Impressionism and Ideology: The State of Recent Genre Film Criticism

Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies. New York : Norton, 1980.351 pp. Stephen Neale. Genre. London : British Film Institute. 1980.74 pp. Eugene Rosow. Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 422 + xv pp. Thomas Schatz. Hollywood Genres: Formulas. Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House, 1981.297 + xiv pp. When film study began to mature in the mid-seventies, interest in the narrative film, which had been nurtured a decade earlier by auteurism's enthusiasm for popular film, waned in favor of more formal concerns. Critical interest shifted from the signified of films to the practice of signification, from what a film means to how it produces meaning. Structural film was particularly amenable to such an approach. No longer was film assumed to have an inviol- able meaning ; rather, meaning was now understood to arise from the con- junction of various discursive codes at work in the cinematic text. Auteurs no longer existed apart from such contexts, nor could they acceptably be studied in this manner again; as Roland Barthes had shown, writing degree zero was impossible.1