics were frustrated by the inability of the auteur theory to define and compare films, because every film is different. Structuralism began to influence criticism, because it offered a focused system that could be applied to many films, unlike the shifting in the auteur theory.
Cahiers du Cinéma, a French film journal, began to sharpen its critiquing skills and became an excellent source for modern criticism. It is in the pages of the Cahiers the film world is introduced to the fathers of film criticism, Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Andre Bazin, and Claude Levi-Strauss.
Structuralism was a mixture of semiotics with a left-wing mindset that was "concerned in early formulation with the interrelationship of the various signifiers within the sign system" (Cook, 222). Influenced by Film Noir, "Cahiers suggested a system of categorization that would discriminate between those films whose formal organization reinforced their manifest ideological themes" (Cook, 58). Narrative structure was looked at more closely by critics to analyze the placement of signifiers in the plot to determine the meaning of a film.
Peter Wollen states that the structuralist approach is based on motifs reappearing "time and time again" (p. 93). He continues that "there must be a moment of synthesis as well as a moment of analysis: otherwise, the method is formalist, rather that truly structuralist. Structuralist criticism cannot rest at the perception of resemblance or repetitions (redundancies, in fact), but must also comprehend a system of differences and oppositions" (p.93). He says that it's from the differences and oppositions of images and narrative elements that we learn about the world, what is universal and what is singular to a particular culture.
Structuralist thought reevaluated genres with the idea that their conventions are a contracted language with an audience. Critics began contemplating the meaning in film, the director, and the audiences position and lost sight of genre specifics (Cook, 58). Tom Ryall describes the structuralist approach to the world of film in a triangular model. He sees the film, the artist, and the audience as three separate and equal parts (Cook, 58-59). Critics of today are still influenced by the structuralist thought process.
While I disagree with Christan Metz, a critic from the Cahiers du Cinéma period, on what are considered elements of a film language, I feel his use clarifies the different elements in a film that make up the conventions in genres. When looking to determine film conventions, first, the two sciences with language as a focus, semiotics, the study of sign systems, and linguistics, the study of language must be understood. The role of communication in semiotics and linguistics is also an important process for it describes the interaction of the film and the audience.
Both sciences study how a sign, or system of signs, influences communication. While semioticians study how a sign affects behavior, linguists study how signs are used in a system to make up a language. These signs are usually words or sounds, but they can also be traffic signals or pictures of people on a bathroom door. Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of modern semiotics, distinguished three general terms of a sign: icon, index, and symbol. Meanwhile, Ferdinand de Saussures, the father of modern linguistics, divided signs into the signified and the signifier.
Peirce's trichotomy of icon (firstness), index (secondness), and symbol (thirdness) relate to the different levels of a sign in a semiotic sign system. An icon looks like or closely resembles the object, a real thing. There is no meaning associated with a pure icon, but according to Peirce pure icons cannot exist. Therefore, most signs are indices, because they look like or closely resemble an object, but an interpreter needs experience to know its meaning. The third division of sign is symbol, which is a higher level of an index in that a symbol is a cultural or social convention. Saussure designates signified and signifier. Signified is the sign with all it's cultural and individual meaning, and the signifier is the thing being represented.
Christan Metz designates that signs in spoken language are similar to signs in film. He calls this the first articulation, where film's make their initial utterance of a film language. "The image is defined as a word, the sequence as a sentence...the sequence is a complex segment of discourse" (p. 65). Metz's image, in terms of a sign, is Peirce's index. It requires knowledge to understand the context. Conventional films more closely resemble symbols, because the audience has experience interpreting their meanings. For instance, many audiences recognize a shot of the cowboy on his horse facing the sunset as the happy end to an old western. Identifying that shot takes a certain cultural background that today may have been weakened by time.
To understand how signs, in either semiotics or linguistics, are interpreted, work in initiating behavior or create a system, one should begin with the standard model of communication.
Shannon and Weaver created a linear model that simply explains the process of communication. There are seven parts to their chain that a message must move through in order to be successful: The sender (speaker, communicator, encoder, etc.), the message, the channel, the receiver (listener, recipient, decoder, etc.), the feedback or response, and the noise (missing one). A message (or sign) begins with the sender. The sender codes his/her message in puts it through a channel (i.e. the newspaper, television, traffic light, etc.) to be decoded by a receiver and acted upon, either with a reply or performing an action, such as nodding or crossing the room. However, sometimes the message is lost or decoded incorrectly due to noise in the channel, such as, a weak transmission or a loud noise in the background.
Signs, as well as, films are another form of message, as stated above, that can travel through this model. For example, let's say High Spirits was showing at the local cineplex. The audience would be lounging in their seats watching the film flash across the screen. The director is the information source, the sender. It is transmitting its message through a series of shots, or sequences, on film, the channel. The audience receives the message and laughs or cries accordingly. This is a basic model compared to what the semoticians have developed.
The detailed model, called the sign repertoire, describes how a sign is encoded and decoded by people. Added onto the above model is a diagram of a sender and receivers repertoire of signs each have previous knowledge of and also a cultural/social repertoire both share.
MODEL TO BE PLACED SOON. SORRY FOR INCONVIENCE.
SR1 and SR2 are the experiences the director and the audience respectively. SR3 is the combination of the two, which forms the conventions that make up genres.
However, a sign does not always stand alone. It is the way in which people use signs that create meaning. Roland Barthes, in his essay The Elements of Semiology, presents Saussures' findings of why pronunciation evolved along with spontaneous associations that seemed to be of an individual act. He says that "Saussure started from the 'multiform and heterogeneous' nature of language, which appears at first sight as an unclassifiable reality" (p. 13). From this, he found a social object with a systematized set of conventions. This led to his definition of language (langue):
it is at the same time a social institution and a system of values. As a social institution, it is by no means an act, and it is not subject to any premeditation. It is the social part of language, the individual cannot by himself either create or modify it; it is essentially a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate. (p. 14)
Where language is social, speech is "an individual act of selection and actualization" 14-15). Despite the individual act of speech, a person does not pick up a book and learn the correct grammar before beginning to speak. A child must be immersed into the spoken world first to learn the necessities to be able to combine logical syntax.
As seen above, communication is circular. A sender becomes the receiver when decoding feedback. But, film is one-way communication. As stated above, Metz, makes this observation himself. He continues that film therefore can not be a language system, because it contradicts three traits in the definition (p. 75). One, there is no empirical facts that film is a system, because, two, there are not many signs in film. Three, as stated above, there is no intercommunication between the film and its spectators (p. 75).
Further in his book, Metz argues that film can be a language in that to "be considered a language, to the extent that it orders signifying elements within ordered arrangements different from those of spoken idioms..." (p. 105). From this, he continues to define the film language.
A sign is formed by a shot from which meaning can be extracted and is similar to the spoken/written sentence. Metz describes the syntax of a film as similar to sentence structure in that a shot is ordered into a sequence of shots and montages. The meaning of these sequences is defined by the denotation and connotation associated with them.
Once the "system of codes" (i.e. shot, sequence, montage) is established, meaning begins to develop through denotation, the literal meaning of an object, and connotation, the inferred meaning of the denoted object based on education. Metz believes that denotation and connotation are what solidifies a language. Barthes provides a well-thought out explanation of their definition further in his lectures.
Barthes says that "a connoted system is a system whose plane of expression is itself constituted by a signifying system" (p.89-90). He continues that "the signifiers of connotation, which we shall call connotators, are made up of signs (signifiers and signifieds united) of the denoted system. Naturally, several denoted signs can be grouped together to form a single connotator-provided the latter has a single signified of connotation" (p.91). For example, let's use the word FISH to demonstrate Barthes' definition. The signs that Barthes says are signs of a denoted system in the word FISH are F, I, S, and H. Apart, they have no meaning and do not cause any action or thought required by communication. Put together as a word, FISH, they form a system that has a cultural background that make what Barthes calls a connotator. The connotation of the word FISH motivates the idea of a aquatic object. Depending on how FISH is used in a larger system, a sentence, further connotative meaning will form.
Denotation and connotation are the underlying elements of genre. As previously mentioned, genre is based on an audience's level of education of conventional signs within the genre. A director's use of signs, with their denotative and connotative qualities, determines which genre a film will resemble. Metz says it is "through [a film's] procedures of denotation , the cinema is a specific language" (p. 97).
Metz states that it's with denotation that film differs from still photography. The denotation of still photography is based in the technical process, and it's through "human intervention" that connotation is supplied (p. 98). He further states that it is through the sequencing of shots into a montage or scene that a "filmic articulation begins to appear" (p.98-99). "It is the denotation itself that is being constructed , organized, and to a certain extent codified.... Lacking absolute laws, filmic intelligibility nevertheless depends on a certain number of dominant habits: A film put together haphazardly would not be understood" (p.99).
The connotation of a film, says Metz, usually does not require specific connotors, because of the ordering and structure of the denotations. For instance, in The Predator, the audience knows that Schwarzenegger has once again saved the day, when the shots of him rising from the water covered in mud as the rain forest explodes behind him. Or, when the Rocketeer's rocket is shot and glued together with gum, the audience knows something is going to happen as the patch starts to leak and the Rocketeer straps on the Rocket.
I would like to mention briefly another of Metz's ideas about film language, Plausibility, which adds to a more rounded definition of genre and what a genre does. Plausibility is Metz's social factor in determining a genre and its conventions. He devotes an entire section, "The Saying and the Said: Toward the Decline of a Plausibility in the Cinema?", and at the very beginning he states that:
very often in the cinema it is the saying that determines absolutely what is said....in this art, which more than any other is linked to industry and to public fashion...generalized convention demands that the actual choice of film as a means of expression, as a form of saying, limits from the very beginning the field of the sayable, and automatically results in the preferential adoption of certain subjects. (p. 235)
In essence, once a director or writer determines that he/she has something to say and wants to say it with film, it will inevitably fall into certain genres. He continues to explain that film is broken down into three aspects that are determined by who is in control of the film, which he calls censorships.
The censorships Metz mentions are based on the political, economical, and ideological status of the culture or the institution creating the art (p. 236). For instance, as mentioned above, Science-Fiction reflected the feelings of the Cold War. The director/producer censored what he says in the film based on his, and the audiences, beliefs about the world at the time. This reinforces the historical aspect in the definition of a genre. Genres evolve based on events in time and the audiences views at the time, because of this censorship. Metz states that this form of censorship is 'ethical'(p. 236).
Metz continues that while the ideological censorship is acceptable, he notes that most often censorship comes from the institution for political and economic reasons (p. 236). He says that institutions select what they say in films based on what will sell and not particularly on needing to say anything at all (p. 236). This is his reasoning for Disney, for example, and the resurrection of old television series and Hollywood's inability to talk about violence and sexuality. Out of these censorships come different aspects of Plausibility, or more accurately, the verisimilitude of the film world.
One aspect is very basic and deals with common everyday events, such as documentary films (p. 249). However, all possible content in these films comes from reality and sets up the rules of an audience's education. Metz states "everything that conforms to the laws of an established genre is plausible ...(i.e. common opinion, rules of the genre)...discourses that have already been pronounced, that the Plausible is defined, and thus it appears as the effect of a corpus: The laws of a genre are derived from earlier examples of that genre-that is to say, from a series of discourses" (p. 238-239). Anything outside the laws of reality, for example, aliens or musical numbers, could not be plausible.
Building on the first aspect is a one that includes all genres and is very similar to the definition of genre established by this paper. This aspect "proclaims and assumes convention, and that presents the work for what it is-that is to say, as the product of a controlled genre intended to be viewed as a performance of discourse in relation to the other works of the same 'genre': Thus the language of the work refuses to encompass the underhanded devices designed to give the illusion that it could be translated into the terms of reality-it rejects Plausibility, in the full sense of the word, since it renounces the attempt to appear true. Works of this variety afford their spectators (who know the rules of the game) some of the most intense 'aesthetic' enjoyment there is" (p. 248) Metz continues, "It attempts to persuade itself, and to persuade the public, that the conventions that force it to restrict its possibilities are not laws of discourse or rules of 'writing'-are not in fact conventions at all-and that their effect, observable in the content of the work, is in reality the effect of nature of things and derives from the intrinsic character of the subject represented. The plausible work believes itself to be, and wants us to believe it to be, directly translatable into the terms of reality....its function is to make real" (p. 249).
In this aspect, the rules of 'common opinion' are followed, but not enough to recreate reality as it is known. The rules are bent to create enjoyment for the audience, those who know the rules well enough to know that they are not common in the real world, which allows for the director to experiment and test the boundaries dividing the cinematic world into different genres. At the same time, the film attempts to make its world seem real by following the conventions of the genre. The institutional censorship forms another subset of Plausibility.
Metz calls this third approach Cinematographic Plausibility, which builds from the previous aspects ability to create the real out of the unreal. However, in this approach there are clear boundaries for the various genres, which makes evolution a more involved and longer trek. Metz uses the expression that film "remained hermetically sealed in a tradition of the filmically plausible" (p.242). For an example, he states that "the western had to wait fifty years before turning to even such mildly subversive topics as weariness, discouragement, or old age" (p.239). The plots and characters are the extreme of convention, like the stock characters of Italian Commedie del Art, which alienates the audience (p. 243).
Where do the films of Tim Burton fit in these worlds? He uses the institutional signs of convention from many genres while experimenting with new forms of content and expressions that Hollywood would rarely touch. Does this qualify that his films are a new genre?