concept

Iconography

The objects, costumes and spaces a genre reuses until they carry its memory, and what that memory is worth.

genre conventions
reference
genre-convention

Iconography is a genre's visual vocabulary: the six-shooter and the Stetson, the tommy gun in the 1920s Ford, the gothic house on the hill, the diner counter. It works by recognition. One image summons a genre's whole history, and a film can then spend that inheritance straight, ironically, or at a loss. The lazy reading stops at identification. The books push further, in three directions: iconography as an economy, as a historical record, and as the place where a genre's ideology is easiest to see and to attack.

Economy, record, weak point

Film Art gives the working definition. A genre's iconography is its "recurring symbolic images that carry meaning from film to film" (fa 332), furnished by objects, settings, costume and even stars. The value is efficiency: because viewers know the conventions, "the film can communicate information economically" (fa 332). An icon is a shortcut.

Hayward (Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts) treats the same images as evidence. Iconography "stresses both mise-en-scène and genre" (ckc 226); it is historically marked, so the icons of one period will not serve another, and the shift in a genre's look "points to social and sexual changes" (ckc 226). Her best sentence is the caveat: "If there appears to be no change, that too merits investigation." An icon that has not moved in forty years is a claim about what a culture would rather not revisit.

Claire Johnston, as reported in The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies, makes iconography the soft spot in ideology. Following Barthes, "myth uses icons, but the icon is its weakest point" (sgh 392). The handbook's gloss is that the less realistic the icon the better, since verisimilitude naturalises an icon while an obvious stereotype points back at the tradition that made it, and can therefore be turned against that tradition. Set beside Film Art, that is a disagreement about value. For Bordwell the icon is good because it is fast. For Johnston it is useful because it is obvious, and obviousness is what lets a film, or a critic, take it apart.

On the bench

Psycho stacks two icon systems in one composition: the gothic house of the family psyche above the flat modern motel (Psychoanalysis in postwar America). Inside, the parlour's taxidermy is horror iconography doing narration, predators and prey and a man already stuffed (Norman among the birds).

Alice — the prologue is iconography rebuilt in order to be broken: the Oz farmyard, the East of Eden house, a sky painted in homage to Menzies, a child in gingham with a Dorothy silhouette, all constructed on a soundstage at 1940s expense (The $85,000 backdrop) so that one cut can smash them. Johnston's point exactly: the icons are conspicuously artificial, which is what lets the film argue with them.

The Craft assembles occult iconography on screen, candles, chalk, the calling of the corners, a snake, most of it designed by a practising witch around one invented deity (Manon was invented so nobody could call him). Taxi Driver's arrives second-hand, from The Searchers and from Pickpocket (Bresson's hands, Travis's guns), and its most insistent icon is a costume: the military jacket tells everyone Travis meets what he never says (The returning veteran, 1976).

What to look for

Which objects, costumes and spaces arrive already loaded? What tradition loaded them?
Does the film spend the inheritance straight, or does it make the icon visibly artificial? If the latter, what is it arguing with?
Compare the icon to an earlier film in the genre. What has changed, and what has pointedly not?
Which icon is doing exposition the dialogue never provides?

In the books

A genre's iconography consists of recurring symbolic images that carry meaning from film to film.

— Film Art, fa 332

Iconography is, therefore, historically marked – the icons of one period will not be icons for another – and so it points to the shift over time of the look of a particular genre. It also points to social and sexual changes. If there appears to be no change, that too merits investigation.

— Hayward, ckc 226

[M]yth uses icons, but the icon is its weakest point

— SAGE Handbook, sgh 392

Deepest on this in the library

Measured across the 72 books indexed in Reel — how much denser each one is on this concept than the library average. A place to read next, not a claim about quality.

4.4× Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts 27 passages · cite as ckc
4.3× Abrams, Bell & Udris — Studying Film 22 passages · cite as stf
2.7× Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies 19 passages · cite as um
2.1× Guy Westwell — A Dictionary of Film Studies 33 passages · cite as dfs
2× Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art 29 passages · cite as fa
1.8× Jill Nelmes — Introduction to Film Studies 17 passages · cite as ifs

Go on, then

concept Formula The plot shape a genre's audience arrives already knowing, and the argument over whether repetition is commerce, ritual or both.
concept Themes The questions a genre keeps asking across decades, and whether its answers are a ritual the audience performs or a settlement it is sold.
source Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art The standard textbook. Where this wiki's definitions default to when nothing fancier is needed.
context Commerce The money context: who pays, what they expect back, and how both shape the text — in production and in reception.
context Control The institutional context: censorship, classification, editorial power, gatekeeping — who may say what, to whom.
source Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema The standard one-volume history. Where to go when a film needs its industry, its movement or its decade.