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.

genre conventions
reference
genre-convention

A genre's themes are the preoccupations it returns to whatever the individual film: the western's civilisation against wilderness, horror's body and its repressions, the gangster's price of success, melodrama's cost of desire. A film inherits its questions and answers them in the accent of its year, which is why theme analysis and context analysis (Values) are usually the same conversation. The disagreement in the library is about what the answering does. One tradition says the audience performs its beliefs through genre. Another says the genre performs a settlement on the audience's behalf, and the settlement is the ideology.

Ritual or management

Film Art keeps theme at the level of convention. Some genre conventions "are more thematic, involving broad meanings that are summoned again and again": the gangster's rise as "a hardening into egotism and brutality", screwball's snobbery against zaniness (fa 332). A theme here is a convention like the cute meet, and the job is to name it.

Barsam and Monahan (Looking at Movies) give the ritual account. Nearly every western shares "a central conflict between civilization and wilderness", and the audience goes "not only to celebrate the familiar, but to enforce fundamental beliefs and passively perform cultural rituals" (lam 81). The theme is stable; the answer moves with the period. A western made in wartime "is likely to express its themes differently than one produced at the height of the Vietnam War" (lam 81).

Hayward (Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts) reads the same repetition as ideology. Classical narrative "must have closure", and her example is Psycho: Norman is still psychotic, but he has been caught, "so there is closure" (ckc 89). Genres "function ideologically to reproduce the capitalist system", and their compulsory endings "provide simple commonsense answers to very complex issues" (ckc 229). Following Robin Wood, genres are not "safe" but ideologically inflected (ckc 198). The difference from Barsam is who is acting. In the ritual account the audience enforces its beliefs by watching; in the ideological account the genre enforces them, and the ending is where it does it.

On the bench

Psycho (1960) works horror's oldest theme, the past devouring the present, and near its close hands the film to a psychiatrist whose lecture a pop-Freud audience could receive as authority and a later one receives as glib (Psychoanalysis in postwar America). Hayward's closure and Barsam's period accent are both visible in that one scene.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) works melodrama's theme, what a woman's desire is allowed to cost, at the moment the women's movement made it loud, and its ending was argued about as an ending for 1974 rather than for Alice (The women's picture, 1974). Kay and Peary's complaint that she is "trapped as surely as Dorothy" is a verdict on the settlement, not the story.

Taxi Driver's theme is disputed by its own makers. Schrader says the film is not about Vietnam; Scorsese says the war is what makes the reflected gutter threatening (Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending), and the film sustains both (The returning veteran, 1976). The Craft raises power, class, race and belonging in its first hour and answers one of them, and its stated moral and its actual sympathies point in opposite directions (The Craft turns on its own coven). That is Hayward's case in miniature.

What to look for

What question would this genre ask no matter which film was asking it? Write it as a question.
What answer does this film, in this year, give? What would the same genre have answered twenty years earlier?
Does the ending resolve the question or only close the plot? What has been left unsaid so that it can close?
Does the film's stated moral match where its sympathies lie in the framing, the music and the performances?

In the books

Other genre conventions are more thematic, involving broad meanings that are summoned again and again.

— Film Art, fa 332

We go to these movies not only to celebrate the familiar, but to enforce fundamental beliefs and passively perform cultural rituals.

— Barsam & Monahan, lam 81

Genres function ideologically to reproduce the capitalist system.

— Hayward, ckc 229

Classic narrative cinema, no matter what genre, must have closure.

— Hayward, ckc 89

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.

4.3× David Morley — Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies 158 passages · cite as tacs
4× Edgar & Sedgwick — Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts 169 passages · cite as ctk
3.7× Roger Silverstone — Television and Everyday Life 88 passages · cite as tel
3.6× Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts 272 passages · cite as ckc
3× Donald & Renov — The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies 240 passages · cite as sgh
2.2× Amy Villarejo — Film Studies: The Basics 33 passages · cite as fsb

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