Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

genre was seen to play an important part in this process. Then, a major concern was
evinced for the ways ideology exerted an influence on art, following theories coming from
the works of Althusser, Brecht, Freud, and others. In cinematic terms, this led to the
postulate that film directors and their oeuvres might provide the key to interpretation.
Therefore, the sources of meaning were now thought to come from the combination of
various discursive codes present in the film text, of which the directorial code was only one
strand (and so famous directors like Fuller, Hawks, and Hitchcock became filmic signifiers
in their own right). In due course, this focus on signification and ideology contributed to a
significant change in the way that the classical narrative film in general, and genre films in
particular, were perceived.
Genres thus were significant for examination as “generic analysis would involve
the consideration of economic and historical contexts (conditions of production and
consumption), conventions and mythic functions (semiotic codes and structural patterns),
and the place of particular filmmakers within genres (tradition and the individual auteur)”
(Grant 2003a:xvii). In this way, genre criticism has been able to encourage new attitudes
towards film, and indeed, as Grant suggests, it can be understood as a place where the
overlapping (but also sometimes separate) concerns of auteurism, Marxism, semiology,
structuralism, and feminism potentially possibly meet. The critic also concludes that, back
in the eighties, leftist critics managed to move away from the perspective of genres as
“mythic embodiments of the dominant ideology” (ibid.). A clear example of this is the way
that many contemporary horror films were interpreted as a criticism of American society
rather than as a mode of support for its doubts and opressions. In this regard, Curt Siodmak
argues that:
In its day, Frankenstein, the forerunner of a generation of admitted mumbo jumbo
and lots of entertainment, was a true trail blazer, and in effect opened up
Hollywood-produced motion pictures to both psychiatry and neurosurgery. What
now seems primitive in Metropolis or the Jekyll-Hydean cycle of werewolf
pictures are simply variations on the theme which Siegfried Kracauer in From
Caligari to Hitler characterised as a “deep and fearful concern with the foundations
of the self.” (Siodmak 1968:64)
While this type of film bears a certain concern for the moral state of contemporary
society, with real implications for the understanding of our inner nature which engage
concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, the above article further focuses on society or at least
394