How Genre Helps Us To Understand Classical Hollywood
Submitted by sunita on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
- Category: History Other
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How Genre Helps Us To Understand Classical Hollywood
The purpose of this essay is to examine the study of genre, in relation to classical Hollywood cinema. One will be looking at how genre helps one understand what classical Hollywood cinema is and how it works. Though first it is important for one to establish what a genre is. Basically a genre is a type of film which is recognised by familiar narrative conventions. For example westerns and musicals are two popular genres, especially in the classical Hollywood era (Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin p.479 1997). In Hollywood genres are extremely prominent as Hollywood is seen as a cinema of genres (Hill, John and Gibson, Pamela Church p.327 1998).
When looking at the study of genres and the system of genres it is clear that it helps one to understand what classical Hollywood cinema is, and how it works. When looking at what it is one will be examining the history of genre and how the genre system effected classical Hollywood cinema. As well as looking at how the concept of the genre has developed and changed. When looking at the idea that genre helps one understand how the classical Hollywood cinema works one will be concentrating on the different types of genre, and how the use of the genre system effects the audience of classical Hollywood cinema.
When looking at the idea that the genre system helps one to understand what classical Hollywood cinema is, it is important to look at the primitive cinema era. As it is clear that these films modelled themselves on stage acts, for example variety acts. This influence came from the vaudeville acts of the time (Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet and Thompson, Kristin p.159 1985). By looking at this history
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of the genre system one is able to understand what the classical Hollywood cinema is as one is able to see how this era of filmmaking was directly effected by other popular entertainment of the day, for example vaudeville acts. So one is able to see where the...
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