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Film genre

A biographical film or biopic () is a film that dramatizes the life of an actual person or group of people. Such films show the life of a historical person and the central character's real name is used. They differ from docudrama films and historical drama films in that they attempt to comprehensively tell a single person's life story or at least the most historically important years of their lives.

Context

Biopic scholars include George F. Custen of the College of Staten Island and Dennis P. Bingham of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Custen, in Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (), regards the genre as having died with the Hollywood studio era, and in particular, Darryl F. Zanuck. On the other hand, Bingham's study Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre shows how it perpetuates as a codified genre using many of the same tropes used in the studio era that has followed a similar trajectory as that shown by Rick Altman in his study, Film/Genre. Bingham also addresses the male biopic and the female biopic as distinct genres from each other, the former generally dealing with great accomplishments, the latter generally dealing with female victimization. Ellen Cheshire's Bio-Pics: a life in pictures () examines UK/US films from the s and s. Each chapter reviews key films linked by profession and concludes with further viewing list. Christopher Robé has also written on the gender norms that underlie the biopic in his article, "Taking Hollywood Back" in the issue of Cinema Journal.

Roger Ebert defended The Hurricane and distortions in biographical films in general, stating "those who seek the truth about a man from the film of his life might as well seek it from his loving grandmother. The Hurricane is not a documentary but a parable."

Film genre

Crime film, in the broadest sense, is a film genre inspired by and analogous to the crime fiction literary genre. Films of this genre generally involve various aspects of crime and its detection. Stylistically, the genre may overlap and combine with many other genres, such as drama or gangster film, but also include comedy, and, in turn, is divided into many sub-genres, such as mystery, suspense or noir.

Screenwriter and scholar Eric R. Williams identified crime film as one of eleven super-genres in his Screenwriters Taxonomy, claiming that all feature-length narrative films can be classified by these super-genres.&#; The other ten super-genres are action, fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, slice of life, sports, thriller, war and western. Williams identifies drama in a broader category called "film type", mystery and suspense as "macro-genres", and film noir as a "screenwriter's pathway" explaining that these categories are additive rather than exclusionary.Chinatown would be an example of a film that is a drama (film type) crime film (super-genre) that is also a noir (pathway) mystery (macro-genre).

Characteristics

The definition of what constitutes a crime film is not straightforward. Criminologist Nicole Hahn Rafter in her book Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society () found that film scholars had a traditional reluctance to examine the topic of crime films in their entirety due to complex nature of the Clarens in his book Crime Movies (), described the crime film as a symbolic representation of criminals, law, and society. Clarens continued that they describe what is culturally and morally abnormal and differ from thriller films which he wrote as being more concerned with psychological and private situations. Thomas Schatz in Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System () does not refer to the concept of crime film as a genre, and says that "su

A mystery film is a genre of film revolving around the solution to a problem or a crime. It focuses on the efforts of a protagonist to solve the mystery by means of clues, investigation, and deduction.

This is a list of mystery films by decade.

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“You see, but you do not observe.”
–Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia”
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It all started with a book that made me curious.

I was on a house call in Georgetown, invited to browse the personal book collection of a woman who used to be a professional rare book dealer like me. I spent the afternoon combing through her library. As the wind grazed the branches outside, the light within the room shifted, sparkling across the antique rug, the gently worn furniture, and the bookcases. Every shelf had been filled with books that quietly spoke to her discernment. Instead of a flashy modern edition of Pride and Prejudice, this woman had a rather ugly one, bound in drab brown paper boards resembling dilapidated cardboard. It also bore an unusual revised title, Elizabeth Bennet; or, Pride and Prejudice.

Despite its humble appearance, I knew the book was incredibly rare. It was the first edition of Pride and Prejudice published in the United States, from A woman who kept this book on her shelf knew a good book when she saw it, even if others around her might overlook it.

Jane Austen is one of my favorite writers. She was born in in the English countryside, Steventon, Hampshire, and went on to become &#;the first great women writer in English,&#; according to one of her many modern biographers. She wrote six major novels, along with a novella, two other incomplete novels, and what scholars call juvenilia (early writing she composed when she was growing up). I have always been drawn to Austen’s confidence, how she guides the reader through her heroines&#; struggles and uncertainties. And I like her wit, which shines in the details she chooses to linger on. Austen died fairly young, at the age of forty-one, and I have often wished that she had lived to write more.

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