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Film Genres: The American Social Problem Film

Course: 
FILM 160
Instructor: 
Quarter: 
Fall
Academic Year: 
2016-17
Days: 
TTH
Times: 
7:10PM-9:35PM
Location: 
Commun 150
Description: 
This course explores the aesthetic, narrative, and rhetorical dimensions of the social problem film. What is a social problem film? In the context of the United States and of Hollywood studios, the genre is defined by fictionalized depictions of deviance/normalcy, health/illness, delinquency/obedience, racial strife/harmony, and a host of other social crises set in realistic American domestic or institutionalized settings. Often a genre scorned by critics for moralizing plots, exploitative tropes, and oversimplified conclusions, these films demand historical research sensitive to the intertextual structures inherently a part of their making; the hallmark of the social problem film being a claim to societal relevance enhanced by situational location shooting. The genre first appeared in the late 1910's and 1920's, an effort to inject quality and realism into a new form struggling to be taken seriously by middle class viewers. A later cycle of social problem films–typified by the work of Elia Kazan, Sam Fuller, and Douglas Sirk–was produced in Hollywood in the postwar climate of the late 1940’s and 1950’s in a considerably more jaundiced style. In this course we will endeavor to examine the historical genre and its televisual and mediatic offspring by following the influence of progressive notions of rescue, punishment, treatment, reform, and cure on the filmic depiction of the struggling individual or wayward group. Though our readings will come mainly from film studies, social historians’ accounts of the growth of medical, penal, and educational institutions will be called upon to better understand story development, mise-en-scène, and audience reception of this persistent American film genre.