The American Film Musical / Edition 1 available in Paperback
The American Film Musical / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 025320514X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253205148
- Pub. Date:
- 02/22/1988
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 025320514X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253205148
- Pub. Date:
- 02/22/1988
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
The American Film Musical / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253205148 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/22/1988 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 345,362 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.03(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Read an Excerpt
The American Film Musical
By Rick Altman
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1987 Charles F. AltmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-30413-1
CHAPTER 1
An Introduction to the Theory of Genre Analysis
THE AMERICAN FILM MUSICAL IS NOT ONE BOOK, BUT TWO. Most overly, it is an account of the Hollywood musical and its place in American life. From Maurice Chevalier to John Travolta, and from Jeanette MacDonald to Barbra Streisand, no major star or director is neglected. Composers, choreographers, designers, musicians, even arrangers and montage specialists are given their due. From the twenties to the eighties (with side trips to nineteenth-century Vienna, the vaudeville circuit, and the Broadway stage), the story of the American film musical is here recounted in full. More than the musical's stars and story, however, it is the genre's recurrent structure that will receive attention in these pages. Book after book has told stories associated with the musical, but little attention has been paid to the structures and strategies which the musical shares with numerous other aspects of American life. To understand the musical is to understand the overall cultural system in which it develops and makes its meaning.
But what is the musical? How do we define it, delimit it, and analyze it? These are questions which have, alas, been too seldom asked and even less often answered. One writer after the other has been content to write the history of the musical as if the terms "musical" and "history" were entirely unproblematic, as if there were general agreement on all particulars of genre theory and genre history. Nothing could, of course, be farther from the truth. More than any other realm in the general domain of film studies, genre criticism has remained complacently untheoretical, accepting terms and categories provided by an openly self-serving industry, borrowing notions of history from fan magazines, and overall revealing shockingly little methodological self-consciousness.
In response to this situation, I have felt compelled to make this book into something more than the story of genre. From beginning to end, The American Film Musical is also a treatise on how to study genre: what genre is, what it does, why it exists (and who makes it exist), what diverse roles industry, critic, and public play in generic functioning, how (and how not) to define a genre, what the responsibilities and methods of the genre historian are or might be, how to identify and delimit subgenres, and, in a broader sense, how to recognize and theorize the relationship between generic functioning and the strategies of the society that spawns a genre. In short, this is a book about the musical genre, a fascinating multi-media celebration constituting the world's most complex art form. But it is also a book about genre as such, a treatise on (and, I hope, an example of) the way in which questions of genre should be asked and answered. The reader who is less interested in the musical and more concerned to follow my theoretical argument might profitably read chapters one, five, and nine as a quasi-separate unit, while the reader primarily fascinated by questions of structure and style will find chapters two through four most rewarding, and those wanting a historical account may well skip to chapters six through eight.
General Discourse on Meaning
In order to understand the nature and function of generic categories, we must first understand the notion of meaning in general. Now, there are of course numerous ways of characterizing the process of signification, and it makes a difference for our understanding of generic functioning which one we choose. While my definition is hardly the only possible one, it will become apparent why it is a particularly appropriate one for the study of genre. Meaning, as I will define it, is never something that words or texts have, but always something that is made in a four-party meaning-situation. An author (understood in the widest possible sense: individual, group, industry, etc.) circulates a text (which may vary from a single word, image, or gesture to multiple volumes) to an audience (singular or plural, present or removed) whose perception is partly dependent on the interpretive community to which its members belong. It is worth noting that this communication model differs in two major ways from more traditional sender-message-receiver models. First, the model I am proposing has no message, that is no specific meaning that may be permanently ascribed to a given text. Instead, a text turns into a message (or different messages) only in the context of a specific audience in a specific interpretive community. When the meaning of a text seems so utterly clear as to permit no doubt, it is invariably because the author and audience are part of the same interpretive community. This common situation may seem to justify the older model, which recognizes the category of "message," but in the long run it is only another argument in favor of adding to the model a fourth category, that of interpretive community. As we shall see, the addition of the interpretive community as an active party in the process of making meaning opens up a new realm of generic activity and analysis.
An author transmits a text to an audience participating in a larger community. How is it that such a text acquires meaning? If meaning, as I believe, is fundamentally dependent on the relationships which the audience perceives in the text, then we may say that the process of making meaning is the process of constricting audience perception to certain quite specific (and limited) types of relationship. When we hear a language entirely unknown to us, say Mandarin Chinese or Bantu, we are free to play up any aspect we want, to stress whatever relationships we want, to appreciate sounds independently of the sense they might make for a native speaker. Even in our own language, this sense of "free play" remains available at certain times (dependent on our mood or the cultural circumstances), but in most situations our familiarity with the language makes it hard for us not to repress the level of sounds (signifies) in favor of meaning (that which is signified). We could pay attention to any kind of sound relationship, but we don't, because years of familiarity with the sounds in question have taught us to stress certain connections over others. The making of meaning begins with this restriction of relationships. To put it in more technical terms, meaning can arise only in a context of finite commutability, of restricted semiosis — however temporary that restriction may be.
The process of producing meaning in literary or filmic texts is no doubt more complex, because of the existence of an additional level of meaning, but the situation is nevertheless fundamentally similar. The normal process of meaning attribution, as we have seen, involves an author, a text, an audience, and an interpretive community (one or more of each). Now, the text itself, as I have shown in more detail elsewhere, may be conceived as including two levels of language: the primary language in which the text is written, and the secondary or textual language that ascribes to the words or images of the primary language meanings which they simply don't have when the primary language is used for everyday purposes. Dante's Divine Comedy, for example, is a text written in the Florentine dialect of Italian current around 1300. This first level of language definitely determines to a certain extent how the text will be read, i.e. what kind of meaning it will make, but this first level pre-exists the text and operates elsewhere independently of the text. At this level, words mean what they mean anywhere they might be used. The word "sun," for example, means the heavenly body that appears high in the sky during the day, passing from east to west and warming the earth. At a second level, however, dependent both on the text's own capacity for language creation and on the various traditions from which it borrows, words like "sun" can take on numerous meanings which they lack in everyday usage. In general, the extent to which such secondary, "textual," meanings are located depends largely on the interpretive community surrounding the text and the audience at a particular point in time. Thus, at various points in the history of Dante criticism, different aspects of the text have been stressed, thus constructing differing meanings: the Florentine political side, the dolce stil novo, the religious symbolism, the verbal patterns, the love poetry, and so forth. This variation in interpretive community has permitted the "use" of the text for an unending string of vastly different purposes: Florentine sectionalism, Italian nationalism, religious training, academic anti-utilitarianism, classical conservatism, and so forth. It is interesting to note that nearly every one of these uses to which Dante's text is put can be neatly characterized by the other texts that the approach takes to be canonical. The interpretive community may thus be defined in part as a context in which the text is to be interpreted; the interpretive community names the intertexts that will control the interpretation of a given text. As in the case of listening to Bantu or English, meaning again appears as a restriction of possible perceptions to a specific, limited set of relationships.
Note that thus far there has been no mention of the text's message, or a correct interpretation, or a proper construction of meaning. What is at stake here is not the meaning of a text, but how any meaning at all arises from a text. A specific critical tradition or other cause — that is, a specific interpretive community — arrests the free play of a text's signifiers and freezes them in a particular way, thus producing a meaning proper to the particular community in question (by foregrounding certain patterns the recognition of which leads to the apprehension of that particular meaning). While it would perhaps be wrong to assume complete liberty on the part of a specific audience, or even of a particular interpretive community, (the primary language, after all, usually remains relatively stable, thus limiting community variation, and even the most diverse linguistic communities usually share with their larger culture certain common concerns, beliefs, or assumptions), there is nevertheless quite little to restrict possible interpretations of a text like The Divine Comedy. There are so many possible intertexts, and so few truly similar texts, that almost any choice of intertexts could be justified by one interpretive community or another.
The Role of Generic Formations in Meaning Production
How does understanding of a single text differ from interpretation of a self-consciously constituted genre? In one sense, not at all. The text still has a primary language (or, in the case of film, a series of primary languages constituting both sound and image track), and a secondary language (or languages) activated by a specific intertextual context. The difference between interpretation of a single text and a generic system arises from the obvious fact that a genre already provides a specific set of intertexts (the other films identified by the industry as belonging to the same genre), and thus a self-contained equivalent of an interpretive community. The constitution of a genre thus short-circuits the "normal" sequence of interpretation. Text after text is generated from the same mold, thus highlighting certain textual relationships, repressing others, and eventually limiting the field of play of the interpretive community. The function of the interpretive community is usurped by the genre, thus rendering the human interpretive community all but vestigial in the meaning-making process. Seen in this light, genres appear as agents of a quite specific and effective ideological project: to control the audience's reaction to any specific film by providing the context in which that film must be interpreted.
Now, a well known truism claims that a generic text cannot be interpreted without reference to the text's generic tradition. To be sure, the categories operative in a single film can be fully perceived only through a conflation or superimposition of related films. The meaning, we often say (roughly following Lévi-Strauss or Cawelti), is contained in the generic patterns rather than in the individual text. What critics have failed to realize in making such claims is the repressive power exercised by the genre. Rather than seeing genres as structures helping individual texts to produce meaning, we must see genres as restrictive, as complex methods of reducing the field of play of individual texts. Genres are not the democratically elected representatives of a group of likeminded texts. They are autocratic monarchs dictating a single standard of allegiance for all subjects. In short, genres are not neutral categories, as structuralist critics have too often implied; rather they are ideological constructs masquerading as neutral categories. As such they are to be identified not with some impersonal structure immanent in a text, but with the discursive activity of the producing industry. Genres are like a key addressed to the audience, a key to the codes contained in the simultaneously transmitted text. Precisely because they don't appear to be emitted by the industry, but rather to arise independently from the conflation of a series of similar texts, genres never give the impression of limiting the audience's freedom. Yet, because they make it easy to understand the text in a particular predetermined way, genres always make it less likely that a film will be construed in a different, non-generic way. By prejudicing us toward one set of intertexts rather than another (and thus toward a particular set of patterns), they provide and enforce a pre-reading of the text at hand.
The Role of the Critic
Genres, then, must no longer be considered solely as impersonal agents of narrative organization, but as discursive acts,4 an active part of the industry's direct address to its audience, a rhetorical ploy destined to enforce a single pre-determined reading or at least to increase the probability that certain other interpretations will remain unexplored. What then is the role of the critic in dealing with the always already pre-interpreted generic text? It is tempting to see in the critic the denouncer of industrial ideology and the restorer of the interpretive community. Many a rewarding revisionist genre study has been based on the assumption that the critic must unmask Hollywood, that criticism is democracy's privileged form of speech, the last bastion of freedom and truth exposing the tyranny of the industry's ideologically loaded generic discourse. Now, I do not mean to condemn this attitude entirely. The critic's function as informer, as the one who fingers the self-serving strategies of this or any other entertainment enterprise, must not be neglected. The critic has a duty to see and to say what is seen. The problem lies with the notion that critics, unlike audiences and industries, have the power to see clearly and to write objectively. To demonstrate the bias implied by genres is simply, once again, for the pot to call the kettle black. Suppose I were to substitute my set of intertexts for that supplied by the genre. Would I not also be attempting to predetermine a given audience's operative interpretive community? Would I be doing anything different with my criticism than the industry with its genre? In order to answer this question properly, we must at this point take an apparent detour through the various strategies that critics (and cultures) have used to support the notion of their own objectivity while exposing the supposedly limited or tendentious nature of other, non-critical, language or endeavors.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The American Film Musical by Rick Altman. Copyright © 1987 Charles F. Altman. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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