Short Answer Questions

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1. How do genres function as cultural rituals?
Genres function as cultural rituals by adopting familiar formulas that help coordinate our needs and desires. These rituals are both formal and ideological practices that can become therapeutic means of responding to situations that are too traumatic, confusing, or irrational to be resolved in a simple or pragmatic way. Like religious ceremonies or the traditions of holidays, these rituals connect us to a larger community.

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2. What is the relationship between the classical era Hollywood studio system and film genres?
The rise of the studio system through the 1920s and 1930s provided extraordinarily fertile ground for developing movie genres. During that time, the economic model of Fordism increased the amount and quality of output through the division of labor and the mass production of parts. As a result of that increased output, cost would decrease and, ideally, consumption of the product would increase. Tied to a studio system that adapted this industrial system of mass production, film genres enabled movie producers to reuse script formulas, actors, sets, and costumes to create, again and again, many different modified versions of a popular movie. The most famous Hollywood studios differed in size, strategies, and styles, but each used a production system based on the efficient recycling of formulas and conventions, stars, and sets.

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3. What is the difference between classical genre traditions and revisionist genre traditions?
Classical genre traditions stem from a prescriptive approach to genres, and place a film in relation to a paradigm that does not change over time. Classical genre traditions establish fairly fixed sets of formulas and conventions. On the other hand, revisionist genre traditions are associated with a descriptive approach to genre, and see a film as a function of changing historical and cultural contexts that modify the conventions and formulas of that genre.

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4. What does the idea of “genres as constellations” refer to?
Genres are a product of a perspective that groups individual movies together in many different ways that can change over time. And like constellations, genres can appear to overlap and change their shapes when viewed from different angles. Hybrid genres and subgenres are ways to better understand the multiple combinations and subdivisions that are possible within the realm of genres.

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5. What are the three fundamental features of the contemporary film melodrama?
Contemporary melodrama films are generally composed of three distinct features: characters who are defined by their situation and who struggle, often desperately, to express their feelings or emotions; narratives that rely on coincidences and reversals and build toward emotional or physical climaxes; and dramatic visual effects and styling that emphasize emotion or elemental struggle.