Genre and Cinema

Ireland and Transnationalism

Brian McIlroy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415512756
• eBook ISBN: 9781135985059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This impressive volume takes a broad critical look at Irish and Irish-related cinema through the lens of genre theory and criticism. Secondary and related objectives of the book are to cover key genres and sub-genres and account for their popularity. The result offers new ways of looking at Irish cinema.

Part I

Genre, Ireland, and theory

1 Genre and nation

Christine Gledhill

Approaching Irish cinema through the concept of genre raises a key question: how might genre and nation—at first sight two distinct categories—be connected? In film theory, “genre” is largely a phenomenon of Hollywood, while Irish cinema provokes debates about colonial representations, national and nationalist traditions, and indigenous forms of storytelling. Nevertheless, contemporary Irish filmmaking frequently mixes motifs clearly marked as nationally specific with an eclectic array of generic features derived from American popular culture, suggesting, if the pairing is to be maintained, the need for a different conception of genre from that elaborated for Hollywood.

In first approaching this problem, I was struck by parallels in the way that film genre and national cinema have been debated. In particular, some of the arguments against utilizing the concept of “the national” to identify differences between cinematic corpuses raise similar problems to those rehearsed in debates about differentiating genres; for example, policing of boundaries, investment in essential and singular identities, and the exclusion of alien elements as threatening “others.” Traditional genre definition, emphasizing repetition of convention and stereotype in the interests of boundary maintenance, has reinforced conceptions of genre production as a means of ideological control, particularly by American studios seeking to dominate world markets. Similarly, the “national” is critiqued as an ideological unity serving ruling institutions or narrowly conceived nationalistic ends, while “othering” marginalized or subaltern identities. While these concepts come under academic scrutiny, the industrial production both of genres and national cinemas appears threatened. For if postmodernist practices dissolve the discrete identities of genres, globalization and multinational coproduction threaten the existence of the distinctively national. Thus genre theorists confront the apparent breakdown of traditional genre categories as generic features float off into the global stratosphere, ever more promiscuously crossing both generic and national boundaries. Consequently, film theory has shifted away from genre definition towards exploration of what Jim Collins (1993) has termed genericity and Rick Altman (1998, 1999), genrification—terms emphasizing the material conditions and possibilities of the generic itself.

Rethinking the “national,” however, has taken somewhat contrary directions. Recognition of the historical prominence and increasing inevitability not only of international coproduction but also of the cross-border migration of personnel and materials, has led Andrew Higson (2000) to propose the category of “transnational” cinema. This term, however, simply postpones the problematic “national” in the process of “trans-ing.” In postcolonial theorizing, the “national” takes on a strategic if no less problematic significance—it requires certitude about one’s place in the world to abandon the national entirely—and this is clearly true in debates about Irish cinema. Paul Willemen (1994) argues cogently against confusing issues of “national specificity” with “nationalism.” Recognizing the need to talk about historical and geosocial locatedness, he demands that attention be given to a cultural specificity within which the “national” and “nationalism” play contingent but not totalizing roles. At the same time, a new historiography focusing on the impact of cinema within modernizing societies has thrown the relationship between national cinemas and Hollywood into new perspectives, suggesting the historical role of American cinema in generating a vernacular aesthetic capable both of mass-mediating the experience of modernity and translation into widely different local and national conditions. These new directions, which acknowledge both the centrality of Hollywood and the sociocultural specificity of different regionally located cinemas, mesh productively with new approaches to genre, suggesting how it might work in the mass-mediated public spheres of different national cultures. This possibility contributes in turn to rethinking the conditions and possibilities of the “national” in relation to cinematic production-consumption as it encounters transnational genres.

RETHINKING GENRE

What then is the productivity of genre as currently rethought in relation to Hollywood? In the first instance, the public, formulaic existence of film genres animates a crucial relationship for conceptualizing the role of cinema in a mass-mediated world: the relationship between media arts as practices of the imaginary and aesthetic (by both filmmakers and audiences) and social experience. This is not a relationship of reflection or distortion but rather a process of circulation between social and generic materials across the extremely permeable boundaries between aesthetic and life worlds.

In conceptualizing this process of circulation and exchange between genres and the social, I continue to find Steve Neale’s (1990) distinction between cultural and generic verisimilitude useful. In choosing the term verisimilitude, Neale points to the already culturally and ideologically constructed nature of the social world, on which generic fictions draw to a lesser or greater extent depending on their requirement for audience recognition—distinguishing, for example, the gangster film, sustained by its topical references, from the explicit fantasizing of gothic horror. However, we have only to bring “realism” into the equation to recognize conflicts between different interest groups over what counts as verisimilar or fantastic. Thus the verisimilar is ever changing. If the normative conservatism of genres is attributed to congealment based on repetition, the condition of their continuing existence depends on an element of innovation which makes any new member of the genre visible. Shifts in cultural verisimilitude, then, provide a vital source of generic innovation, particularly where these emerge from controversial public debates circulating in neighboring media—for example changing discourses and representations around gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Such shifts may involve rearticulation of themes or motifs within the genre as when police procedurals or boxing sagas change the gender or ethnicity of key protagonists, with all the twists to narrative structure, performance, aesthetic affects, and thematic effects this involves. Thus genres become public sites in which social experience and aesthetic imaginings feed and negotiate with each other. The use of black/white contestants to complicate the Republican/Loyalist divide in Jim Sheridan’s The Boxer (1997) comes to mind here.

Similarly, innovation may be achieved internally by borrowing from neighboring generic cycles, often those, as Rick Altman suggests, that competitor studios or production companies have made successful, thereby hybridizing the host genre. Steve Baker’s (2004) astute analysis of Resurrection Man (Marc Evans, 1998)—a film which engages particular generic configurations of Irish ethnicity—suggests the powerful interactions such hybrids may generate, through the amalgamation in its central protagonist of James Cagney’s Irish gangster and the Irish Bram Stoker’s vampire. While the film, Baker suggests, follows the American gangster format by exploiting already circulating social images of Irish gangs—here of the Loyalist Shankhill Butchers—it soon shifts from the gangster film’s topical reference to socioeconomic context by crossing over into gothic horror. The film now entertains generic conventions removed from the constraints of cultural verisimilitude but free to dramatize the link between sexuality and politics, implicitly figuring Loyalist militancy as masculine psychosexual dysfunction in a fantasized association with the “undead.” In suggesting that this genre crossover is an evasion of the need to explore the political consciousness of Loyalism, Steve Baker implicitly draws a boundary between sexuality and politics, between psychosexual imaginings and political gangsterism. And yet his astutely analyzed image of a Belfast mural depicting Loyalism as the violent return of the undead suggests how this generic fantasy is doing material work as a public frame of reference.

If such psychosexual imaginings result in a profoundly disturbing, apolitical nihilism, this is not I think because they work only at the level of American genre, or even that they have hybridized genres, but that they are not generic enough. The film presents only one half of either genre—the brutal egocentricity of the gangster and the ghoulish despair of the vampire—because it cuts both off from their shared roots in melodrama. As an “aesthetic of justice,” melodrama’s core lies in the confrontation between and recognition of polarized values: villainy requires not just victims, but innocents whose true nature and therefore resistance demands public recognition (see Williams 1998; Gledhill 2000). It is this utopian assurance— however indirectly glimpsed—that is not only missing but violently denied by Resurrection Man.

Consideration of the melodramatic roots of American film genres suggests that the “public” function of genre is not confined to its ideological relation to cultural verisimilitude, nor even to its response to demands of a contested realism, but is played out in the moral–aesthetic tensions provoked by the genre film’s combined search for sensational effect, topical reference and exercise of fantasy. While critical commentators attempt to establish and regulate reading protocols in order to define meanings, less is known about the imaginative and aesthetic reaches of reception. Mark Jancovich (2002), for example, questions one of the founding definitions of genre as a shared agreement between filmmakers and audiences, which has largely limited audience reaction to passive recognition of genre conventions. Paying attention to fan publications and websites, he demonstrates the active work of genre definition and boundary maintenance by which different cult audience sectors defend their fan identities against both mainstream exploitation and critics’ elaborations.

However, the “public” significance of genre rests not only with filmmakers and audiences. Steve Neale (1990, 2002), Barbara Klinger (1994), Rick Altman (1998, 1999), and Mary Beth Haralovich (1992, 1997) have all in different ways turned attention to the industrial conditions of production, and to the exhibition and circulation of genre films in the public sphere. Studios, Altman argues, invest not in the stable and unified generic worlds constructed by critics, but in hybridizing each other’s past and currently successful cycles in order to maximise audiences, while Klinger and Haralovich demonstrate how publicity machines and advertising copy attempt to negotiate audience expectations and affiliations, especially in respect of controversial shifts in cultural or generic verisimilitude. Nevertheless, operating in a different professional sphere, according to different codes, reviewers, and critics feed a publishing industry that consolidates genres for wider public consumption, academic research, and film school training. Thus past cycles are regrouped under new names—for example, film noir, or the woman’s film—and returned via the critical machine both as creative sources for the next generation of filmmakers and as aesthetic and cultural horizons for audience interpretation.

All this suggests the intensive and contradictory cultural work engaged in by production companies, filmmakers, reviewers, theorists, and audiences, through the function of genre as a switching point between life worlds and fictional worlds, between ideologies and aesthetics, between politics and the figurations and fantasizing of imagination. Crucially, this conception of generic production dispenses with the cultural analyst’s role as arbiter of meaning or ideological value—for how in such a fluid, shifting, contested play of convention, boundary crossing, response, affect, and interpretation can any definitive generic identity or meaning be fixed? Rather than finalizing meanings or defining degrees of reaction or progressiveness, the analyst’s questions need to engage processes: What is going on here? What is in play? What are the circumstances of production and reception then and now? What are the conditions or possibilities of affect, meaning, and response? What can this particular work say or make us feel now that was not then available to perception?

GENRE AND THE NATIONAL

If genre cinema has largely been discussed and theorized in terms of American film genres, the nationality of other cinemas is frequently differentiated from Hollywood as nongeneric by prioritizing artistic criteria traditionally associated with the national culture. This is problematic since any national film culture taken broadly involves a “horizon of expectation” and cinematic experience that includes Hollywood. Thus local film production is pressured to engage or differentiate itself against such expectations, maintaining Hollywood’s power of definition. In this context, Hollywood comes to stand for “popular culture”—obscuring from critical view the existence of an indigenous popular culture which is similarly relegated by the artistic criteria espoused as “national culture.”

Miriam Hansen (2000), reviewing the critical writings by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, which responded to Hollywood’s role in the mass mediation of modernity, argues its capacity to function as a form of “vernacular modernism.”¹ As an instrument of mass technology, American cinema both replicated and mediated the experience of a modernizing world. On such bases, it forged a cinema capable not only of economic dominance but translatable appeal through an aesthetic attuned to the bodily and subjective experience of urbanization, industrialization, and new forms of public life. Hansen’s concept of “vernacular modernism” addresses a paradox in the theoretical configuration of film studies, which bears on questions of the national and generic. On the one hand, post-68 film theory has worked with a conception of Hollywood as an inherently conservative classical narrative cinema to be opposed by counter-narrational and antigeneric strategies of the modernist avant-garde, by definition accessible only to the few. On the other hand, the new historiography suggests that American cinema was received far and wide as both sign of and means of participation in the modern, serving as inspiration alike for avant-garde movements and democratizing mass societies, often in opposition to traditional national hierarchies.

We have a beautifully conceived enactment of this latter proposition in Paul Quinn’s This Is My Father (1998), when the would-be lovers, Fiona (Moya Farrelly) and Kieran (Aidan Quinn), have absconded from a penitential community walk for the urban delights of Galway and the promise of Greta Garbo at the cinema, only to be stranded on a lonely beach when their car breaks down. Their magical rescue comes in the form of an American photographer for Life magazine, Eddie Sharp (John Cusack), who swoops out of the skies in his helicopter, bringing jazz, supper by a camp fire, romantic musical backing, and a mechanic’s skills to repair the car, all for the price of a ten-minute game of American football. It is a moment of intense emotional release of utopian possibility after the scenes of repression, gnawing frustration, and religious hatred which have blocked, and will continue to block, the protagonists’ future. In this respect, Hansen suggests it is Hollywood’s proliferation of unruly, body-impacting genres—adventure serials, thrillers, melodramas, weepies, horror films, together with the stars who embody their excitements—which were capable not only of netting the contrary sensations of disorientation and spectacle, anxiety and hope, bodily exhaustion and hyperstimulus of urban modernity, but, in the moral panics such genres provoke, exposing the exploitative, repressive forces that work to block its liberatory, democratic potential.

While never losing sight of Hollywood’s baleful economic strangulation of local film industries, Hansen’s argument nevertheless suggests a tension between the narratively efficient and regulatory editing patterns of classical cinema and a heterogeneous generic fertility—the very conditions of genericity—pressing against the system. On another level, as a nation-building cinema, Hollywood was built on the participation and adherence of large immigrant communities—including, significantly, Irish filmmakers, actors, and audiences. Since the impact of new technologies on daily life in terms of urbanization, industrialization, and new forms of sociality are shared by countries undergoing modernization, Hollywood’s genres, as a form of vernacular registration of this experience, are immensely translatable across national boundaries and into local contexts of production and reception— producing, Hansen suggests, the “first global vernacular.” Thus, in certain circumstances, we see the retooling of genres according to different local and national-cultural interpretations; for exampl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Genre, Ireland, and theory
• Part II Genre, Ireland, and Hollywood
• Part III Transnational and transformational contexts
• Part IV Genre and the Irish short film
• Part V Jordan, gothic, horror
• Part VI Genre and the city film
• Part VII Northern Irish commemorative cinema
• List of Contributors
• Index