Based on research into neo-noir, I would suggest that there are four basic types (if not more) of production. The first, perhaps the easiest to identify, are those films that constitute a remake of canonical films such as D.O.A, Farewell My Lovely and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The second is that which carries an inflection of nostalgia and make explicit reference to the style and the mood of noir, amongst which are titles such as, Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. The third kind could be identified as those films that pay homage to noir by making references to motifs, dialogue and scenes, such is the case of Pulp Fiction and generally of the work of Quentin Tarantino. The fourth category of neo-noir is perhaps the most difficult to define as all the films I have previously mentioned are examples in which film noir is deliberately referenced. This ‘group’ holds films that do not fit in to any of the aforementioned ‘categories’ and yet audiences can easily perceive certain tropes of noir within these films. Among these we find examples of films as diverse as Matrix, Blade Runner, Lost Highway, Basic Instinct and Black Rain.

Erickson, in his essay accuses two films: The Two Jokes (1990) and The Public Eye (1992) of failing “to maintain the slightest notion of the true noir spirit” (pg. 312). Although the question of truth is problematic Erickson succeeds in adding to the lists of noir definitions the word “spirit”. What defines then the noir spirit? Could it be the “cynical and the pessimistic tone […] the darker side of human condition, modern fables that highlight the dangers of alienation, the fragmentation of society, the breakdown of human interaction, the debasement of love, the beguiling power of wealth, the corruption of government, and mankind’s inherent propensity for inertia and impotence” (Martin, pg. 6)? Is noir “spirit” allowed to evolve, mutate as the environment in which it exists changes? It is also entitled to refer and quote to the noir canon since contemporary audiences are not only conscious of the legacy of noir but also amenable to noir references in modern perspectives and environments?

When discussing authenticity the Argentinean poet Jorge Luis Borges once stated that being original was a matter of having a good memory. Implying that, in art at least, we are the sons of history and beholden to an artistic past. Any attempt to deny the influence of, and our indebtedness to, past artists and art is to forfeit a valuable resource.

An interview with Samuel Fuller

An interview with Billy Wilder

An Intro to Film Noir 

Three Anthony Mann pics 

A compilation of reviews on some of noir’s most influential films 

….among other things….

Enjoy!

The French noticed a certain similarity between the gangster film, the police genre and the detective fiction. Authors like Raymond Chandler, James Cain, and Dashiell Hammett among others were already well know writers and film viewers were already familiar with some of the novels that served as inspiration to the movies, such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Farewell, My Lovely and The Maltese Falcon.

It is no coincidence that when you look up the definition of detective fiction you find that it resembles the definition(s) that critics tend to give of film noir. However, a closer reading of the attempts to define noir as a genre reveals that scholars have found it impossible to capture and define its essence in any absolute sense. In her article on Film Noir and Women, Elizabeth Cowie (in Copjec’s Shades of Noir) discusses the public’s fascination with film noir and how this plays a crucial role in the construction of the category as such.

“Whether it is a genre, a cycle of films, a tendency or a movement, film noir has been extraordinarily successful as a term. As a ‘genre that never was’ – since the term was not used by the studios themselves, or by the audiences at the time..[..] The term has succeeded despite the lack of any straightforward unity in the sets of films it attempts to designate. This tenuousness is matched by a tenacity of critical use, a devotion among aficionados that suggest a desire for the very category as such, a wish that it exist in order to ‘have’ a certain set of films altogether. Film noir as a genre is in a certain sense a fantasy…” (pg. 121)

Cowie does not deny the particular style, or phenomena, present in the Hollywood cinema of the 1940’s and 50’s, she merely points out the contradictions that the study of film noir poses and the discrepancy between the canon and the term itself.

Among early critics and enthusiasts there was a tendency to define noir; Borde and Chaumeton, for example, argue that the presence of crime constitutes noir’s most essential characteristic. The inclination to find boundaries has led critics to disagree on noir’s essential ingredients, although recent criticism is more aware of the dangers of such a limited scope. French film critic, Andre Bazin, aware of the difficulty of delimiting noir as a genre, suggests that we consider noir as a style. This allows the term more flexibility than the designation ‘genre’ and it also points to the limitations of inscribing noir in a singular or series of definitions.

Bazin is correct in pointing out film noir’s peculiar style. It is in fact it’s style, what attracted audiences to it and what we as contemporary viewers tend to admire the most. Noir’s style was greatly influenced by the German Expressionism that was imported to Hollywood when both Austrian and German filmmakers immigrated to the US to escape the war. Figures like Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, are among the filmmakers that are most alluded when one refers to the cannon of noir films.

Watching a ‘noir movie’ is always an exquisite experience precisely because, despite the fact that they were B-movies, there are very ‘stylized’; their convoluted voice over narrations, their costume design (the hats, the rain coats, the femme fatale’s attires, the cigarette holders, etc), their witty dialogue and the cleverness of their characters, the camera work and moreover the lighting, are among the traits that define such style. (One of the most beautiful and influential camera work was done by cinematographer John Alton)

Theorizing on the term ‘film noir’ can be difficult and so critics and scholars have a tendency to look for common traits shared by (what is understood as) its canon of films. Many documents define noir as an essentially male discourse. One of the most common scenarios presents a male character, usually a detective, cop, journalist, agent or even a criminal, confronted with a crime and with a ‘choice’ between two women. Often a tension arises between the two opposite female characters, usually good and evil. Most films share a fatalistic tone with a pessimism dominating the atmosphere. They usually narrate an urban tale that brings out the corruption of society and confronts the spectator with the idea of the ‘American dream’. Other features of film noir are the “use of high contrast lighting and other ‘expressionistic’ devices, the focus on mentally, emotionally and physically vulnerable characters, the interest in psychology, …the downbeat emphasis on violence, anxiety, death, crime and compromised morality”(Neale, 174), and the convoluted relations between male and female characters.

However the western’s central position in the development of genre theory is complicated because its main characteristics are unusual, meaning that they are specific to the western, rather than typical characteristics that can help define genre theory as a whole. Thus the western proves not to be a suitable model for general conceptions of genre theory.

Another complication regarding the western is the relationship it plays with American history and US culture, which makes is susceptible to formal methods of thematic, cultural and ideological analysis. The western also one of the principal points or reference for theories of iconography in the 60’s and 70’s, which proves the richness, the distinctiveness and the highly encoded characteristics of its visual conventions.

In his writings on the Western, scholar Edward Buscombe discusses the imagery of the western and it’s relation to American history and American geography. The relationship is complicated since it has created a mythic sense of the west that has in itself taken a central role in US culture and identity. Such mythology is grounded in the notion that there actually existed, between the XVII and late XVII century, a moving western frontier in the US.

One of the center points of this notion of the frontier is the meeting point between Anglo-Americans and “other” cultures. Yet it is also a place where Anglo-Americans of the West are forced to face their own “otherness” against Anglo-Americans of the East, where Europe brings on the connotation of civilization man comes to encounter his uncivilized double.

Other ideas of the Western have more to do with the spirit of the frontier as a place marked by opportunity and hardship, adventure and violence, where hard work and spirit to conquest and displace “other” (inferior) people was rewarded with land. The Western is central to the idea of Anglo-American racial and cultural superiority, despite the fact that the frontier increasingly ensured its “mestizage” and its disappearance.

The term “mythology” or “mythic” might be considered loaded by many scholars but as exemplified by the work of Jim Kitses, the thematic structure of the Western derives directly from the “mythology” created around the frontier and the dialogue that the West establishes with the East.

The West The East
America Europe
The frontier America
Equality Class
Agrarianism Industrialism
Tradition Change
The past The Future

The Wilderness Civilization
The Individual The Community
Freedom Restriction
Honour Institutions
Self-knowledge Illusion
Integrity Compromise
Self-interest Social responsibility
Solipsism Democracy

Nature Culture
Purity Corruption
Experience Knowledge
Empiricism Legalism
Pragmatism Idealism
Brutalization Refinement
Savagery Humanity

Despite the fact that Kitses grid fails to name ethnic or racial terms, done so by many contemporary scholars (specially by those concerned more with aspects of race and representation), Kitses grid nevertheless manages to encompass its basic ambiguities; ambiguities that are at the center of the Western’s drama and ideology.

However, explorations of the frontier are not done by Western movies alone, nor are they the Western’s sole focus. Films that had the Indians as the central figures (there are many examples of such films in the early 1900’s alone, so numerous where these film that some scholars have grouped them as a subgenre of the Western ** I dare say that there were perhaps more films made then that had Indians as their main characters than those done nowadays) have a different approach to the “frontier” subject. Despite the fact that the tropes of noble and ignoble savagery, or of tragically vanishing of a race and of “white” Anglo-Americanness prevails, many films are merely comedy’s or dramas set in the West with Indians as their main characters.

The exploration of the early “Westerns” and the “Indian westerns” conflicts the pre-established sense of the Western, since the heterogeneity of the Indian films of the silent era is matched by the heterogeneity of films about “whites”. The silent western is also very different to the talkie western, despite the fact that they might share common elements. The differences between the westerns and their “subgenres” illustrate that there are more elements to the Western than those that scholars who work on genre theory have chose to address and that the problem when theorizing on a particular genre lies in the limited cannon of films that scholars chose to work with.

Despite ‘post-revisionist’ westerns (such as John Sayles’s Lone Star, 1996 + Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo, 1993 + Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, 1976) frontier mythology, the construction of masculinity and gender, along with the western’s iconography seem to prevail when discussing the genre, despite the awareness that there is more to say about the Western’s recent – and not so recent- history.

Here are some great links that will give you different insights on the movie.

A.O Scott, of NY Times

Images Journal

A review by Tim Dirks.

Roger Ebert’s blog

Jim Emerson – Scanners blog

In his text Brown explores the connection between the act of narration and the imagery. The way the image is presented, the framing of shots and their sequencing, the repetition of setups, the position of characters, the direction of their glance, all take part in the act of telling a story.

In other words, Brown wants to explore the narrative agencies that take part in the action, who is involved in the act of storytelling while exploring the (not so passive) role of the spectator.
The scene in which he focuses is the moment in the story in which the characters arrive at Dry Fork, the first time that they sit down for a meal together. Brown analyses the scene in great detail, isolating the sequence of the shots in order to explore whose point of view it is representing and who is responsible for the narration and the consequences that such “points of view” have in shaping the spectator’s reading of the film.

Brown notices that there are two “points of view” or two narrative agencies taking part in the action. The first one being that of Lucy sitting at the head of the table, whose narrative authority has been established after a series of shot/reverse shots. The second narrative agency being that of an omniscient narrator that seems to place itself (the camera) at an angle where the spectator can have a better view of the action as a whole. This view is not associated with that of any character, rather it is there to show us, the spectators, the interplay between the characters in the group.

Lucy’s gaze is not detached from her “moral” background; she is an insider, a woman of society, married to an army lieutenant. Dallas, the “other” female companion, is by contrast an outsider, a prostitute that has been driven out of town by the ‘Ladies Law and Order League’ (to whom Lucy might well have been a part of). Tension arises at the table when Ringo (who has broken from prison to avenge his brothers death) invites Dallas to join them at the table. A close up of Lucy’s face reveals us how uncomfortable she is by the whole situation. The shots that follow (because they are made out of an angle that could well be that of Lucy’s gaze) metaphorically embody her point of view.

French film theory refers to spectator’s view as derived from the central position of the perspective of the photographic representation. It does not, however, allude to the emotional responses or the connections that the choice that this placement might induce. As a spectator we can be tricked/coerced to identify with the view of that who is “looking” or, as Brown argues, in Stagecoach we are compelled to identify with those who are “looked at”.

Brown expands on Lucy’s gaze over Dallas: “Though I share Lucy’s geographical position of viewing at this moment in the film, I am not committed to her figurative position of view. I can, in other words, repudiate Lucy’s view of or judgment on Dallas, without negating it as a view, in a way that Dallas herself, captive of the other’s image, cannot”.

Our positions as spectators have a life of its own and are not merely mechanic responses to the “perspective of the photographic representation”. Identification asks us as spectators to be in two places at once, both where the camera is (in this case with Lucy) and “with” the depicted person (Dallas). This puts as in a complex position of oscillating between that of viewing and being viewed. (A very uncomfortable situation in many cases explored in great detail and achieved wonderfully by P.T Anderson in his film Boogie Nights).

This sequence achieves to side the spectator with the “outsider” despite the fact that she has been denied of a point of view (and of a place in society). Thus, as audiences we do not necessarily identify with the character trough’s eyes we are meant to be seeing the action, suggesting that the spectator is also playing an active role in the construction of the narrative.

Brown argues that the “cumulative effect of the narrator’s strategy of placement of the spectator from moment to moment is his introduction into what might be called the moral order of the text”. As spectators we are then encouraged to adopt a posture of rejecting that “moral” code that Lucy as a character comes to represent and to see behind such “moral” conventions that support discrimination and intolerance and align ourselves with the outcasts.

Brown concludes that “certain formal features of the imagery – framing, sequencing, the prohibition, and “invisibility” of the narrator, can be explained as the ensemble of ways authority implicitly positions the spectator/ reader. [Therefore they study of the narrative agencies in] “Stagecoach” points to a largely unexplored body of critical problems associated with describing and accounting for narrative and rhetorical signifying structures”.

** Notes on Robert Warshow’s – Movie Chronicle : The Westerner

Title indicates that Warshow is more concerned about the westerner – the western hero-, than the genre itself. However, the western is pretty much defined by its hero and the hero, particularly in the western and in action movies, is the driving force of the film.

Warshow compares the hero of the gangster movie to that of the western in order to:
- Show the differences in both
- Discuss the parallel between both men’s use of guns
- Compare their positions as outsiders
- Contrast their melancholy and loneliness

The outcome shows that “the westerner” – the hero at the center of The western is:

1. A figure of repose
2. Sort of a zen character who understands the world and its code (comes as no surprise to us that Seven Samurai inspired The Magnificent Seven – where the samurai code is equivalent to the code of honor of the western hero)
3. His melancholy comes from the simple recognition that life is hard and serious.
4. Although we never see him working we recognize that there are no luxuries in his lifestyle, – that he has a hard life.
5. Love is not on his side in the sense that he is bound to be doomed and cannot settle for love – there tends to be something of a higher power that calls him
6. Usually the territory is lawless and the westerner is due to set precedent with his actions
7. He will protect those who are weak from the perils of the evil that surrounds the landscape and from the harshness of the landscape itself.

8. He knows his way around the country and can survive – he is a great scout!
9. We are meant to believe that he has a hard life although we rarely see the westerner at work. – this is why Warshow calls him “a man of leisure”
10. Poverty is all over but the westerner does not suffer from it, nor does The Western focuses on the social aspects of this. Rather it takes from it by implying that in the west wealth is irrelevant and richness comes from moral values rather than by gold or cattle (usually the rich man is corrupt and sponsors the criminals)
11. The classic westerner seems to posses a moral clarity very strong that contrasts the landscape of moral chaos. (New takes on western – like the HBO series Deadwood and even The Searchers, seem to question this moral rectitude)
12. The moral rectitude is somewhat Manichean as conflict between good and bad is often represented between two men, or whites vs. Indians. (in many cases)
13. The westerner fights for justice and order. A justice and order that needs to settle in the west as the societies are just establishing themselves. He is the Law! (if questioned, usually by a woman, he will answer “it has to be done”, as if he held a moral power beyond his humanity.
14. He defends honor and thus he is a gentleman (although not refined)
15. According to Warshow we cannot refer to him as antisocial, not because their is no criminality in his actions, but because we cannot fully call his surroundings social or society.
16. The westerner, seeks not to extend his dominion but to assert his personal value and his tragedy lies that this cannot be fully achieved.
17. This mature understandings of his limitations and the unavoidable guilt of using the force as a law maker, is what gives the westerner his “right” to his melancholy.
18. Doomed by his dentiny; destiny that perhaps no one else but the sheriff or the prostitute are able to understand – he can do nothing but play the drama of the gun fight again and again until the time comes that he gets killed or the one he loves does.
19. He can never settle becasue he has a moral obligation that prevents him from finding happiness.

The woman in westerns play a role that merely helps define the men of the western:

1. A “good” woman is usually unable to understand his motives: She is against killing and he, the westerner, usually fails to make her understand that this is his world, that this is the way things are.
2. Usually the woman comes from the East and she represents refinement, virtue and civilization.
3. The women who are able to understand the world of men are prostitutes – those who are quasi independent, they make a living and survive by themselves and belong to no-one.
4. Other women are equated to children, unable to look after themselves in a vast and violent (not only because its lawless but because of the landscape) territory
Warshow then asks – What is at the centre of the western? :

Western enters into the field of “serious art only when his moral code, is also seen to be imperfect”. Think of uninteresting westerns such as Daniel Boom and stuff, where there is no dilemma – Warshow argues that the “moral ambiguity” – the fact the he is a killer of men, despite the fact that he does so in the name of the law – “darkens his image and [in a way] saves him from absurdity”.

The western, the frontier, the conquest, the new world can be understood as freedom, expansiveness of life, the promise of a better place, later it reveals to us that the landscape, the openness does not hold its promise and it ceases to be the “arena of free movement” but becomes a burden with its great empty space, full of obligations (work the land, very very hard – dessert), the material bareness.

According to Warshow the western movie holds such a strong hold in our imagination because it offers a serious treatment of the problem / dichotomy of violence such as can be found no where in our culture.

The violence is presented up front – the gun is held outside in a holster and not in disguise. The gun shows us he lives in a world of violence and even that he believes in violence.

However, violence is not the driving force of the movie but a conflict that usually seeks resolution through a violent act. The drama is not that of guns being shot all over like in a Tarantino movie, but that of self –restraint: the moment of violence must come in its own time and according to “special laws” – otherwise it looses its value.

However, violence is not the POINT of the western movie, but rather a certain image of life style, a certain image of man that best expresses itself and himself through violence, and the conflict that precisely is born out of the use of violence.

1. Those that keep the narrative and the musical numbers clearly separated: (mostly where the numbers appear to be part of a show like Cabaret)
2. Those that retain the division between narrative as problems and musical numbers as escape (where one more or less can tell when the musical number will appear as it tends to be cued – The Wizard of Oz)
3. Those which try to dissolve the distinction between narrative and numbers, thus implying that the world in which the narrative takes place is also utopian. (Moulin Rouge – utopic world of artists and performers being more sensitive – yet one can argue that MR combines all three!!)

As an opening to his text on musicals “Entertainment and Utopia” Dyer states that “Musicals were predominantly conceived, by producers and audiences alike, as “pure entertainment”. By “entertainment” we understand that is something:

-    Produced for profit
-    Performed before an audience
-    Performed by a crowd whose role is to provide pleasure
-    Therefore: entertainment = pleasure
-    Therefore: entertainment (should) = money

Hollywood musicals are “one of a whole string of forms – that are usually summed by the term ‘Show Biz’.

And ‘Show Biz’-ness is strictly a business produced by two major forces:

1.    those who invest the money
2.    those who produce the content

Those who produce the content are those qualified to entertain. As as Dyer explains: “Because entertainment is largely produced by professional entertainers, it is also largely defined by them”.

However, the money comes from big investors and big investors are usually white, male, patriarchal figures. Therefore the relationship between entertainment and capitalism is a complex one. Not only because of the complications between spectacle and politics but also because entertainment does not respond to the demands of the people but it shapes those demands. “it does not simply give the people what they want (since it actually defines those wants)”.

Definitions of entertainment also imply that audiences are drawn to them because they want to have a good time. This means they most likely want to “escape” their realities and enter a world of “jolly and wish fulfillment” In (Dorothy’s) Judy Garland’s own words, audiences are in search of a place “over the rainbow” where “the dreams that you dare to dream – Really do come true”.

However, this does not mean that entertainment creates “models of utopian worlds”. Rather it focuses in what Utopia “would feel like rather than how it would be organized”.

Let’s explore this definition a bit further;

Define Utopia:

An utopic world is one where there is:
1.    No suffering
2.    No poverty
3.    No racial, sexual, or class struggles
4.    We all live happy
5.    In peace with nature
6.    No ecological damage
7.    ….etc..

Take The Wizard of Oz for example;

Is Kansas an utopic place?

-    Black and white
-    No fun
-    No one to play with Dorothy
-    Working in an isolated farm
-    No one around
-    Exposed to horrible acts of nature
-    Reigned by the richest women, sort of a feudal society
-    No joy in the characters

One is left to wonder why Dorothy would want to leave Oz and return to a colorless life in Kansas. Yet the sense of  “home” is raised as a more important factor than the scarcity that surrounds her.

While the world that The Wizard of Oz revolves in is far from utopic, the general feeling the film conveys is one of happiness, of joy – Dorothy dreams of a better place but settles for home because she realizes it is where her heart is.

Salman Rushdie wrote a very beautiful text on the film and he says that Dorothy’s dilemma is one that all of those who chose to migrate from their home country have to face. Home is where the heart is but one always dreams of leaving home for that place where dreams come true…. yet Dorothy chooses to return, giving more value to home than to dreaming. The American Dream essentially feeds from this unquestioning sense that USA can be both home + and a place where dreams come true. Thinking along these lines we could say that films like The Wizard of Oz play a huge role in this construction.

Contrary in Moulin Rouge, a contemporary version of the musical, one is bewitched by the beauty of the images and captured by the pop songs. One feels like singing along. One feels happy watching the movie not only because it is a very smart and gripping movie, but because it is colorful, one knows the lyrics, it is witty and it hides the hardship in comedy and music.

Yet, a world where a woman has to sell her body to survive is far from utopic, but falling in love with a poet and being happy at what she does generates a utopic feeling, and this is precisely Dyer’s point: entertainment does not present “models of utopian worlds” but rather how utopia feels like.

Dyer also says that these modes of entertainment change as entertainers (producers of entertainment) and audiences change, since they correspond to different modes of perception and they respond to the times’s particular “culturally and historically determined sensibilities”.

According to Dyer, one way to understand these sensibilities is to explore in the way in which entertainment responds to the inadequacies of society – they way in which it escapes it.

This more or less explains why entertainment is such a huge hit: and why it works = as it responds to “real needs created by society” However the relationship is a complex one because “while entertainment is responding to needs that ARE real, at the same time is defining and delimiting what constitute the legitimate needs of people in society” (pg 23).

But entertainment being entertainment it does not really or adequately address important needs of our society. It does not address the struggles in society in a way that one feels that the struggles are valid, for such struggles take place in is a world that will sacrifice their dreams and settle for Home. “Class, race, sexual preferences are denied validity as problems by the dominant bourgeois, white, male, patriarchal) ideology of society” and are therefore never addressed by entertainment.  (pg 23)

Take the Lion in The Wizard of Oz. He is presented as gay because he lacks courage. Back in Kansas he was shown as easily scared but in his working clothes he was not gay looking. Yet dressed as a lion, his gay-ness is made obvious by his long blond curls and the red ribbon he wears in his hair. The subject of his manliness is devalued by his lack of “courage” and his gayness is a matter of comedy.

Entertainment’s “light” nature is precisely what makes it such a difficult place where such issues can be addressed. This is why Lars Von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark” is such a work of genius. It is a criticism to the “American Dream” it’s justice system, using the studios biggest entertainment form: the musical. Not only a musical but opposing the pastoral dream created in “The Sound of Music” the movie from which it gets its melodies.

Dancer in the Dark:
1.    questions the American dream in the sense that immigrants work like slaves in factories
2.    they have no access to social care, they are abandoned by the system
3.    they are feed this nonsense about this great country through their own cultural production / movies
4.    the music that Selma (Bjork) chooses to sing comes as a complete opposite to what is stands – The Sound of Music – being the pastoral dream and her reality in the factory and her life is far from one
5.    the feeling in far from being one of utopia
6.    the world the characters live in is dystopic
7.    she is put on trial for killing a man who begs to be killed because he has no money to buy “things” for his wife.
8.    Ends in sadness

A work of genius because what Von Trier essentially does is mock America by that which America is so proud of, turning things around and making the musical precisely a place where socio-politics can be played.

Musicals mostly respond to cultural codes that are pre-ordered, it does not question them. And as such they are understood to be passive more that questioning, yet there are things that can be studied within the musical production that are very interesting and this is precisely what Dyer opens up in his text.

Contradiction lies at the heart of which movies belong where – opposed to the simplicity of their definitions.

The uncertainty is also associated with the relative “contradicting” status of theory and history genre studies.
Like everything else, genre theory was also influenced by semiotics, which caused it to run into set of restrictions. Semiotic genre analysis bypassed history in order to follow the “semiotic discipline” ignoring genre theory built before them.  Also, by treating genres as the “meaning” they failed to understand the role that audiences play in the insertion of and not the other way round.

On the other hand ideological approaches do stress questions of representation & identification previously left aside.
-    Ritual approach does see Hollywood as responding to societal pressure – expressing audiences desires
-    The ideological approach claims that Hollywood takes advantage of spectator energy and psychic investment in order to lure audiences into Hollywood’s own positions.

According to Altman, the opposition between these two “positions” embody the most interesting approach to film genre.

A semantic approach is more concerned with the vocabulary of each specific genre – Altman uses the examples of the western to make his point.

Two semantic approaches would be that of:

Jean Mitry : proposes a definition of the western as a “film whose action is situated in the American West, is consistent with the atmosphere, the values, the conditions of existence in the Far West between 1840 – 1900”
o    Note that no real cinematic concerns come to play in his definition.

Marc Vernet : general atmosphere “emphasis such as earth, dust, water and leather” stock characters “the tough/soft cowboy, the lonely sheriff, the faithful or treacherous Indian, the strong but tender woman, the good whore” as well as technical elements “use of fast tracking and crane shots”
-    Despites the fact that he adds some cinematic concerns his definition is till highly based on the semantic model.

A Syntactic approach is more concerned with the metaphysical aspects- reading the vocabulary (from the semantics) but focusing on the abstract meaning of such “signs”:

Two definitions would be that of:

Jim Kitses: The western grows of a dialectic between the “West as a garden and as a desert, between culture and nature, community and individual, future and past”. The western definition is generated by the syntactic relationship and not viceversa.

John Cawelti: says that the “western is always set on or near a frontier, where man encounters his uncivilized double. The western then takes place on the border between two lands, between two eras and with a hero that remains divided between two value systems (for he combines the towns morals with the skills of the outlaw)

Conclusion:  the semantic approach has little explanatory power and is applicable to a larger number of films.

However, the syntactic approach surrenders broad applicability in return for the ability to isolate a genre’s specific meaning.

Altman, realizing the conflict between both currents, proposes that both approaches should be considered when discussing genre theory. Such approach is more inclusive and recognizes that not all films relate to their genre in the same way.

While his approach raises questions of its own – like, where are the exact borders between these genres defined? seems much more sensible, needless to say much more inclusive.
** notes on the last chapter of Rick Altman’s “Film/ Genre“