GENRE
Genre functions as an interesting point of intersection with adaptation analysis. Though genre is important to literature as well, American films rely heavily on it to communicate in narrative shorthand to audiences. A genre is a category: in films belonging to that category, we can generally assume that there are going to be a number of broad similarities. This kind of analysis makes it possible to effectively compare films from very different periods of movie history by focusing on their generic unity. We can ask questions like: where do we see similarities in one gangster film from the 1930s, for example, and a gangster film made more recently? The answers can illuminate how storytelling has changed over time, but also how recent films are in many ways dependent on the films that have come before them.
Genres tend to have life cycles: they are created in the example of successful individual films, go on to produce imitations and copies, proliferate, and then begin a slow process of decline. Genres succeed and sustain themselves when two things happen: filmmakers see value in using the genre to tell stories, and audiences see value in the stories they are told within that genre. When the genre ceases to carry meaning for audiences, they die. Critic Leo Braudy offers a useful framework for considering the life cycle of genres and the various stages of their development: “Genre films essentially ask the audience, ‘Do you still want to believe this?’ Popularity is the audience answering ‘Yes.’ Change in genres occurs when the audience says, ‘That’s too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated.’”
Gaslight offers an example of an intertextual subject that demands multiple interpretations. We must consider its source material (it’s based on a play), but also the other films that were released in the gothic woman’s cycle. We might consider the impact of the Production Code on the story, or the circumstances of production at the studio, MGM, where the movie was made. We might factor in Cukor’s role as auteur, or Bergman’s screen persona. We might also think about the ways in which this film has influenced others that have followed it. The term ‘gaslighting’ has even entered the popular imagination, as people often use it to describe the practice of making people doubt their own reality. Even recent films like Leigh Wannell’s remake of The Invisible Man (2020) draw upon the framework of the gothic woman’s film. Intertextuality creates plentiful opportunities to see films in conversation with one another.
We’re going to consider where Gaslight falls in a specific context, which is in a cycle of films predominant in the early 1940s that have come to be known by many names, but for our purposes, we’ll call them “gothic woman’s films.” Generally, critics agree that the first of these was Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), a movie about a woman who marries a mysterious man, only to find that he carries some dark secrets (you can see some images from the film below). The film takes place in a mansion haunted by the memory of the man’s previous wife, whose image looks down from the portraits that line the walls. Rebecca, which was itself based on a novel, was such a successful film that many subsequent filmmakers and studios worked together to bring similar stories to the screen. Most are united by some shared principles, including their focus on a female character in an enormous house, often tortured psychologically by her husband, who means her harm.
Other films followed in Hitchcock’s example. Hitchcock himself made another, Suspicion (1941), which is about a woman (Joan Fontaine) who becomes convinced that her husband (Cary Grant) is trying to poison her (below, top left). Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1946) is set in a dark mansion where a mute woman (Dorothy McGuire) believes she is being stalked by a serial killer (top right). The same year, Vincente Minnelli directed Undercurrent, wherein a woman (Katherine Hepburn) becomes obsessed with her mysterious brother-in-law (Robert Mitchum) and increasingly suspects that her husband (Robert Taylor) is a killer (bottom left). Douglas Sirk’s 1948 film Sleep, My Love features a conniving husband (Don Ameche) who is trying to drive his wife (Claudette Colbert) to suicide so that he can marry his mistress (bottom right). Even these brief plot descriptions should demonstrate how clearly these films share a common storytelling tradition. They foreground female characters and emphasize the ways in which the men in their lives deceive and betray them. The images collected below should also illustrate how the filmmakers use the mise-en-scene to capture the gothic settings (dark houses full of clutter and shadows), especially focusing on staircases.
CYCLES
Critic Mary Ann Doane has done some of the most important and influential work on this kind of film, which is probably best considered as a “cycle,” or group of films made in a concentrated period of time that share some fundamental characteristics. One of the clearest examples is the proliferation of disaster movies in the 1970s, but the superhero film craze that marked the first two decades of the 2000s is another illustration. Cycles can sometimes, if they hang on long enough, become full-blown film genres—the disaster movies really didn’t, but it remains to be seen whether the superhero film will stick around. The gothic woman’s film cycle of the 1940s was, like others, concentrated and focused on similar themes and narratives. According to Doane, who calls it by a different name, “This cycle might be labeled the ‘paranoid woman’s films,’ the paranoia evinced in the formulaic repetition of a scenario in which the wife invariably fears that her husband is planning to kill her—the institution of marriage is haunted by murder. Frequently, the violence is rationalized as the effect of an overly hasty marriage; the husband is unknown or only incompletely known by the woman.” This is definitely the case in Gaslight, where Paula (Ingrid Bergman) is only faintly acquainted with Gregory (Charles Boyer), the mysterious piano player who she marries and then joins in her aunt’s house, only to suffer the psychological distress that Gregory inflicts on her through his attempts to control, and then make her doubt, her reality.
Films like Gaslight draw upon the influence of the gothic genre (that’s why I used that term), which dates back to a collection of literary works mostly coming out of England in the 1800s. Many gothic stories rely on similar generic constructions, including enormous, intimidating mansions and mysterious events. A number of Edgar Allan Poe stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” are quite gothic in their tone and story conventions. According to Doane, “These films appropriate many of the elements of the gothic novel in its numerous variations from Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe to Daphne du Maurier and beyond: the large and forbidding house, mansion, or castle; a secret, often related to a family history, which the heroine must work to disclose; storms incarnating psychical torment; portraits; and locked doors.” We see these elements throughout Gaslight, especially in the way that director George Cukor controls the space through visual design. Mise-en-scene, one of the director’s essential tools (what’s in the frame), matters a lot in these gothic woman’s films because the filmmaker can use the environment to reflect the heroine’s increasingly unstable mental state. Cukor uses this technique throughout the film’s extended sequences set in the Alquist home, but he also makes the images seem threatening in the film’s early moments, foreshadowing Gregory’s treachery through placement of jagged surfaces in the frame.
Watch the video commentary at right, which explores how Cukor manipulates the physical environment to reflect Paula’s unraveling at a key moment in the film. Pay close attention to the surroundings, which Cukor has invested with menace through production design, use of light and shadow, and unorthodox framing.
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As woman’s films, these movies are preoccupied with the ways in which men victimize women through psychological reinforcement of patriarchal rule. In these homes, the husbands make the rules and get to define reality. Doane argues that “Many of these films situate themselves within the terms of a dialectic between the heroine’s active assumption of the position of subject of the gaze and her intense fear of being subjected to the gaze.” Because the men have the privilege of looking at the women, they have the power to control what they see—Paula moved the picture frame because Gregory says she did it.
Sight is an important thematic concern of these movies. Doane argues that “In this cycle, dramas of seeing become invested with horror within the context of the home, and sexual anxiety is projected onto the axis of suspense. The paradigmatic woman’s space—the home—is yoked to dread, and to a crisis of vision. For violence is precisely what is hidden from sight. Hence, one could formulate a veritable topography of spaces within the home along the axis of this perverted specularization. The home is not a homogenous space—it asserts divisions, gaps, and fields within its very structure. There are places which elude the eye; paranoia demands a split between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen. Thus, many of these films are marked by the existence of a room to which the woman is barred access.” Men like Gregory essentially turn the home, which masks what goes on inside from the people who are not admitted in, into locked boxes inside which they control what sight means. Gregory is especially perturbed when Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten), the police investigator who eventually exposes his torture of Paula and brings him to justice, has entered the home and is able to see through the reality that Gregory has constructed.
Many of these conflicts are situated in the specific space of the home that carries the most import in the gothic woman’s film, the staircase. Doane says that “it is the staircase, a signifier which possesses a certain semantic privilege in relation to the woman as object of the gaze, which articulates the connection between the familiar and the unfamiliar, or between neurosis and psychosis. An icon of crucial and repetitive insistence in the classical representations of the cinema, the staircase is traditionally the locus of specularization of the woman.” When the action is set almost entirely inside one location, directors like Cukor must maximize their control of mise-en-scene; he and other gothic woman’s film directors situate many of the narrative conflicts on and around the stairs.
Attention to genre matters quite considerably. Though many storytelling mediums rely on genre, it is arguably more important to cinema than any other. In this way, each genre film might be considered an adaptation of the previous collection of entries appearing in that genre. Genre films respond to the ones that have come before, either through upholding and adhering to the established set of conventions, or by offering notable deviations. Genre life cycles can extend over long periods of time (like Westerns, for example), or they can be relatively short, like the gothic woman’s film. However, the legacy of genres, even after they die out, always remains available for later filmmakers to pick up. There are a number of contemporary-set films that are inspired by Westerns, and many recent films that adopt the framework of the gothic woman’s film. Genre is replicable across country and era, but filmmakers use the genres they think most effectively speak to the collective experiences and anxieties of the intended audience.
clip quiz - intertextuality and genre
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
THE TALL T (1957, Boetticher)
In the Western, the hero is usually a man bound by his devotion to duty. What are the duties of a man, as articulated in this scene from The Tall T, and how does the hero embody them? |
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BROKEN LANCE (1954, Dmytryk)
Themes of society, capital, and empire are common in the Western. Where do you see those themes and ideas expressed in this clip from Broken Lance? What does the film have to say about them? |
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THE LAST HUNT (1956, Brooks)
At their core, most Westerns are male-dominated stories of violence. What does this scene from The Last Hunt say about the relationship between men and the violence they commit? |
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THE BRAVADOS (1958, King)
Make a list of all the visual conventions of the Western that you see in this clip from The Bravados. What images announce to you that you are in a Western? |
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intertextuality and genre - the man from laramie
In the early 1950s, director Anthony Mann and actor James Stewart partnered on five significant Westerns: Winchester 73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954), and finally, The Man From Laramie (1955). In each, Stewart’s performances were notable for their darkness, a far cry from the typical nice-guy characters he had played in the late 1930s, who were marked by their idealism and innocence. But Stewart himself had gone off to fight in World War II as a bomber pilot, and when he came back, neither he nor the parts he played were the same. As a director, Mann had spent some of the late 1940s making aggressively dark (both thematically and visually) noir films that followed characters into the seedy underworlds of the American city. He brought this sensibility, if not always the same visual style, to his Westerns with Stewart.
The collaboration between Stewart and Mann culminated with The Man From Laramie, which in many ways was the darkest, and most intense of their collected Westerns. Stewart’s Will Lockhart comes to the Western town of Coronado with a score to settle; though his motivations initially remain mysterious, the film eventually reveals that he is looking for a man who sold repeating rifles to the Apaches; his brother, a U.S. cavalryman, was in a unit that was wiped out by Apaches with those guns. This plot device bears a striking resemblance to several elements of the first Western collaboration between Mann and Stewart, Winchester 73, which makes the gun itself its protagonist, and also features Stewart embroiled in a quest for vengeance for the loss of a family member.
Will eventually finds his man in the ranch hand Vic Hansbro (Arthur Kennedy, who had been Stewart’s co-star in Bend of the River with Mann behind the camera), whose resentments against his boss, the cattle baron Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp) have led him to some dubious means of making money. Alec’s preferential treatment to his idiot son Dave (Alex Nicol) leave Vic on the outside looking in, feeling like he is wasting his time cleaning up after an irresponsible boy simply because he is Alec’s biological son and stands to inherit the ranch, even though Vic is the one who really runs it.
These themes of empire, vengeance, violence, and a man’s duty to his loved ones are essential to the Western, and The Man From Laramie embodies them in a variety of its scenes. Its male characters like Will and Vic are torn between competing loyalties. Both of them come to see Alec as a kind of surrogate father figure, and are frustrated in their attempts to betray him or go against his wishes. These kinds of tensions between a man’s belief in what he must do and what the society around him is telling him to do are present in a number of Westerns. That’s how the genre works: it sets up moral quandaries for its characters to wrestle with, and hurtles towards a resolution.
In the Western, that resolution usually means some kind of violence. In the common understanding, this is the fabled shootout in the town square, and though Westerns don’t all literally do this, they do emphasize that in this kind of a time and place, violence is the way that conflicts between men must be resolved. To these characters, violence is a way of establishing their reputations and settling debts. There is a tit for tat exchange at a particularly violent moment in The Man From Laramie, as Lockhart shoots the out-of-control Dave Waggoman in the hand in self-defense; Dave’s men overpower Will and return the favor, firing a pistol into his palm at close range. This is one of the most personal, viscerally violent moments in a classic Hollywood Western, but it is rooted in the idea of retribution, a common theme in the genre.
The visual conventions of the Western genre are found in Mann’s use of both color and widescreen; though these were not essential to the Western, their widespread adoption in the middle 1950s overlapped with the period of the genre’s greatest flourishing. Color and widescreen tended to maximize the Western’s use of landscape shots, which positioned its characters in the environments they sought to control. If most Westerns were about the relationship between the men and the wilderness they inhabited, then the use of color and widescreen emphasized that connection visually.
Genres play an important role in intertextual analysis because they invite comparison and contrast by virtue of their very construction. Repetitions across entries within a genre solidify those genres’ identities, but they are also not stable forever—they change, evolve, and decline. They provide many opportunities for intertextual study; genres are intertextual by their very nature.