Fluency and Acting

I just woke up, so this may not be the revelation it feels like now.

In my dream, I was at some kind of celebration for the newly relocated Tampa Zoo, with which somehow our research group was involved. K and S had just been introduced on stage and now the gathered crowd was watching a video on a large screen on stage. I was backstage watching it. Some of the people in it were actors - I recognized Dean Winters - but others clearly weren't. There was an older woman speaking, and she was really bad, like you sometimes see in community theater, not at all able to make her words sound like natural speech. As I was waking up, I thought about this woman and why she couldn't act. It's like she had no awareness of the difference between how she sounded and how people normally speak. That's weird because, of course, she's heard, and produced, countless hours of natural sounding speech all through her life. But, she's never been directed to examine the differences. The distinctive features of natural speech have never been pointed out to her.

I thought about A's review in class this week, talking about the components of fluency - pitch, juncture, and flow. That woman was acting the same way a poor reader reads - with no fluency, no understanding of how the ideas are represented in the text. Only she wasn't reading, she had actually memorized it without connecting the underlying thoughts. Or, she had memorized it, connected the thoughts, but never considered the distinctive features of fluent, natural speech.

When we teach movie-making to kids, we touch on acting as a discrete set of skills because they are the actors in their own movies. When we do that, we need to use language that ties the ideas that we are teaching back to reading. We need to teach them to attend to the distinctive features within the text that cue pitch, juncture, and flow. We can do this the same way we teach reading fluency in the classroom. Let me qualify that by saying, we can use the engaging and effective strategies that are sometimes used in the classroom to teach fluency. The key is that, in the context of movie-making, they have a real purpose to learn how to read fluently. They want their movie to be good, so the fluency strategies that we are teaching serve the purpose of helping them make their movie better. In the process, we will be helping them become better readers.

This is another way in which the kinds of projects that we do can support the acquisition of traditional literacies. This connection has probably already been made in research about Process Drama.

Altman 1999, Preface and Chapter 1

Altman, R. (1999). Film/genre. London: British Film Institute Publishing.

Although I may be shifting my focus to genre in literature and writing instruction in the classroom, Rick Altman's book still provides some interesting framing. In his first chapter, Altman walks us through the history of literary genre theory.

Altman suggests that literary genre theory has been historically under-theorized, or maybe theoretically malnourished. He begins by listing the unexamined assumptions that underlie Aristotle's Poetics which are transmitted intact down through the ages.

• Classical Genre Theory
• Aristotle - analyzes works of others to define genre by traits of the work (not effect produced, notes Altman)
  
• Horace - extends Aristotle's analysis into rules to writers
  

• Neoclassical Genre Theory
• Torquato Tasso
• Pierre Corneille
• Nicolas Boileau
• John Dryden
• Alexander Pope
• birth of tragicomedy
• birth of drama, then melodrama
• Nineteenth Century Genre Theory
• Romantic movement - mixing of genres
  
• Friedrich Schlegel - provided theoretical underpinnings to abolition of generic differences
• Stendahl - led the assault
  
• Victor Hugo - led the assault
• establishing new canon
• Ferdinand Brunetiére - brought in evolutionary model of genres
• Twentieth Century Genre Theory
• Benedetto Croce - rejected scientific model and attacked the notion of genre
• Before Croce, the genre theory debate was classic versus romantic; he changed it to genre vs. innovation
• René Wellek and Austin Warren
• genres can be based on inner form or outer form
  
• provided a reasoned theory for establishing the existence and exact borders of a genre
• possible to redraw the generic map
• criticized by Altman for failing to recognize the role of the critic or theorist (I don't know quite what he means by this)
• Northrup Frye
• extended Wellek and Warren
• freed genre definitions of a dependence on tradition
• Tzvetan Todorov
• structuralist
  
• strongly criticized and opposed Frye
• distinguishes between theoretical and historical genres
  
• furthers a move by Welleck and Warren and Frye, to critic-defined genres
• defines genre by effect produced instead of (Aristotlean) reliance on traits of the work
• E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
• genre in the reading process, including all reading (not just literary)
• all understanding starts with the identification of genre; the reader interprets based on the genre. If understanding of genre of a work changes, meaning changes.
• Altman seems worried about Hirsch and Todorov placing too much emphasis on the reader, describing it as a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" effect - using a magic word that unleashes power that can't be controlled. "Once labeled by writers and critics, genres might well fall into the hands of untutored readers or out-of-control audiences." I fail to see the risk.
  

On another note, I'm dying to know the current state of film genre theory, given changes brought about by desktop production and online publication. How does the field deal with the rapid emergence of new forms and the empowerment of "unsanctioned" filmmakers?

Also interesting that Altman studied film genres at the University of Iowa with fellow student Henry Jenkins.

Defining Questions of Genre

At summer camp, we teach a lot of different aspects of film-making, and story-telling in general. One that I've considered but haven't yet included in any serious way is genre. I have a sense that genre is important in the creation and viewing of mainstream movies and that a better understanding of genre will help the kids in their productions. One group this summer made a classic heist movie. It occurred to me at the time, but I never had the opportunity to talk to them in any detail about this. Understanding that they were working within an established genre might have helped them make creative choices and might have given them a better understanding of how that particular kind of story works. A lot of movies made at the camp would fall into a horror or horror/comedy genre. Others fit the action/adventure genre. Many combine one genre with elements of parody, like the techniques seen in "Scary Movie", "Epic Movie", "Another Teen Movie", etc.

The second formative moment comes from an interview with one of the campers at the end of the week. In response to a question about making movies in school, he said that they don't make movies in school. Then he corrected, "well, unless it's like, a documentary."

Filmmaking constitutes a literacy skill that is newly accessible through digital video and computers. As filmmaking moves into schools, so far it takes the form of documentary films. Video is allowed, if you are creating a documentary about photosynthesis or the Civil War or some other content-area, documentary topic. That's great, but what about narrative?

Documentary filmmaking is analogous to expository writing. So, the analog to narrative filmmaking in the classroom would be narrative writing or creative writing. If we teach kids to write stories, why don't we teach them to tell stories with film? More to the point, why should we and how do we?

I began with the following questions and rationale:

Title: Genre in Film and Genre in the Classroom

Questions
What models of genre are used in the classroom with regards to reading? With regards to writing? What models of genre exist in the field of film studies? How are classroom deployments of genre similar to narrative film deployments of genre? How are they different? What concepts about filmic genre may be successfully ported over to classroom practice?

Rationale
Video production is becoming an accepted form for student productive behavior in the classroom. So far, most of that student-produced work takes the form of documentaries, i.e. a movie about the water cycle, a video report about Martin Luther King, Jr.

If video production is going to be an accepted form of literate production in the classroom, then the range of acceptable student work needs to expand to include narrative film production. If that is the case, classroom teachers need a framework to understand, teach, and evaluate narrative film production. Part of that framework involves genre.

A rich body of research and tradition of classroom practice involves the use of genre in literature and in writing. Genre is also a well-established construct in the field of film production. Finding the ways in which film genre and literature genre coincide and the ways in which they conflict is the first step in bringing a filmic understanding of genre into the classroom.

After a discussion with Dr. S about these topics, I narrowed the focus of my questions to look at two processes of composition and their models:

How is genre enacted in literature as a model for the writing process?
How is genre enacted in film as a model for the filmmaking process?

More Notes on Mittell

Mittell, J. (2001). A cultural approach to television genre theory. Cinema Journal 40, No. 3, pp. 3-24.

For my paper, I may need to look at film and television genre separately. I want to keep a value structure for importing ideas into the classroom that includes usefulness and practicality.

"Even the most comprehensive discussion of television genre theory, Jane Feuer's essay in Channels of Discourse, ultimately concludes that genre analysis does not work as well as a paradigm for television as it has for film or literature."

Mittell identifies this essay as a first step toward a more comprehensive theory of genre for television. I need to see

1. what follows this work by him
2. and what other work cites this essay
   

Mittell identifies three traditional approaches to genre analysis:

1. definitional - looking for core elements
2. interpretation through a theoretical lens
3. historical - looking at how genres shift over time, "evolutionary dynamics"

He locates one main weakness in most genre analysis as the view of genre as a "textual attribute", a "component of text". Instead, he argues persuasively that genre is not intrinsic to texts, but that it is dependent upon intertextual connections. "Genres emerge only from the intertextual relations between multiple texts, resulting in a common category." He gives many examples, one being "The Great Train Robbery", which was originally classified as a crime film, and years later as a western. The text did not change, but the cultural discourse did and so the genre definitions shifted. He also notes that only some characteristics are used to define genre, for instance, we don't make generic differentiations between TV shows set in different cities, but we do differentiate between shows set in hospitals versus those set in police stations. We cannot understand genre by looking at sh0ws in isolation; we must look at the entire community that creates the genre - including the TV industry, fans, critics, etc. "...(T)exts themselves are insufficient to understand how genres are created, merge, evolve, or disappear. We need to look outside the texts to locate the range of sites in which genres operate, change, proliferate, and die out." (p. 7)

Genres are not timeless and unchanging. "We need to look beyond the text a the locus for genre and instead locate genres within the complex interrelations among texts, industries, audiences, and historical contexts." (p. 7) Analyzing texts is necessary, but insufficient for understanding genre.

Mittell brings in Foucault's "discursive practices" and situates this essay theoretically in line with poststructuralism.

Mittell says that to analyze genre, we need to look at "what audiences and industries say about genres, what terms and definitions circulate around any given instance of genre, and how specific cultural concepts are linked to particular genres." (p. 8) He advocates decentering the text. Instead of seeing the text as a stable object, he sees texts as "sites of discursive practice". (p. 9). He mentions mapping generic discourses. He also brings social situation and power into the discussion.

Mittell acknowledges previous work on genre as a discursive process and cites Rick Altman's book Film/Genre as the key work, described as his "influential textualist semantic/syntactic theory of genre". Mittell contrasts his work with Altman's, saying that Altman still remains too bounded by the text.

"Altman convincingly argues that the film industry promotes multiple genres around any single movie to maximize audience appeals." (p. 10). I need to look for this specifically in Altman's book. This is important to understanding genre, I think. It's also interesting to consider this in light of the parody videos on YouTube, like "Scary Mary", that repackage familiar movies in different genres.


"... genres work as discursive clusters..." p. 11

Mittell's definition of genre:

"... genres are categorical clusters of discursive processes that transect texts via their cultural interactions with industries, audiences, and broader contexts."

Mittell gives a case study in genre analysis using Michael Jackson's music videos, Billie Jean, Beat It, and Thriller. He outlines how traditional approaches might look at the texts, then how he proposes genre should be examined. In his example, he identifies many cultural influences on the work that are essential and are unaccounted for in any examination of genre that stops at the boundaries of the text.

Mittell concludes with five principles of cultural genre analysis:

1. Genre analysis should be specific to the medium, i.e. don't use film genre theory for TV
2. Genre studies must balance between the general and the specific.
3. History of genre should take discourses into account.
4. Genres have to be understood by looking at how they tie into to the larger culture.
5. Genres have to be understood within hierarchies of power within culture.
   

Notes on Mittell 2001 A Cultural Approach to TV Genre Theory

Mittell, J. (2001). A cultural approach to television genre theory. Cinema Journal 40, No. 3, pp. 3-24.

This is a theoretical essay that advocates a cultural approach to genre theory as it applies to television.

"Industries rely on genres in producing programs... self-definition... scheduling... Audiences use genres to organize fan practices... personal preferences, and everyday conversations and viewing practices." p. 3

"Importing genre theories into television studies without significant revision creates many difficulties when accounting for the specifics of the medium." p. 3

He's talking about the inadequacy of importing film genre theory into television; the same hold for importing any media studies genre theories into classroom video practice.