Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Guns in Gangster Films

The auteur theory developed by French film critics beginning in the 1950s is partly a convenient way of categorizing and analyzing films, collecting titles as the body of work of the director. More than this, though, the theory holds that it is the director more than anyone else who is responsible for the finished film, since he or she is the one who determines visual style and other matters in the course of production. The theory finds that the director expresses meaning through visual style and that analyzing the visual style of a given director reveals consistent thematic concerns, similarities in character development, and other repeated and recognizable signs of a single intelligence at work. At the same time, though, film remains a collaborative medium, and it would seem that directors would be influenced by their collaborators so that there should be some distinctions that can be made between different works according to other members of the production team. How applicable the theory is depends on how it is defined. As a means of arranging and rationalizing film criticism, the theory connects a body of work so that it can be analyzed. As a flat-out statement of actual responsibility for every facet of a film, though, it is certainly too limiting. In analyzing the development of a genre, the way the genre develops is guided first by historical change acting on genre expectations and traditions, though the director with a strong point of view will find ways to make those traditions and expectations his or her own.

Robert Warshow in his article "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner" finds relationships between what he calls the "two most successful creations of American movies," the gangster and the Westerner, "men with guns" (Warshow 654). When he wrote this article in 1954, he said that the gangster movie no longer existed in its classical form. However, our awareness of the parameters of the classical form still infuses ...

Page 1 of 7 Next >

More on Guns in Gangster Films...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Guns in Gangster Films. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:19, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702349.html