Themes
The genre convention of recurring meaning: the questions a genre exists to keep asking.
- genre conventions
- reference
- genre-convention
The preoccupations a genre returns to across decades: the western's civilisation versus wilderness, horror's body and repression, melodrama's price of desire. Individual films inherit their genre's questions and answer them in period accent — which is why theme analysis and context analysis (Values) are usually the same conversation.
What to look for
What question would this genre ask no matter which film was asking it? What answer does this film, in this year, give?
Canonical cases
Psycho (1960) working horror's oldest theme — the past devouring the present — through Psychoanalysis in postwar America. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) working melodrama's oldest theme — what a woman's desire is allowed to cost — at the exact moment The women's picture, 1974 made that theme newly loud.