Moretti and Genre

Film Noir, Blacksploitation, Mondo Film, Jidaigeki, they’re all film genres; they and others have come, gone and even been revived over the past few decades. As Moretti has pointed out studying genres of popular art can often be used to understand social trends in the cultures or nations from which they emerged. Critics have usually controlled film history. Those movies which are considered to be artistically significant get written about the rest get forgotten. The forgotten films are often genre pictures crime, horror, or musical films; often however there are more of the genre films produced and they usually out gross the artistic ones.  New Media more specifically sites such as IMDB, Wikipedia have allowed us to see all the films produced in any country in a given, sometimes even their box office receipts. With such information we can gain a film history controlled not by critics but by the film viewing public.

Moretti’s work encourages us to see how genres come and go over time. Often when critics are busy praising movies they deem artistic they fail to acknowledge the ones they consider mere entertainment. Using some of Moretti’s ideas allow us to gain a better understanding of film, studying not just the movies we liked but the ones which were liked by the general public.  For purposes of this essay I intent to discuss the cinemas of Italy and Russia but specifically Soviet Era films; I feel that while the cinemas of these two countries are widely studied around the world there are many misconceptions which Moretti’s methods and the massive amount of information available through New Media can now begin to remedy.

Italian cinema is often lauded as one of the great film cultures around the world. The Neo-Realist movement is considered the first important movement in post world war two cinema. Additionally directors such as Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni are admired from film schools around the world; while these films are great movies saying that they embody all of Italian film is a gross understatement. Italian cinema also has a long history of popular films in genres like action, crime and horror, this includes popular directors such as Dario Argento and Sergio Corbucci and Genres such as the Spaghetti-Western. Trying to divide art and entertainment has often plagued film studies, however with advances in new media and some of the ideas of Moretti a better understanding may soon be possible.

Let’s use composer Ennio Morricone to show some connections between high and low art in Italian cinema.  If you click the link for his IMDB page I’ve provided you’ll see a rather large career stretching back some fifty years. Now if you click on some of the titles you will see that they stretch the full range of genres from emotional dramas, to brutal crime pictures, to sweeping historical, and some truly gruesome  horror films. Morricone composed scores for films across all genres and as a result his career shows how certain genres came and went. He began composing mostly dramas, as these went into decline he began composing for crime and horror films, when these and Italian film in general went into decline by the 1980s he like many Italians working in the film industry started working in American films, he returned to Italy in the late 1980s when Italian films started to become popular again; this popularity is credited to a film Cinema Paradiso which he composed the music for.

You may find yourself asking how does this tie into Moretti and more importantly how does this all tie to new media. While Moretti seems fascinated by the fact the genres come and go over time with a pretty strong consistency he doesn’t seem that interested in drawing conclusions. His main focus seems to be on creating models or templates through which further study could be done.  By using Ennio Morricone’s career as a starting point we can see the years in which certain genres appeared and others diminished. Taking these dates we can compare them with actual historical events and see if there are any new connections, which can be drawn. None of this would have been possible without sites like IMDB and Wikipedia, they and other sites organize films by composer something that few if any traditional film books do. Directors often (but not always) stick to the genre in which they first find great success; crew people however bounce around going from one genre to the next. Therefore studying the oeuvre of other crew members give you a better idea of the when which genres were doing well and which had ceased to be at different times.

Russia is another nation whose films are often misrepresented by critics and film theorists. A teacher of mine at film school Paul Warner informed me that there were never any action movies made in Soviet Russia and that the majority were art films, he probably never saw the following list. This list shows that a film called Pirates of the Twentieth Century was the most popular Soviet film as far as ticket sales, by the way it was a Kung-Fu film.  If you looked up the articles of all those films which were listed you’d find that four were by the same director Leonid Gaidai; most of Gaidai’s movies were satirical, musical, comedies; imagine a Russian Monty Python.  Now without the list and future lists which will hopefully exists the points which I have tried to make would be impossible to prove. New Media allows film historians to see which films and more specifically which genres actually were popular instead being forced to believe the statements of ill-informed film professors and historians.

Moretti’s theories on genre present some truly fascinating opportunities when applied to genre. We are being increasingly able to see when certain film genres first appeared as well as when they went into decline. A few years ago researching Italian or Russian film in such a way would have required 50-100 books most of which weren’t in English. Today it can be done in a variety of languages thanks to a few websites. Another method created by all this studying of genre is studying box-office receipts; such studies like the one I linked allow us to see what actual people were going to see this gives us a much better perception of how film was viewed by a culture. While Moretti’s books doesn’t really discuss financial success of genres I feel that using such information follows Moretti’s spirit by using a piece of typically ignored data to try and understand historical trends. By studying genres we can gain a better understanding of how film has actually evolved not how critics would have liked it to. This understanding would have been impossible without New Media.