Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory ed. by Barry Keith Grant, Malisa Kurtz (review)

Each genre film, according to one of the most firmly established “rules” of film genre study, must exhibit qualities that determine its relationship to other examples in the genre. Barry Keith Grant and Malisa Kurtz’s Notions of Genre is no different. While claiming to be something unique, a study in genre through works written before the academic tradition (1970-) became firmly established, it also self-locates precisely within the types of writings one expects in a genre reader.

Notions of Genre offers a compilation of essays on popular film from 1945 to 1970 that reflect an early and organic preoccupation with film genre theory, prior to its proper academic application. A distinguished film scholar well known for his Film Genre Reader, “the first scholarly anthology on film genre” released in 1986, Barry Keith Grant reveals his enthusiasm for the prehistory of film genre in the Introduction to its current, fourth edition (2013), in which he emphasizes the early significance of Robert Warshow’s article on the gangster film (1948) and André Bazin’s essay on the western (1952), both works included here in Notions of Genre, as the earliest contributions to genre theory (7). Grant and Kurtz use essays by more familiar authors—like Warshow and Bazin, who have been considered forefathers to genre study since the publication of Christine Gledhill’s The Cinema Book (1985)—to balance out their reintroduction of historically lesser-known work and authors.

Grant and Kurtz divide the collection into four sections, the first two (“Comedy” and “Western”) directly indicative of film genre labels, and the last two (“The Fantastic” and “Crime and Punishment”) more universally applicable beyond the realm of film studies proper.

The first section on “Comedy” is nicely anchored by the first two readings, James Agee’s “Comedy’s Greatest Era” and Siegfried Kracauer’s “Silent Film Comedy,” important and familiar works written by authors who clearly befit the book’s project. Though perhaps better known as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, James Agee was one of the earliest and most steadfast film critics before the vocation truly existed, defending film’s artistry as a writer at Time and The Nation, and writing his most influential piece, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” included here, as a freelancer for Life Magazine. Kracauer’s essay largely argues that the physicality of slapstick comedy evoked “material life at its crudest” and therefore intrinsically “conformed to the spirit of the medium predestined to capture the fortuitous aspects of physical life” (36). Though Kracauer’s essay represents meta-level film Theory more than genre theory in a limited sense, both Agee’s and Kracauer’s texts lament the devaluation of physical comedy at the advent of sound cinema. The remaining four readings in the section range from 1963 to 1968 and all revolve around the same axis. In “Whatever Happened to Hollywood Comedy?” Dwight MacDonald illustrates how “the old magical world” of silent comedies disappears by mid-century, when contemporary films become too realistic to be amusing abstractly, with films like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) violating the “basic rules of comedy” (54). The last two essays explore film comedy systematically, with Donald W. McCaffrey charting “The Evolution of the Chase in the Silent Screen Comedy,” and Carolyn and Harry Geduld mapping the transformation of comedic characters upon the introduction of sound.

Highlights of the second section on the “Western” include Bazin’s highly influential essay “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence” and George Bluestone’s “The Changing Cowboy: From Dime Novel to Dollar Film,” another early work in adaptation studies, itself pioneered by Bluestone’s seminal book Novels Into Film (1957). Interestingly, despite being devoted to a genre not highly regarded for its representation of diversity, this section exemplifies the widest assortment of critical methods and authors of any in the book. Harry Schein, chemical engineer and founder of the...