Film & Culture Chapter 3

narrative

A cinematic structure in which content is selected and arranged in a cause-andeffect sequence of events occurring over time.

persuasive film

A documentary film concerned with presenting a particular perspective on social issues, or with corporate and governmental injustice. Compare factual film, instructional film, and propaganda film.

instructional film

A documentary film that seeks to educate viewers about common interests, rather than persuading them with particular ideas. Compare factual film, persuasive film, and propaganda film.

propaganda film

A documentary film that systematically disseminates deceptive or distorted information. Compare factual film, instructional film, and persuasive film.

factual film

A documentary film that, usually, presents people, places, or processes in a straightforward way meant to entertain and instruct without unduly influencing audiences. Compare instructional film, persuasive film, and propaganda film.

gangster

A film genre dealing with organized crime, often the Mafia.

musical

A film genre that adapts the song and dance routines from stage plays.

western

A film genre that deals with cowboys and the old American west.

horror

A film genre that deals with fear and is intended to shock or terrify the audience.

film noir

A film genre that describes the stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s.

science fiction

A film genre that focuses on humanity's relationship with science and the technology it generates.

presentation

A genre convention that features certain elements of cinematic language to communicate tone and atmosphere. (Ex: low-key lighting and deep shadows in horror films)

uncanny valley

A hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's human likeness.

stream of consciousness

A literary style that gained prominence in the 1920s in the hands of such writers as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Dorothy Richardson and that attempted to capture the unedited flow of experience through the mind.

story formulas

A movie's structure or plot that helps viewers determine what genre it belongs to.

documentary film

A nonfiction film that presents the filmmakers' perspective on actuality. Documentary films take many forms, including factual, instructional, persuasive, and propaganda. Regardless of approach, every documentary is shaped by the filmmaker's intent and subjective interpretation of ideas and actual events.

theme

A shared, public idea, such as a metaphor, an adage, a myth, or a familiar conflict or personality type.

stars

Actors who star in genre films factor in how the genre is classified, analyzed, and received by audiences. Most avoid being typecasted, but some thrive in specific genres.

experimental film

Also known as avant-garde film, a term implying a position in the vanguard,out in front of traditional films. Experimentalfilms are usually about unfamiliar, unorthodox,or obscure subject matter and are ordinarilymade by independent (even underground) filmmakers,not studios, often with innovative techniquesthat call attention to, question, and evenchallenge their own artifice.

character types

An actor's part that represents a distinctive character type (sometimes a stereotype): society leader, judge, doctor, diplomat, and so on.

stop-motion animation

An animated film that records the movement of objects frame-by-frame.

hand-drawn animation

An animated film that uses 24 hand-drawn or painted cels to create one second of footage.

direct cinema

An approach to documentary filmmaking that employs an unobtrusive style in an attempt to give viewers as truthful and "direct" an experience of events as possible.

digital animation/CGI

Animation that employs computer software to create the images used in the animation process (as opposed to analog techniques that rely on stop-motion photography, hand-drawn cels, etc.).

genre

The categorization of narrative films by form, content, or both. Examples of genres are musical, comedy, biography, Western, and so on.

generic transformation

The process by which a particular genre is adapted to meet the expectations of a changing society.