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Reviewed by:
  • Genre and Performance: Film and Television
  • Sue Matheson
Genre and Performance: Film and Television. Edited by Christine Cornea. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010. 224 pages, $84.95.

Edited by Christine Cornea, Genre and Performance: Film and Television is an interdisciplinary collection of papers examining the confluences of genre, medium, and performance semiotics in film and/or television programs from the 1970s to the present day. US- and UK-produced film and television programs are generally the focus of these studies, but there is also some interesting work concerning genre and performance in the contexts of Bollywood and Canadian television. As Cornea notes, this collection introduces readers to issues concerned with the specificities of performance within media formulas and showcases how approaches overlap or differ within film and television studies. [End Page 219]

There are ten chapters in all, arranged to encourage comparison with one another and produce an interesting dialogue with the reader. The first chapter of this collection, "Film Noir: Gesture under Pressure," is a detailed examination of diegetic performance and various performance strategies in contemporary film noir by Cynthia Baron. Following is Richard J. Hand's "Captured Ghosts: Horror Acting in the 1970s British Television Drama," a lucid and thought-provoking account of the shifts in performance styles associated with the British television play and the exceptional demands that horror makes on the actor. Jonathan Bignell then notes in "Docudrama Performance: Realism, Recognition and Representation" that the television docudrama invites its audiences to draw upon their knowledge of other television dramas as well as their knowledge of reported events. Dennis Bingham's "Living Stories: Performance in the Contemporary Biopic" identifies the biopic as a showcase for performers and performances, reading the biopic alongside a Hollywood tradition of star performances.

Using comparative analysis, Steven Peacock's "Borders and Boundaries in Deadwood" examines the US serial Deadwood, paying attention to film and television forerunners in the Western genre. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster's "The Colbert Report: Performing the News as Parody for the Postmodern Viewer" investigates "fake news" programs produced in Canada and the United States that use comedic performance strategies to encourage a questioning of more conventional news and current affairs programs. Brett Mills's "Contemporary Comedy Performance in British Sitcom" is concerned with the mixing of truth and falsehood in performance and the blurring of generic boundaries in recent British comedy series.

Issues surrounding performance and science fiction films and television programs are discussed in Christine Cornea's and Roberta Pearson's articles. Cornea's "2-D Performance and the Re-animated Actor in Science Fiction Cinema" explores the uncertain presence of the performer and science fiction's preoccupation with the relationship between the technological and the human in heavily mediated presentations of being human. Pearson's "The Multiple Determinants of Television Acting," drawing on original interviews that she did with the cast and crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), provides a fascinating and detailed account of the practical determinants of acting and performance in this series. Finally, Ryan Denison's "Bollywood Blends: Genre and Performance in Shahrukh Khan's Post-millenial Films" examines the different ways in which genre and performance operate in popular Bollywood films. Denison's discussion of the nuanced expressions suggests that actors can and are taking greater control of their filmmaking environments.

All these studies are well-written, cogent, and topical discussions of performance issues related to their genres. The images which accompany them are well chosen and interesting. Overall, Genre and Performance: Film and Television is an important addition to the ongoing discussion begun by Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (published [End Page 220] in Screen 16.3 [1975]), James Naremore's Acting in the Cinema (1988), Roberta Pearson's Eloquent Gestures (1992), and Karen Hollinger's The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star (2006). Promoting the exploration of performance via film and television semiotics, this collection does not attempt or pretend to be exhaustive. Instead, it succeeds by being what Cornea promises it to be: a tantalizing "taster" of what can be achieved by approaching screen performance with an awareness of genre. Genre and Performance: Film and Television certainly does inspire interest...

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