Iconography
The genre convention of recognisable things: objects, costumes, spaces and images that carry a genre's memory.
- genre conventions
- reference
- genre-convention
The visual vocabulary a genre accumulates: the gunslinger's silhouette, the noir venetian blind, the gothic house, the diner counter. Iconography works by recognition — one image summons a genre's whole history, which films can then honour, milk or betray.
What to look for
Which objects arrive pre-loaded? What tradition does the image quote, and does the film spend that inheritance straight or ironically?
Canonical cases
The Bates house in Psycho (1960) — American Gothic verticality looming over motel-modern horizontal, two icon systems in one composition. And Alice — the prologue as pure iconography: painted sunset, farm fence, gingham child — the women's-picture/Oz image-set reconstructed at full cost precisely so one cut can smash it (The $85,000 backdrop).
Sources
Scorsese on Scorsese on quoting the classics; Durgnat on the house.