Mystery Movie Genre Essay

When discussing American culture, the influence and interplay of film cannot be understated. We are a nation consumed with the media. Today, the movie business is one of the highest grossing businesses there is. We hold movie stars up as though they are super human. We closely watch their style, their dating lives, their party habits, and even their favorite restaurants, among many other things. We rely on movies to lift us up, teach us about other cultures and time periods, and even to teach us about our own culture. Often, movies reflect the time period they are filmed in and directly reflect the social tensions of that time and the film noir genre is no different. One of the most famous film noir movies out there, The Maltese Falcon,

A film genre is a motion picture category based on similarities in either the narrative elements or the emotional response to the film. While films have at least one major genre, there are a number of films that are considered crossbreeds or hybrids with three or four coinciding genre or sub-genre types that they can be identified with them and most can be filed into categories that are easily recognizable to audiences (Goodykoontz & Jacobs, 1998, p. 4.1). However, ever so seldom a film comes along that breaks free of its invisible bounds of genre and it leaves the audiences confused about the actual existence of genre. One such film is a film that most are familiar with Steven Spielberg’s classic Saving Private Ryan.

Film Noir is a fairly self-explanatory name. French for “Dark” or “Black Film”, this style (not genre) of film is pretty much summed up in those two words. These films started being made in a 1940’s, Post WWII paranoia, with the threat of nuclear missiles looming over the heads of all United States citizens, Hollywood included. This paranoia led to disillusioned attitudes and existential feelings, which in turn were reflected in Film Noirs through things such as characters, with the two most prominent types being hardened male protagonists and femme fatales. Also, the “Darkness” of Film Noirs was not just a metaphor for the content of the film, but also a fairly literal description of the visual style was like. Taking influence from

Film noir, popularized in the 1940’s, can be defined as a type of crime drama, normally in black & white, with a somewhat depressive tone to it. Themes such as sexual deviance, promiscuity, crime, and all around pessimism were prevalent in these types of films. Film noir reflected the societal attitudes of the time as people were recovering from events like the great depression, and World War II, all while dealing with the anxiety of the cold war. These events all contributed to the popularization of film noir until the social revolutions of the 1960’s changed the general attitudes of American people. The film Double Indemnity can be defined as film noir for a number of reasons. At the most basic level, Double indemnity is a 1940’s crime drama,

So what are genres? When most people are asked this question they will reply with something like science fiction, horror, mystery, or romance. While these are not fundamentally wrong answers, those with such responses do not understand the full breadth of what genres truly are. According to the dictionary, a genre is “a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content, technique, or the like” (Genre). Still though this does not capture the full breadth of what a genre really is. To explain how genres form, dynamically change, and serve their purposes we must first take a step back and look at some other fundamental concepts.

Many people from different countries across the world have been coming to United States, including Austrian director Billy Wilder. He directed many film with different genres including Film Noir. Film Noir translates to “Dark Film,” the name was given by the French after watching Hollywood crime thrillers that began to show after World War II. These films typically had dark lighting style closely related to those in German Expressionist films. However, Film Noir borrows its form from influences of major Hollywood popular genres, using themes that were related to social context and civilian life in the United States. Two films that demonstrate how Film Noir was influenced by Hollywood and the social context in America include Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951) both directed and written by Billy Wilder.

Films should be both entertainment and should also tackle challenging ideas. It’s good to have varieties of films, because we watch film depending on what we are in the mood for. Sometimes we watch to learn about history we never knew about and

Genre categorization is important because it helps to organize and classify movies. People make a lot of decisions based on the genre of the film; this is one of the main ways in which audiences select what movie to see. Most genres follow the same theme, story formula, setting, and story formula. If every genre followed the same set of rules one would think that after awhile these movies would become predictable and therefore lose its spark. There is also the notion that people and society change and evolve, making certain genres irrelevant and not relatable to the overall movie lover population. So how do film makers who are known and generally stick to a certain genre, keep audiences from losing interest? They simply evolve with society by changing the rules of a certain genre and one way to do this is genre breaking. Genre breaking can be defined as a film that is classified as a certain genre but breaks the genre tradition, by keeping the traditional theme of the genre but changing the setting, presentation, and story formula. By doing this, the film still follows the essential idea of the genre’s traditional theme, but the way it goes about doing it is totally different and can usually be seen as a parody.

There are many ways a genre can be categorized in films. Each film has a genre or a mixture of genres on which the film is based. Genre can change and be determined by aspects such as the setting, the theme, topic, the mood (which shows the emotional tone of the film), and the way the movie was filmed. There are multiple genres in film, which then branch off into mix-genres. Mix-genres or subgenres are a combination of two or more genres of different types.

Film noir is a cinematic term used to describe stylish crime drama movies. They usually involve cynical attitudes and sexual motivations.” All film noir movies are shot in black and white giving sense of moral corruption, evilness or desperation. A dark-themed music is played making the movie more mysterious. The world inside the film noir movie is filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal. The factor in the movie “Out of the past” that proves it is film noir are atmosphere of movie, presence of character as femme fatale and doomed character.

The producers will develop a test and the audience will tell the producers whether it is something they want to see or they are not going to see. This can affect the next text to be produced in an attempt to conform to the audience demands. Looking at the development of different types of genres and the development of films within the same genre, it’s possible to look at similarities and differences and identify changes in society and audience ideologies and tastes.

Genre Theory is used in the categorization of films. Genres are dependent on various factors such as story line, whom the director is, and what are the audience expectations In using genre theory we create a short cut in how we describe films. Genres are categorized into and then sub categorized depending on the story and plot. Fantasy is a genre described as, “Any film with obviously unreal, magical, or impossible situations, characters, or settings, often overlapping with various other genres, especially science fiction, but sometimes historical dramas.” (Goodykoontz, 2014) Fantasy is a genre that typically includes a crossover genre, sci-fi,

There are many different types of film and film genres. A film can fit into more than one genre, but there are some genres that are more general than others. Some examples of film genre are animated, science fiction, documentary, comedy, and historical fiction. Within each genre, there are also specific characteristics that help support themes and story lines within that genre.

Film Noir as a genre is set in a specific period of time. It is also a genre that is considered to be related to a specific society - that of America from 1940-1958. Film Noir as a genre is a term that French critic Nino Frank coined to describe the new “film movement” emerging from Hollywood in the 1940’s, which appeared to be black and white, crime and detective films. But these two prominent characteristics do not form the genre alone. Stylistic film features such as mood, style and tone are very eminent in Film Noir however it was not always considered as a film genre, but this is what makes the film genre so distinctive. Film Noir was a “new movement” or cycle of films as it consisted of expressionistic lighting techniques such as low

the films genre. The genre is a way for the audience to distinguish types of