The Role of Genre in the Development of American Cinema

Since the birth of cinema, genre has played a major role in the direction and shape modern films have taken. One of the first prominent genre films was the Western. With its trademark untamed landscapes and rugged leading men, the Western has most often been used as a vehicle for meditation on mankind's relationship with society and what it really means to be civilized. In the film The Searchers, the issue of racism is addressed through the main character's quest for vengeance and his genocide of Native Americans. This highlighted the brutality of racism and begged the question, 'Are we still this way?'

The Western gave way to the Gangster picture. The Gangster film, which elevated violence to the level of high art, and told stories of the everyman who doesn't take the hard way to fame and money. It is a parable of the New American Dream, a dream in which one can be happy and have all the material things they can take through brute force. And in Gangster films, as in Greek tragedies, the hero is almost always killed or brought to justice by his hubris. William Wellman's The Public Enemy ends with the anti-hero, James Cagney, gunned down, a victim of his own pride and anger.

Musicals in film's history have always been a form of escapist art, letting the audience forget their troubles and go to a place where the everyday is made into a sort of Broadway spectacle, making the juxtaposition between reality and cinema close yet far-away. And since musicals' popularity led to the rise in using sound in motion picture, starting with the hugely popular The Jazz Singer, the world of cinema was changed forever.

Science Fiction as a film genre, started out like the Gangster movies, adapted from dime novels, but quickly became a frontier on which skilled writers could make complex metaphors out of the problems and fears of the current times and put them in a new context, to reach those who would otherwise be uninvolved. In each remake of the Science Fiction classic,...