History of Film Industry Essay Week 5 PERFORMANCE How does film studies deal with acting? Movie reviewers tell us that certain performances are good whil

History of Film Industry Essay Week 5

PERFORMANCE

How does film studies deal with acting? Movie reviewers tell us that certain performances are good while others are terrible. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives awards every year in tribute to the quality of individual performances. And we all come away from the movies we see with opinions of whether the stars have done a good job creating their characters or not. But it should be clear by now that as an academic discipline, film studies is less interested in issuing judgments than in analyzing aspects and components of meaning, as we shall see

Genre

Genre: a type or category of film—such as the western, the horror film, the comedy, or the musical—that has its own recognizable conventions and character types.

To return to a point raised while defining the term convention, we sometimes assume that art is about pure creativity—that great films (or novels, or paintings, or musical works) are a matter of complete originality. But genres belie that idea. Genres rely on repetition and variation rather than uniqueness—familiar, recognizable conventions rather than raw, pure inventions.

The assignments are designed to match the material of each week. I am happy to have you complete the assignment in a fashion that accords with your interests, as long as you connect it to the material of the course