Abstract
There are other factors which contribute to the structuring of the film-making process which are also worth examining. These include aesthetic and cultural factors which are less tangible than issues of finance and technology but are just as significant nonetheless. The aesthetic domain embraces those resources constituted by the techniques of cinema — modes of narration, mise-en-scène, montage and so on — which any film-maker can draw upon in the course of their work. It is through the utilisation of such aesthetic resources that film-makers establish an active communication, in Williams’s sense,1 with their audience. These resources are related to technological resources such as cameras, lenses, film stock, lighting, editing and dubbing facilities. Consequently, the individual film-maker is afforded a wide range of aesthetic and technical possibilities from which to draw upon.
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Notes
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965), Chapter 1: ‘The Creative Mind’.
Christine Gledhill, ‘History of Genre Criticism’ in Pam Cook (ed.), The Cinema Book (London: BFI, 1985), p. 58.
The first critical study to use the term film noir was Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumerton’s Panorame du Film Noir Americain (Paris) 1955.
Leo Braudy, ‘Genre. The Conventions of Connection’ in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 3rd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 415.
Edward Buscombe, ‘The Idea of Genre in American Cinema’, in Barry K. Grant (ed.) Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977), p. 34.
Tom Ryall, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 73.
See John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism (London: BFI, 1986).
Andy Medhurst, ‘Music Hall and British Cinema’ in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays, (London: BFI, 1986).
See Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (London: Cameron & Tayleur, 1977).
Ian Christie, ‘The Scandal of Peeping Tom’ in Powell, Pressburger and Others (London: BFI, 1978).
Alexander Walker, Hollywood England (London: Harrap, 1986).
Martyn Auty, ‘But is it Cinema?’ in Auty and Nick Roddick (eds), British Cinema Now (London: BFI, 1985).
Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), p. 333.
Christine Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’ in Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI, 1987).
James Park, Learning to Dream: The New British Cinema (London: Faber & Faber, 1984).
Important texts include Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy(eds), Gainsborough Melodrama (London: BFI Dossier, 1983); several of the essays in Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays, particularly Charles Barr: ‘Schizophrenia and Amnesia’ and Julien Petley: The Lost Continent’;
Ian Christie, Powell, Pressburger and Others (London: BFI, 1978);
David Pirie: A Heritage of Horror (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973).
George Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’ in Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), p. 75.
John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 24.
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© 1991 Duncan J. Petrie
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Petrie, D.J. (1991). Genre, Aesthetics and Criticism. In: Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21473-0_7
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