Fandom High School

"Last week, I said we'd be talking about genre film," Mitchell told the class, his hands firmly set on the couch itself. "The word genre means 'a stylistic category'. That means that genre film, by its very nature, is stylised. Prior films also had genres of their own, of course, but in the 1930s, all the new technical changes meant that a couple of very important genres were born. Musicals, screwball and horror, most prominently. This is the dawn of 'ScreamYell' and of 'The Red House'." He glanced around the room to see who actually recognised those titles. Yes.

"Obviously, the innovation of sound brought the musicl into the world. It started off a bit--" He searched for a word, "Stilted," he said, finally, "With revue musicals, which were just songs upon songs strung together on film. But quickly, new kinds of musical started to appear: backstage musicals, taking place behind the scenes of an actual musical, operettas, and integrated musicals, like the Red House, where the songs just... flowed into the narrative. You saw Swinging Time last week: that's a backstage musical. 'Adore Me This Eve', which we'll be watching later, is an operetta. You can tell, because it takes place in a fantasy world."

He took a breath, and glanced through the class. "Another big genre that came to be in the sound era was horror. It did exist before the time of sound, but it didn't really take off-- at least not as a genre in and of itself. 'The Vanishing Man', 'The Mummy', all of these films were born in this age, one after another. It was a genre that quickly found its stylistic footing, to the point where studios would just give their directors a title to work off, and see what they got. That's how we got 'Ran with Zombies', for example." He gave the class a quick grin. "On the less supernatural end of things, this time also brought us gangsters." He seemed too amused about that.

"Scarred Face, that famous mob movie, was one of them. That came out in 1932. Film has a habit of covering the issues of the time that just came before it, so the time right at the end of, and after, the prohibition of alcohol was rife with these kind of stories. People started to put their fantasies on them, as gangsters wore fancy clothes and bought big cars with little issue. Most of the time, they followed the same basic pattern. Two men who were utterly different but close friends would choose different pathways in life, one of crime, and one of the straight and narrow. And in the end, one of them would die violently, usually in a shoot-out." He made a gesture with his hand. "Of course, at the time, the public had trouble dealing with all the violence, even if it seems nearly tame by modern standards. The studios tried to cope by making their stories milder, or to turn them around, make it about redemption, like Feathered Wings, Filthy Faces."

He pushed himself down against the couch. "Out of mob movies came Film Noir," he continued, "Which took all the dark edges the studios had rubbed away and fashioned them into something new. Finding new paths to tell these stories. They were detective stories, set mostly in the 1940s, full of femme fatales and treachery and coldness and death. These weren't good people. The films weren't supposed to be about good people."

He scraped his throat. "To end this class on something lighter," he said, "We have the screwball comedy. Sort of like a romantic comedy now, it'd be about two people in love with enough money to act like complete idiots." He grinned again. "Take 'Past the Ninteenth Century', for example. It's the love between a theatre entrepeneur and the lady he romances, and they both start to act more and more like twats as the movie continues. Or 'The Night It Happened', where a heiress flees to marry a playboy but falls in love with the long-suffering reporter who follows her. The genre mostly died in 1945 at the end of the war, but there's been attempts to revive it long after."

He finally took a pause to breathe. "I want you all to pick one of these genres, and write a short summary for a fictional film. Get creative. It'll be good for you."

[[ and ocd up! ]]

"Last week, we talked about Europe," Mitchell started without much of a preamble. "This week, we'll be discussing the country you're standing in. The Great War gave a massive economic impulse to American society, but we're not here to talk about that kind of history. What matters is that in the 1920s, American film started to flood the markets. The Roaring Twenties were all about the fast pace of life and the big film studios really started to live. Paramount, MGM, Universal, Fox, Warner Brothers, all of these studios came to integrate themselves. They built their own studios with artificial lighting and editing systems."

He made a few gestures. "They developed many new forms of cinematography, like this blurry kind of image they created by taping bits of gauze to the camera." He had to let go of a laugh at... something, over that one. "They changed the film stock, too, so the camera could capture all of the colours, not just purples, blues and greens - and turn them into different shades of grey. It doesn't sound like much right now, but trust me, audiences were excited about it." He'd know, yes.

"It was also the rise of some of the first true star directors," he said, "D. W. Griffith had started early, of course, but you also had people like Cecil B. De Mille, who did The Ten Commandments, and John Ford, who shot a lot of the first early westerns. Europeans flooded the American shores again as well, looking for a bit of luck on film, see if they got anywhere. One of these blokes was called Charlie Chaplin. Some of you might've heard of him." He glanced around the room. "He used to do musical halls in Britain," he continued, fondly, "Sort of a big thing. But not as big as he became once he started doing comedies. Then there was Ernst Lubitsch, who shot Madame Ducherie and The Commitment Cycle and so on. F.W. Murnau who did Sunup, bringing expressionist style into American film. It didn't bring in a lot of money, but it had an effect like most could only dream about."

He swung his legs up. "Finally, the 1920s in America brought us animation," he said, "The techniques had been invented in the 1910s, but they didn't quite get it right until then. Brought us the first Mewix the Cat films. The Mouse came to be in that period, too - as Disney produced Big Boat Millie, which would establish them as the big cartoon powerhouse to be reckoned with."

"Animation was a big process," he said, "One artist would draw the key frames, another would draw the tiny movements in between, and then there was a lot of other stuff going on. I'd like you all to pair up and try that."