Authors: Thomas Schatz
ISBN-13: 9780075536239, ISBN-10: 0075536234
Format: Paperback
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies, The
Date Published: February 1981
Edition: 1st Edition
The central thesis of this book is that a genre approach provides the most effective means for understanding, analyzing and appreciating the Hollywood cinema. Taking into account not only the formal and aesthetic aspects of feature filmmaking, but various other cultural aspects as well, the genre approach treats movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its audience. This process, embodied by the Hollywood studio system, has been sustained primarily through genres, those popular narrative formulas like the Western, musical and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts throughout this century.