Course information

If the slapstick comedy was particularly attuned to the Roaring Twenties and the musical and the screwball comedy alleviated the era of economic hardships in the 1930s, which are the film genres best attuned to the twenty-first century? This course aims at exploring some of the most popular genres of our times, genres that preexisted the twenty-first century, but which found, or are struggling to find, a precise generic crystallization in our era. The premise of the course is that genres are forms of cultural ritual and types of social contract. They enable individuals and collectivities to process and respond to historical contingency, by developing imaginative and poetic solutions to cultural anxieties, epistemological uncertainties, and social transformation. For this reason, the primary purpose of the course is not so much that of analyzing the aesthetic and narrative features of determined genres, but rather to explore the cultural, social, and philosophical dynamics to which such genres respond. 

The course is divided into two parts. In the first part, we will explore the notion of film genres, by focusing on classical models. In particular, we will concentrate on a genre that appears to be far removed from current concern and sensibilities, namely, the Western. The distance of this genre from the contemporary culture will allow us to better focalize the workings of generic conventions, formulas, and expectations. In the second part of the course, we will apply the knowledge acquired in course’s first part to three genres that have gained an unprecedented prominence in the twenty-first century: the disaster film, the superhero movie, and the biopic. While in the first part of the course is tightly structured, the second part of the course allows students a greater degree of flexibility, but it also expects them to supplement the basic bibliography and filmography, by developing individual study trajectories.