PROLEGOMENA TO A CONTEXTUALISTIC GENRE CRITICISM1

Barry K. Grant

It is often noted that the major film theories have suffered from a common exclusiveness, a condition usually explained as the result of critical overzealousness: exploring a comparatively new medium and eager to disprove the unkind assessment of film as mere mass entertainment, aestheticians have unfortunately tended to substitute a narrow validity for comprehensiveness. The classic or "orthodox" theories, as V. F. Perkins disparagingly terms them,2 certainly offer many important insights; nevertheless, because of their respective preoccupations most fail to consider the complexities of the film experience. For example, in a recent summary of new developments in film genre criticism, Thomas Schatz identifies the two essential characteristics of film genres--the assumed "contract" between producer and consumer which allows for their existence, and their function as secular myth.3 And while he initially gives them equal importance, Schatz then neglects almost completely the idea of the contract, that elaborate network of conventions, and concentrates instead on a structural approach to genre films which, he concludes, helps to clarify "their shared as well as their distinctive individual qualities."4 Schatz's overview of genre criticism is merely another example of this characteristic restrictiveness as it is manifested in one area of film criticism. It seems to me impossible, however, to appreciate in any meaningful way individual genre films without understanding the distinctive manner in which we experience them. In other words, a consideration of the contract in operation becomes crucial. Of course genre criticism must continue to describe generic parameters, but it needs as well to treat critically individual films as generic works, a task which perhaps has been the most obvious failure of genre criticism to date. It is my intention in this essay to suggest how, within the framework of contextualist aesthetics, genre criticism might become better equipped to approach the problems of defining genres and evaluating individual genre films.

Contextualism as it is defined by Stephen C. Pepper,5 is grounded in the notion of art as experience and considers the aesthetic experience as a vital interaction between the physical work of art and the spectator. In this sense, the phrase "work of art" implies an action rather than an object; as John Dewey puts it, "Art is the quality of doing and of what is done. Only outwardly, then, can it be designated by a noun substantive . . . . The product of art--temple, painting, statue, poem—is not the work of art. The work takes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties .6 The specific nature or "quality" of this experience "the character, the mood, and you might almost say, the personality" of the event (BA, 59) becomes the central subject of inquiry for the contextualist who, therefore, ultimately must consider both the physical work of art and his own responses in making aesthetic judgments.

Clearly, contextualism offers a particularly relevant approach to the medium of film. As the semiotician Christian Metz has remarked, the cinema is "the 'phenomenological' art par excellence,7; and although phenomenological criticism tends to treat consciousness more discretely than contextualism, Metz's assertion reveals the extent to which film engages the viewer. Basically, this engagement is two-fold: firstly, cinema by its very nature is more than any other medium an art of illusion, for the very perception of a motion picture begins with the "synthesis" by the spectator's eye of the individual still frames; and secondly, the viewer's willing suspension of disbelief is particularly strong in the cinema, where it is encouraged by images and sounds larger and louder than life. (Thus, film's apparent affinity for the melodramatic, the fantastic, and the spectacular -- narrative modes which tend to magnify reality -- is actually quite natural.) It is no accident that the cinema's greatest artists consistently have been concerned with this central fact of the film experience. The films of primarily "emotional" directors such as Hitchcock, Chabrol or Truffaut, for example, depend upon audience expectations, identification and involvement, just as more intellectual film makers like, say, Eisenstein, Godard and Fassbinder structure their work according to their respective theories of audience involvement and its implications. Even the so-called "closed" cinema of a Fritz Lang derives both its power and meaning from audience involvement as much as the "open" cinema of a Renoir -- the former by encouraging judgments in the viewer subsequently exposed as obsessive, even fascist; the latter, oppositely, by inviting suspension of judgment. Still other directors -- Bunuel, Fellini, Cocteau -- exploit the cinema's special contiguity with various levels of experience (dreams, fantasy). Their film practice is in agreement with Suzanne Langer's observation that "Cinema is 'like' dream in the mode of its presentation: it creates a virtual present, an order of direct apparition."8 Yet whether they consider emotional or intellectual involvement of paramount importance, they all begin with the basic and necessary fact of viewer interaction. In short, film is the art which most powerfully allows us, as Leslie Fiedler would say, "to be in dreams awake."

Now genre films consistently exploit audience involvement more than any other kind of cinematic experience. The idea of genre in film, as distinct from the concept in literature as it began with Aristotle, arose out of the commercial nature of Hollywood film making. The demands of the box-office led studios and producers to make movies which repeated with only minor variations elements of earlier successes; thus, in a relatively short time traditions became codified. These traditions are comprised of generic conventions, common pools of familiar visual, narrative and thematic traits which by mutual consent on the part of artist and audience (the "contract") both express and confirm our notions of reality. Moreover, genre films restate, hence ritualize, our social beliefs, particularly our sense of national identity. The science fiction film, for example, gives shape to and thus validates America's particularly cute xenophobia, while the Western explores our concepts of social order and history. Thus film genres are often referred to as a modern or secular equivalent of myth for, as Bronislaw Malinowski says, myth "expresses, enhances, and codifies belief."9

Genre films are, then, directly related to lived experience, their traditions expressing communal values. While most viewers of genre films do not go to the extreme of attempting to live the conventions directly, like the Belmondo character in Godard's A bout de souffle, audiences do model their values To and behaviour a significant degree according to them. For example, the resurgence in the last decade of the outlaw couple cycle of gangster films (Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Thieves Like Us, Aloha, Bobby and Rose, The Sugarland Express) can be seen as an expression of the contemporary disaffection of youth with the establishment. It influenced popular music (Georgie Fame's hit song, "Bonnie and Clyde," Bob Dylan's numerous outlaw fantasies), fashion (the faddish return to the styles of the 30s), politics (Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda), even our conception of social roles (the increased search for alternative lifestyles). Generic evolution obviously has connections with contemporary events and attitudes. Thus, as the sense of disaffection spread from the young to other social groups with the national trauma of the Nixon administration, the outlaw couple films were swamped by a sudden tidal wave of disaster films with their obvious metaphors. The Towering Inferno depicted the dangers inherent in the capitalist edifice; Earthquake rocked the very foundations of our society; and so on. Moreover, the evolutionary model or typical "life-cycle" of a genre-formulation, "classic" expression, intellectualization and, finally, parody, with the possibility of renewal--seems to parallel the evolution of popular culture generally. Because this interaction between audience and genre films is two-way, genre films provide what Dewey sees as true aesthetic experience: they are "a product, one might almost say a by-product, of continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world" (AE, 220) in which "the conventions themselves live in the life of the community." (AE, 152)

Nevertheless, critics insist on analyzing film genres as discrete objects, enumerating the elements of individual genres -- elements which themselves seem to vary from genre to genre.10 The epic film, for instance, is defined either by the sweep of its vision or its setting, while a disaster film is categorized as such if it contains a particular event. Thus critics cannot even agree on whether film noir is a genre or not! In the case of even what is probably the most codified of all genres, the Western, such discrepancies are, glaringly evident. In his central study of the genre, Jim Kitses, in a manner akin to the structuralist approach, defines the Western in terms of a definitive-grid of binary oppositions.11 Andre Bazin and Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout similarly explicate the Western in thematic terms, but on levels different from Kitses and each other -- the former is concerned with myth, the latter with historical veracity.12 Taking the Western as the primary example in his theoretical essay, Edward Buscombe defined genre largely by its iconography, which he terms "outer forms,"13 an argument then countered by Richard Collins, who suggests that a genre be defined instead by its "actional units" -- "a repertoire of key situations that recur again and again."14 And this, in turn, is somewhat different from Stanley J. Solomon's idea of "generic cores," a basic premise from which possible scenarios spring.15

While definitions of this sort are of some value, they commonly lack a consideration of viewer participation. And so, failing to see genre as an on-going dialogue between audience and film, like Aristotle's originally descriptive categories, they inevitably become prescriptive. For instance, in his classic essay on the Western, Robert Warshow declares realism to be an extrinsic concern of the genre; he judges, therefore, that "The Ox-Bow Incident, by denying the convention of the lynching, presents us with a modern 'social drama' and evokes a corresponding response, but in doing so it almost makes the Western setting irrelevant, a mere backdrop of beautiful scenery."16 Like the idea of the baroque "Superwestern" which Bazin would shortly offer in the second classic piece on the genre.17 Warshow makes the mistake of assuming that in a "true" Western a convention must be employed in a conventional manner, that something about the inherent nature of the Western prevents it either from questioning its conventions or being a "social drama." Yet no matter how one chooses to define the Western, it certainly begins with James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, which clearly were "social dramas" concerned with exploring the issue of democratic ethics. "Genre," as one sociologist of the cinema states, "is what we collectively believe it to be,"18 and that belief, as a part of culture, undergoes continuous evolution. Definitive genealogies violate the nature of film genre by "freezing" them historically, thus leading to normative value judgments, since works which do not follow the critic's hierarchical conception will naturally be considered generically diluted or inappropriate.

There is one essay, though, which attempts to explicate genre films in terms of viewer experience; yet it, too, is finally prescriptive. For this writer, Thomas Sobchack, every genre film deals with the tension between an individual and the group, the resolution always in the group's favor, thus allowing for a socially constructive catharsis in the viewer.19 Sobchcak concludes that:

As a specific example, Don Siegel's Charlie Varrick, cited in the context of the caper film, is considered to be an "anti- genre" film because Varrick succeeds in escaping with the money in the end. Ultimately, though, this is circular reasoning, the categorizing of Charlie Varrick inflects (rather than repeats or abandons) a particular caper-film convention so that it becomes in one sense a generic expression of the cultural cynicism and escapism of the 70s.

Some critics have wisely attempted to avoid becoming notmative by adopting a "scientific" method similar to that of Northrop Frye. As Stuart M. Kaminsky declares, "at its best, a genre study should be purely descriptive," and "the genre approach makes no qualitative judgement."21 But like Sobchack, Kaminsky speaks of discovering "ideal forms" in genre films.22 The invocation of the Platonic seems puzzling, for the term "ideal" necessarily implies some standard of value. Most probably, what is meant by the notion of an "ideal" genre film is one which incorporates the greatest number of elements assumed to be integral to its genre. Yet such a film is better described as a "pure" genre film--that is, one full of its generic elements but lacking an interpretive perspective. As Robin Wood sees it, a genre film is truly interesting only insofar as it is filtered through the consciousness of an auteur, his concerns providing a "tension" with the basic generic material.23 If the richer genre films do result from such a tension , contextualist aesthetics here proves itself particularly helpfui.24 Pepper would substitute the term "conflict" for "tension," a point on which he is both explicit and emphatic: of course there is virtue, he says, in integration or unity as an organizational principle for a work of art; "But it is something new in aesthetic theory to discover the aesthetic value of conflict. This side of his theory is what a contextualist should exploit. The integration he should stress is an integration of conflicts." (BA, 66). Pepper's main example of the positive value of "conflict" consists of a detailed analysis of a Shakespearean sonnet, in which the conflict existing between the poem's theme ("sadness") and its form (the accentuation of "brightness" in the tone of the final rhymed couplet) increases its aesthetic value, as the reader is enlivened rather than made weary (BA, 120-123). In the context of film genre, conflict may be seen to exist inherently in the relationship between the ideology of the commercial American cinema (capitalism/individualism), its forms of expression genres and the auteurs who, working within the system, animate these forms.

Still, it may seem odd to attempt to fit contextualist theory to film genre, primarily since the contextualist views as positive aesthetic value the work of art's instrumentality in achieving "the intensification and clarification of experience" (BA, 57). The pleasure of the experience, while not disregarded, is secondary to its force: "The more vivid the aesthetic experience and the more extensive and rich its quality, the greater its aesthetic value." (BA, 57, italics in the original Thus, contextualism is, as Pepper notes, the only aesthetic theory which can account adequately for the pleasure involved in the experience of classical tragedy. But for Sobchack, genre films are thoroughly predictable, and do not truly stimulate the viewer at all--a condition of which he eagerly approves,25 but which is, of course, untenable to the contextualist. "Habit," which Pepper defines as "convention, tradition, and the like," reduces aesthetic value because it "simply dulls experience and reduces it to routine" (BA, 65).. In the experience of a genre film, however, the fundamental repetition of elements is valuable for two reasons. Firstly it allows for greater play of the important contextualist notion of "funding"--the building and enriching of aesthetic experience through subsequent encounters with the physical work of art--which in the case of genre films operates not only with individual films, but also with specific conventions repeated from film to film. One can repeatedly appreciate, say, the unified structure of a film like The Godfather, and at the same time increasingly admire (as one's knowledge of the tradition grows between viewings) its original treatment of specific conventions. Secondly, as Jean Loup Bourget has convincingly26 shown, the existence of conventions almost paradoxically offers the possibility of greater subtlety, if not subversion. An auteur such as Douglas Sirk, for example, could not have infused h-is American films of the Eisenhower period with their unconventional meanings without apparently offering his viewers the conventional experience they expected from that kind of film, so-called "women's pictures" or "weepies." In short, predictability fosters the possibility of irony.

Finally, contextualist aesthetics helps greatly to account for the power of the best genre films, for what it is that makes them good cinema. Traditionally, the most "important" genre films, after their generic conventions are duly catalogued, are judged by their superior dramatic qualities (that is, thematic criticism) and/or for the competency of their cinematic techniques. But to a significant degree such an approach ignores the dynamics involved in the experience of the film as a genre film Criticism of the horror film is typical. In his book The Horror Film, Ivan Butler declares that ". . . one man's frisson is another man's guffaw,"27 so that a horror film must (?) be defined by personal reaction based on the director’s intention. Yet most everyone now agrees that we should trust the tale, not the teller. As D. L. White says, it is not primarily iconography which makes a film a horror film, but the quality of the experience it offers: "A horror film . . . is not just a sequence of certain events; it is the unity of a certain kind of action . . . the element of horror is subtle and comes from the peculiar progression and cumulative impact of the narrative."28

In closing, then, I would like briefly to discuss a particular genre film, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1967), as a horror film from the contextualist point of view. The reason for my choice is three-fold. First, as a genre the horror film should lend itself readily to a contextualist analysis, for the raison d'etre of these films is to elicit vivid aesthetic response. Secondly, it is important to note that Night of the Living Dead by all reports affected its audiences deeply-, while a clear imitator, Don't Open the Window, seemed merely silly. Although they treat the same subject -- the dead rise and eat the living--and their plots are essentially identical (for my present purpose a plot summary is unnecessary) the first film attained a cult following, the second was hardly noticed. The question is, Why? And thirdly, I respond deeply to the film every time I see it, and as this essay was being written I was working with the film in the classroom.

The force of Night of the Living Dead is achieved in such a manner, by its consistent inflection of many horror film conventions which, in turn, generates its vivid quality. Unlike its imitator, Night of the Living Dead is in black and white. On the first viewing, while I deduced that it was made on a low budget, I also approached it expecting it to be like the "classic" black and white horror films, the Universal films in the 30s or Val Lewton's in the 40s -- movies which elicited horror by suggestion rather than graphic presentation; without color, surely, this film can't be as explicit or as "hip" as the Hammer Studio horror films of the 60s. Viewing the film, though, I found myself continuously struggling to adapt to each of its generic alterations. For example, unlike most horror films, Night of the Living Dead withholds any explanations for its bizarre events until about halfway through. (Don't Open the Window tips its hand almost immediately.) And when we are given an explanation, it is difficult to hear because the television newsman is periodically drowned out by the protagonist's noisy construction of defensive barriers and by the government's evasive responses to the newsman's (our) questions. A tension is created as the protagonist's immediate concerns for survival conflict with and thwart our generic expectations to find either the cause of the living dead or, on an intellectual level, to know what they mean -- and so make them manageable, safe.

Similarly, other aspects of the film's narrative violate convention, such as the black hero, the disorganized and unheroic military, the graphic depiction of entrails (now unfortunately, thoroughly predictable), and the death of the young lovers. The film consistently eliminates the conventional means of fiction for dealing with monsters, as both religion and reason ultimately prove ineffective.29 Nevertheless, I-remembered, it is a horror film, after all, and so I rallied my faith in the traditional resolution which I had presumed (and now hoped) would surely come. But it did not. And just when the night of the living dead seemed over, the survival won, Romero shook my complacency irretrievably -- for with the arrival of the sheriff and his vigilante posse, the hero is shot from a distance, insensitively mistaken for one of the living dead. Even as I was horrified, I realized suddenly and clearly that Ben's death isn't merely an "anti-genre" gimmick, but is consistent with the tone of the entire movie. Abruptly, I understood who the living dead really are -- the sheriff and his men -- and it was only then that I became truly horrified, for I was forced to face the implications of this revelation, the likely callousness and brutality of people with power and trust in response to a threat. The film didn't preach this to me, but allowed me to experience it aesthetically. I remembered that I would have, in effect, "sacrificed" Ben by preferring the conventional explanation to his loud and annoying efforts to secure his own safety. Furthermore, it is a radical (although not original) proposition, for it forces us to question social authority; and it takes, therefore, just such a profound experience as this film elicits for many to understand fully its importance. The film is aware that as a viewer, in Lawrence's words, "I must admit the genuineness of MY horror, accept it, and not exclude it from my understanding."30 (Cf. Romero's politically subversive horror film, The Crazies [1973], to see how much of this is purposeful, the result of a genuine auteur consciously reworking the genre's traditions.)

Night of the Living Dead violates many taboos (cannibalism, matricide) and is readily described as distasteful, if not ghastly. From any viewpoint other than the contextualist, the critic would be forced to condemn it. But the force of aesthetic experience is crucial, and a complex aesthetic concept which must not be reduced to mere "shock value," thus allowing, .for example, an apparently similar movie such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be considered worthwhile. Romero’s film elicits a horror which is central to -- indeed, constitutes -- its meaning, ultimately stimulating the viewer's senses, while its imitators merely exploit a sense of horror and are finally dull. In sum, the tension between our expectations of a genre and the manner in which the individual film plays upon them provides an excellent arena for the "conflict" which Pepper considers central to contextualism. The vividness of my experience of Night of the Living Dead resulted from its tone and execution and its direct descent into the horrible which on one level worked by disturbing my approach to it as a genre work. Pepper says of subjective response that:

In film criticism, it is only logical to give attention to ourselves seated in the theatre, for that is where the meaning of any film begins. And the aspect of ritual so central to genre films--the conventions, our expectations and responses--forces our experience of these films to become integral to their meaning. The best genre films are aware of it, and incorporate it. With film genre, then, the critical focus must shift from the naming of generic parts or, oppositely, from what amounts to an appeal to taste, to the examination of the relationship between oneself as a viewer and the film. Through a clear understanding of contextualist aesthetics, genre criticism finally may be able to come to terms with the problems of evaluation.

FOOTNOTES

1. This essay may be read as an attempt to work through on a theoretical level issues raised in my essay, "From Film Genre to Film Experience." Paunch, #42-43 (Fall-Winter, 1976) pp. 123-137. return

2. V. F. Perkins, Film as Film (Baltimore, 1972). For a concise overview of the classic film theories, see Chaps. I and 2. Also helpful in this regard is J. Dudley Andrew's The Major Film Theories (New York, 1976). return

3. Thomas Schatz, "The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study," Quarterly Review of Film Studies, (August, 1977), pp. 302-312. return

4. Ibid., p. 312. return

5. See Pepper, The Basis of Criticism in the Arts, Chap. 3. Subsequent references appear parenthetically as (BA). return

6. John Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 214. Subsequent references appear parenthetically as (AE). For Pepper, Art as Experience is "the most influential aesthetic work in contextualist literature" (BA, 59); also relevant in the context of this essay is David Madden's remark that the book is "a primer of popular culture aesthetics." "The Necessity for an Aesthetics of Popular Culture," Journal of Popular Culture, 7, (Summer, 1973), p. 9. return

7. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor New York, 1974), P. 43. return

8. Suzanne K. Langer, "A Note on the Film," in Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York, 1953), p. 412. return

9. Quoted in Schatz, op. cit., p. 306. return

10. For evidence of the different ways in which film genres are defined, see Barry K. Grant, ed., Film Genre: Theory and Criticism (Metuchen, N. J. Scarecrow Press, 1977). This anthology provides a starting point for anyone interested in the subject and contains a detailed bibliography. A number of the critical works described here are included, as indicated below. return

11. Jim Kitses, Horizons West (Bloomington and London, 1970), P. 8. return

12. See Andre Bazin, "The Western, or the American Film par excellence," in What is Cinema?, Vol. II, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 140-148; and Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout, "The Western: A Historical Genre," Quarterly of film/Radio/ Television, 7, (1952), pp. 116-128. return

13. Edward Buscombe, "The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema," Screen, 11, (March-April, 1970), pp. 33-45. Reprinted in Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, pp. 24-38. return

14. Richard Collins, "Genre: A Reply to Ed Buscombe," Screen, 11, #4-5 (August-September, 1970), pp. 66-75. return

15. Stanley J. Solomon, Beyond Formula: American Film Genres (New York, 1976), p. 3-6. return

16. Robert Warshow, "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner," in The Immediate Experience (New York, 1971), p. 147. return

17. "The Evolution of the Western," What Is Cinema?, 11, pp. 149-157. return

18. Andrew Tudor, Theories of Film (New York, 1973), p. 139. return

19. Thomas Sobchack, "Genre Film: A Classical Experience," Literature/Film Quarterly, 3, (Summer, 1975), p. 201. Reprinted in Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, pp. 39-52. return

20. Ibid., p. 203. return

21. Stuart M. Kaminsky, American Film Genres (Dayton, Ohio, 1974, p. 9; p. 4. return

22. Sobchack, op. cit., P. 196; Kaminsky, op. cit., p. 3. return

23. Robin Wood, "Ideology, Genre, Auteur," Film Comment, 13 (January-February, 1977), pp. 47-48. return

24. Not coincidentally, Robin Wood in his critical career has been one of the few practicing contextualists. He has said that "I have been told, on very good authority, that I am an 'anti-intellectual,' because my work consistently implies a refusal to separate my emotional life from my intellectual life. Such a separation, in my view, can only contribute to the detriment and. impoverishment of both." "In Defense of Art," Film Comment, 11:4 (July-August, 1975), p. 46. His landmark work Hitchcock's Films, for example, examines the films both as the expression of an auteur within a conventionalized system and in terms of their value for the viewer as unpleasant but therapeutic experiences. return

25. Sobchack, op. cit. For a discussion of the political implications of this issue, see Judith Hess, "Genre Films and the Status Quo," Jump Cut, I (May-June, 1974), pp. 1, 16, 18. Re- printed in Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, pp. 53-61. return

26. Jean-Loup Bourget, "Social Implications in the Hollywood Genres," Journal of Modern Literature, 3 (April, 1973), pp. 191-200. Reprinted in Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, pp. 62-73. return

27. Ivan Butler, The Horror Film (London and New York: Zwemmer/ Barnes, 1970), p. 8. return

28. D. L. White, "The Poetics of Horror: More than Meets the Eye," in Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, pp. 130-131. return

29. Cf. R. H. W. Dillard, Horror Films (New York, 1976), pp. 55-81. return

30. D. H. Lawrence, "The Reality of Peace," in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York, 1968), p. 677. It is perhaps more than coincidence that in this essay Lawrence speaks of the living dead. return