American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures

American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures by Amanda Ann Klein
University of Texas Press, 2011.
255 pages; $36.85 (cloth).

Film Cycles Are Nearly as Old as Film Itself, predating the Hollywood studio system as regularly occurring phenomena. Cycles emerge when audiences respond overwhelmingly to certain films, driving intensive periods of film production that replicate visual and narrative elements of these initial hits in hopes of gaining similar box-office success. Despite the essential role cycles play in shaping commercial filmmaking and academic discourse on subsets of films, an examination of the cycle itself has remained peripheral to film studies. American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures reveals how indirectly the concept of the cycle has been addressed, from production strategy to audience response and cultural practice. Amanda Ann Klein recenters this industry practice with a series of case studies in which the common thread is a shared cyclical history rather than a shared generic identity. In the process of carefully distinguishing the cycle from the genre, Klein offers new insights into the distinct potential both structures hold for grouping and analyzing films.

What advantages does the shift from genre to cycle offer? In pragmatic terms, a cycle provides a more temporally localized analysis. Rather than finding change and continuity in genres spanning decades or centuries, cycles have a relatively specific moment in time. Most cycles follow a familiar boom-and-bust trajectory as one or more successful films produce a glut of similar films until audience interest and/or the creative potential of the productions are exhausted. Klein finds an opportunity in these relatively stable boundaries, which often confine cycles to a decade or less, to explore cycles as identifiable moments of cultural and industrial practice. Cycles raise questions of why studios produce certain films, which audiences they pursue, and what effects changing audience tastes have on the rise and decline of specific waves of films. Unlike the familiar comfort of a certain genre, audiences fall in “love at first sight” (11) with the cycle, setting off a passionate interest in a given film formula for which affection may be just as quickly lost. Meanwhile, the heated pursuit of a newly found audience by producers may offer a period of heightened transparency in the interaction between film production, audience taste, and cultural desires.

Klein’s chapters proceed both chronologically and epistemologically. Her introduction helps identify the cycle outside the familiar confines of genre, examining the cycle of “kissing films” of early cinema. Chapter 1 looks at gangster films from the teens through the thirties, demonstrating continuities better revealed through a cyclical analysis than a pure genre approach. Chapter 2 looks at cyclical change compared to generic change, following the Dead End Kids films and their imitators from the thirties through the mid-forties. While the first two chapters seek to define the cycle, chapters 3 and 4 more specifically focus on cultural groups as major forces behind many cycles. Klein uses the teen film boom of the fifties and the black action film boom of the nineties as her respective case studies. Chapter 5 offers a conclusion via a meta-example: the cycle of contemporary cycle parodies, which follow cycles farther down the contemporary distribution pipeline toward direct-to-DVD releases.

In the introduction, The Kiss (1896) and the films that followed its success form an apt case study to distinguish the cycle from the genre paradigm of other scholars. Klein begins a thoughtful reworking of Rick Altman’s extensive scholarship on film genres and his limited reference to cycles. By working with kissing films, a cycle that never flourished into a genre, Klein clearly identifies cycles as phenomena that can function independent of genre.

Chapter 1 provides a more fully developed case study, which also carves a distinct place for itself in contradistinction to genre analysis. The gangster films of the 1930s have always held a peculiar challenge for genre scholars. The genre seemingly burst onto screens overnight, only to disappear with the onset of the Production Code era in 1934. By...