GLOBAL GENRES—Introduction: Film Genre in the Age of the Global Shuffle
/This contribution is an introduction to a series of forthcoming essays on genre and the ‘global shuffle’.
The auteur theory and genre analysis were the cornerstones of film studies in the United States. Film appreciation classes were added to the curriculum of many universities (and some high schools) in the 1960s and 1970s in response to two major developments: the emergence of New Wave movements around the world and the closing down of the studio era of production. One created excitement about what cinema could be and the other about what it had been. The contrast between the two meant that those early courses and the scholarship which grew out of them was bifurcated around the opposition between European art films and Hollywood genre films.
Genre was widely seen as a set of formulas that emerged from a factory mode of cultural production, ignoring the degree to which the New Wave directors they so admired had themselves been inspired to make movies because of the Hollywood films they watched at the Cinematique Francois; like the good fan filmmakers they were, many made films that appropriated and reworked their favorite films and directors: for example, Chabrol’s ongoing conversation with Alfred Hitchcock, Truffaut’s engagement with film noir and the western, and Godard’s focus on gangsters, science fiction, musicals, and so many other genres, to cite just a few. Their own criticisms stressed directors who were “at war with their materials” with genre understood primarily in terms of convention and authorship in terms of invention. Reading through early writings on genre theory, it is striking how much they seem hermetically sealed off so that there is no acknowledgement that genre films were emerging on an ongoing basis in every other major national cinema through popular films produced for their own markets and regional distribution.
By the time I entered film studies in the 1980s, film genre studies was undergoing a new burst of energy, thanks in part to Rick Altman and several cohorts of graduate students at the University of Iowa (a key reason why I went there to do my MA). As an undergraduate, I read and debated passionately what Robin Wood was publishing in Film Comment, reappraising a wide array of exploitation film genres. The rediscovery of Douglas Sirk, especially by the New German filmmakers, was resulting in a new fascination with Hollywood melodrama. Directors from Sam Peckinpah to Robert Altman to Mel Brooks made deeply revisionist contributions to these same genres teaching us new ways to read and engage with their conventions. And as I was starting to teach film, Quentin Tarantino was teaching us how to appreciate the treasures of the grindhouse cinema, while Todd Haynes, Cheryl Dunye, and Gregg Araki were queering genre with their works.
When a little more than a year ago I was invited to teach a course in film genre at the USC Cinema School, my first reaction was that I was born to teach a core class in American film genre. I had trained under Rick Altman, my passion for American cinema had grown out of reading and watching the revisionist works of the 1970s, I wrote my dissertation on film comedy, and I still passionately watched whatever genre films I could DVR off TCM. I could teach a class taking contemporary PhD students through the history of genre criticism and watch a mix of genre films – canonical and deep cuts, old and new.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the next wave of important work in genre theory would be coming through an engagement with the global production and circulation of genre films, the mutual influence of genre across the planet. And so, without even fully knowing what I might mean by it, I proposed teaching a course on “film genre in the age of the global shuffle”. Here’s the course description:
This course begins with the premise that streamers are shuffling our access to popular film and television from many corners of the world. Long term, how does this influence the stories cinema tells, for better or for worse, and how adequate is our current vocabulary of genre criticism for addressing the transcultural exchanges of genre elements this is producing? I am looking for interesting cases that may signal something bigger happening within global popular cinema from cross-cultural and cross-genre hybrids (Thai westerns, Nordic noirs, Afrofuturist musicals) to nationally specific genres (Wuxia, Gallio, Masala). Here's our chance to play with genre theory, reading or rereading classic essays, and stretching them to the breaking point. Collectively, I hope we can make some real conceptual breakthroughs and produce a significant body of publications.
I had been thinking and writing about the “global shuffle” for some time. We are living in an era of global streaming platforms, which has shuffled who has access to popular films and television series in dramatic ways. As Netflix enters a new national market, part of the stipulation is that they will put a certain amount of money into local media production. In the past, the result would be “quota quickies,” but the new economics play out differently, since Netflix can recoup its costs easily by making the content they produce available through its platform world-wide. Our tendency is to think about Netflix as an agent of cultural imperialism that contribute to furthering American dominance and “monoculture”; to some degree this is true, but their own marketing needs pushe them to promote diversity (at least popularly accessible forms of diversity – that is, diversity within genres).
As Joseph Dean Straubhaar, Swapnil Rai, Melissa Santillana and Silvia Dalben Swapnil Rai write, “global streaming companies like Netflix or Disney+ impose a degree of genre imperialism by suggesting the formats and themes that local companies should produce. The current process for co‑productions by streamers outside of the U.S. is not an open system in which local people produce what they want…. Netflix’s stated objective is to produce things that succeed locally, but also are very exportable globally” (2025, 121). The result is a form of hybrid media, riddled with contradictions, which often assumes the quality of universalism implied by this book’s account.
Having made such content, the streaming networks find it profitable to transport them elsewhere, making them available to consumers who would not have encountered them otherwise. As Michael Curtin writes: “after almost a century of American hegemony, the topographies of media industries are today growing more plastic and complicated as media institutions scale their ambitions and operations in an increasingly porous and dynamic environment” (2020, 90), and:
Remarkably, adaptations move “up” and “down” as well as “across.” That is, content and aesthetics not only circulate widely, they are also refashioned to address different topographies of imagination. And they create new topographies…. We are witnessing new patterns of interaction between media users and producers, as well as among users themselves. Once seen primarily as consumers, today viewers and fans amply express themselves in a variety of ways and media producers systematically monitor this discourse, creating feedback loops that shape story lines and characters. (97)
In this process, transcultural fans play a vital role in educating each other about the cultural traditions from which this content emerged and attracting new fan audiences to help sustain the content flow. Networked communication between fans enables contact across historically separated spheres of cultural influence as people forge shared identities together online.
A friend recently sent me a list of popular genre films from Korea, and I was able to find almost all of them, with English subtitles, somewhere in the streaming infrastructure, with many of them surfacing on Tubi, a bottom rung streamer that most of us can access for free. The more arty titles can be found on Criterion Channel, Mubi, Kino, or Kanopy; the more commercial ones on Prime, Netflix, or Max. Try looking at Netflix’s index by language at the number of films in Thai, Tagalong, Indonesian, Igbo or Arabic and compare that to how many films from those countries were showing on screens at the peak of the Art House era.
Older cinephile practices were based on scarcity but today’s challenges, and opportunities, grow out of plenitude. There’s so much out there but no one’s helping us sort through the pieces. Where do we go to identify key popular filmmakers in many of these countries, to understand local genres, to map the most creative and interesting titles? And that’s where new forms of film criticism, education, and scholarship are needed. These films are mainstream (in that they are widely accessible and build on genre), but niche (in that few of us know what’s out there or how to find it even if it is hiding in plain sight.) What are the implications of these developments for how we understand film genre today?
It is no longer appropriate to discuss genre as if it were exclusively operating within the context of American entertainment. In fact, it never was.
I begin the class by focusing on the Western, the most American of film genres and therefore the one that was central to so much early film studies writing about genre. Yet the conventions of the literary western were as much shaped by German pulp writer Karl May as by American writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper or Louis L’Amour. May was one of the top-selling German writers of all time; his works have sold more than 200 million copies world-wide, and they have been ascribed in creating a market for stories set in the American west across Europe. There are still festivals and conventions based on May’s fictions held today. I shared this video from the New York Times about the sensitive issue of May’s romanticization and appropriation of Apache culture on the first day of class and it generated intense debate and discussion.
Gaston Melies (George’s brother) was dispatched to San Antonio to make Westerns for the French Star Films company in 1910 further fueling European fascination with the genre. Jean Renoir’s The Crime of M. Lange (1936) depicts labor politics at a French publishing house in the early 1930s which specializes in pulp magazines featuring Arizona Jim, an American cowboy. We might similarly trace the ways that the American Western has been shaped by – and in turn shaped – Asian filmmakers. The first film I showed the students was Martin Ritt’s The Outrage (1964), Akira Kurosowa’s Rashomon (1950), remade into a western featuring Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, and Edward G. Robinson.
Of course, The Outrage is not the only Western based on Kurosawa’s films: The Magnificent Seven (1960) was a remake of Seven Samurai (1954); Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was based on Yojimbo (1961), and so forth. Kurosawa, of course, would have been the first to acknowledge that his passion for John Ford westerns informed his approach to the Samurai films in the first place.
And we should note that Leone is simply the best known director to help shape the Spaghetti Western, a subgenre that emerged in the 1960s as Italian directors turned their attention to the genre. I also had students watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966), to illustrate this phase of the genre’s history. Getting back to Asia, though, I also wanted to show them the Thai western, Tears of the Black Tiger (2000), a genre mixing sensation that merges Sirkian melodrama, singing cowboys, and popular south-east Asian conventions.
The deeper I dug, the more examples of the “Eastern Western” surfaced, many of them localizing the American western as staged by Leone and the other Spaghetti Western auteurs.
You can see trailers for some examples below.
And around and around it goes; where it stops, nobody knows.
There are, after all, frontiers in many countries and thus, the Western story has resonances pretty much everywhere we look. More than one writer locates echoes of the Western in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic Australian epic, Mad Max 2 (US title: The Road Warrior) (1981). Óliver Laxe’s Sirât (2025) has been a film festival sensation this past year with his explorations of the rugged terrain of Southern Morocco, but might we consider his earlier work, Mimosas (2016), to also tap into and contribute back to the western tradition? What about the Turkish film, Once Upon a Time in Anatollia (2011)?
Alongside these various examples of global westerns, I had students read anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt’s foundational essay, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” which explains, “Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression—these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone. Miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread master pieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning—these are some of the perils of writing in the contact zone” (1991, 37). This passage became a key reference point across the semester as we tried to understand the flow of genres across national boundaries.
Similarly, we found ourselves returning often to some important distinctions around genre-mixing made by Janet Staiger in her essay, “Hybrid or Inbreed: The Purity Thesis and Hollywood Genre History”:
My rejection of the hybridity thesis for post-Fordian Hollywood cinema is not a rejection of 1) the view that pattern mixing is occurring; or 2) the fact that Post-Fordian Hollywood cinema is producing hybrids both internally within the United States and externally throughout the world economy of signs. Internal hybrids would be examples of films created by minority or subordinated groups that use genre mixing or genre parody to engage dialogue with or criticize the dominant. Films by U.S. feminists, African-Americans, Hispanics, independents, the avant-garde, and so forth might be good cases of internal hybrids. (1997, 17)
To fully understand the implications of Pratt and Staiger, we need to pay attention to the local particulars of media industries; the ways international film festivals functions as crossroads among auteurs; the interplay of local and global genre conventions; patterns of immigration; the geopolitical and economic histories of the regions involved; and the process of media consumption, among other things.
Another key influence on my thinking has been the idea of understanding genre as a reading hypothesis rather than a property of texts or their production. Reader-Response theorist Peter J. Rabinowitz becomes a key thinker here: “Genres can be viewed as strategies for reading. In other words, genres can be seen not only in the traditional way, as patterns or models that writers follow in constructing texts, but also from the other direction, as different bundles of rules that readers apply in construing texts” (1985, 420). Here, we might start with film noir, a “genre” (?) with much disputed boundaries, which is widely understood as having been first recognized by French critics and audiences when they saw a large backlog of American films in the post-war era and read them through the lens of their own pre-war Poetic Realism movement. The tell, of course, is that Film Noir is a French term – not one that would have been recognized by Hollywood who would have understood these films as crime movies, melodramas, thrillers, and a range of other genres.
As Noir has become such a widely recognized and marketable genre, we see the rediscovery and repackaging of 1940s and 1950s films from around the world as noirs. Witness the recent discovery of a noir movement in Argentina under Peron; in American-occupied Japan; among British filmmakers, each of which have been the theme of film packages on the Criterion Channel.
And the same is true of Neo-Noir films being consciously produced today which do situate themselves consciously in relation to encoded genre conventions.
So, there’s been a fascination of late with Nordic Noirs, although I would argue that these films from the ‘land of the midnight sun’ might better be described as Nordic Film Gris.
A program of recent Chinese Crime Thrillers on Criterion suggests that many mainland directors are consciously building on Nordic Noir traditions including setting their films in bleak, arctic, industrial and rural landscapes, with morally unsympathetic protagonists, brutally violent crimes, captured in extreme long takes. See for example Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014). Meanwhile, the concept of Nordic Noir is being traced backwards to the midcentury with a package of titles first offered at the Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in Summer 2025 and then on Criterion Channel in early 2026. What does it mean to read these films as film noir?
How might such interpretive strategies be applied to another genre being currently reassessed – the Italian giallo film, the subject of more and more DVD box sets – with which it shares a similar focus on crime and detection and morally suspect characters? The Giallo is associated with its lurid use of color much as the Noir was with the use of Black and White cinematography, but the modern category of Neo-Noir starts to blur the distinctions between the two. And so it goes.
Across the semester, students watch films from some 20 different countries with clips from many more, as we talked through a broad array of genres, including many – such as Giallo, Masala, Wuxia, kaju, extreme cinema, etc. – which originated outside the Hollywood system, but which are key for understanding contemporary popular cinema. We began with the relationship between Rashomon and The Outrage, and we ended with Lady Snowblood and Kill Bill. In the days to come, we will share some of the student writing which emerged through thinking through some of these issues and engaging with some of these titles together.
Below I want to share with you the screenings and assigned readings from the class so that you might also choose to launch your own explorations of global genre films. As the assigned readings suggest, I am certainly not the only person asking questions about how genre operates on a global scale. I hope other film schools will offer such courses and film scholars will join me in trying to theorize what is happening in the age of the global shuffle and how it may accelerate cultural exchanges which run across the history of cinema.
References
Curtin, M. 2020. “Post Americana: Twenty-First Century Media Globalization,” Media industries 7.1: 89–109.
Pratt, ML. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession: 33–40.
Rabinowitz, PJ. 1985. “The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy,” Critical Inquiry, 11.3: 418–431.
Staiger, J. 1997. “Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History,” Film Criticism, 22.1: 5–20.
Straubhaar, J. D., Rai, S., Santillana, M., & Dalben, S. 2025. Transnational Streaming Television: Reshaping Global Flows and Power. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003505525
Week 1 Defining Genre - The Case of the Western
Screenings:
To be watched before the first class: The Outrage (Martin Ritt, 1964, USA; Based on Rashomon), Prime Video
If you have not already done so, also watch: Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950, Japan)
Winnetou – The Red Gentleman (Harald Reinll, 1964, Germany), YouTube
In Class: Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000, Thailand), DVD
Readings:
Rick Altman, Chapter 2, Film Genre (Chapter 1 recommended)
Andrew Tudor, “Genre,” Edward Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre,” and Douglas Pye, “The Western (Genre and Movies),” Film Genre Reader IV
Barry Langford, “Who Needs Genres”
Matthew Freeman and Anthony N. Smith, “Why We Still Need Genres”
Resources:
Stuart Kaminsky, “The Samurai Film and the Western”
Erik R, Lofgren, “Adapting Female Agency: Rape in The Outrage and Rashomon”
Robert Warshaw, “The Western”
Andre Bazin, “Evolution of the Western”
Colleen Cook, “Germany’s Wild West Author: A Researcher’s Guide to Karl May”
Week 2 Genre Evolution
Screenings:
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966, Italy, based on Yojimbo), Prime Video
Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022, Comanche), Hulu
In Class: Return of an Adventurer (Moustapha Alassane, 1966, Niger)
Readings:
Altman, Film Genre, Chapter 4
Janet Staiger, “Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Thesis and Hollywood Genre History,” John G. Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” Tag Gallagher, “Shoot Out in the Genre Coral: Problems in the ‘Evolution’ of the Western,” Film Genre Reader IV
Michael Curtin, “Post-Americana: Twenty-First Century Media Globalization”
Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”
Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Exposito-Barea, “Tears of the Black Tiger: The Western and Thai Cinema”
Resources:
Ivo Ritzer, “Spaghetti Westerns and Asian Cinema: Perspectives on Global Cultural Flows”
Rachel Harrison, “‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’: Global Projections/Local Allusions in Tears of the Black Tiger”
Thomas Klein, “Bounty Hunters, Yakuzas and Rōnins: Intercultural Transformations between the Italian Western and the Japanese Swordfight Film in the 1960s”
Christian Uva, “Sergio Leone’s Short Century”
Week 3 The Cases of Noir and Giallo
Screenings:
El Vampiro Negro (Román Viñoly Barreto, 1953, Argentina), YouTube
Death Walks at Midnight (Luciano Ercoli, 1972, Italy), Prime Video
Holy Spider (Ali Abassa, 2022, Iran), Netflix or Prime
Readings:
Altman, Film Genre, Chapter 9
Peter J. Rabinowitz, “The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy”
Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” David Desser, “Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism,” Film Genre Reader IV
Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, “Toward a Definition of Film Noir”
J. A. Place and L. S. Peterson, “Some Visual Motifs in Film Noir”
Alexia Kannas, “The Problem of Genre”
Carol Clover, “Her Body, Herself”
Resources:
Alexia Kannas, “The Italian Giallo”
David George and Gizella Meneses, “Argentine Cinema: From Noir to Neo-Noir”
Babak Tabarraee, “Iranian Cult Cinema”
Sabrina Barton, “Female Investigation and Male Performativity in the Woman’s Psychothriller”
Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears”
Barry Langford, “Film Noir”
Week 4 Police Stories
Screenings:
Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjærg, 1997, Norway), Prime Video
Elite Squad (Jose Padilha, 2007, Brazil), Prime Video or Tubi
Readings:
Altman, Film Genre, Chapter 6
Björn Ægir Norðfjörð, “Crime Up North: The Case of Norway, Finland and Iceland”
Luis M. García-Mainar, “Nordic Noir: The Broad Picture”
Paul Julian Smith, “Transnational Cinemas: The Cases of Mexico, Argentina and Brazil”
Resources:
Randall Johnson, “Post-Cinema Novo Brazilian Cinema”
David Bordwell, “Style without Style?,” Christopher Nolan, A Labyrinth of Linkages
Week 5 The Yakuza and the Triad
Screenings:
Ishi the Killer* (Takashi Miike, 2009, Japan), iTunes
*Please be forewarned this is an example of Extreme Cinema. It will be the most explicitly violent film of the term. Do not watch if you have trouble dealing with extreme gore and violence.
Triumph of the Warriors: Walled In (Soi Cheng, 2024, Hong Kong), Prime Video or YouTube
In Class: Creepy (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2016, Japan), Prime Video
Readings:
Altman, Film Genre, Chapter 8
Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”
Kate E. Taylor-Jones, “Miike Takashi: Welcome to the Dark Side”
Elayne Chaplin, “Death and Duty: The Onscreen Yakusa”
David Bordwell, “Aesthetics in Action: Kung Fu, Gunplay and Cinematic Expression,”
Valerie Soe, “Gangsta Gangsta: Hong Kong Triad Films, 1986-2015”
Resources:
Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam, “From the New Wave to The Digital Frontier”
Caleb Kelso-Marsh, “East Asian Noir: Transnational Film Noir in Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong”
Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam, “Hong Kong Cinema and Global Change”
Sun Yi, “Generic Involution and Artistic Concession in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema: Overheard Trilogy and Beyond”
Cheuk-to Li, “Popular Cinema in Hong Kong”
Tony Williams, “Takashi Miike’s Cinema of Outrage”
Felicia J. Ruff, “The Laugh Factory?: Humor and Horror at Le theatre du Grand Guignol”
Week 6 Body Genres
Screenings:
Atlantics (Mari Diop, 2019, France/Senegal), Netflix
Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-ho, 2016, Korea), Prime Video
Readings:
Linda Williams, “Body Genres,” and Thomas Elsasser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” Film Genre Reader IV
Tom Bordun, “Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema”
Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”
Bliss Cua Lim, “Generic Ghosts: Remaking the New ‘Asian Horror Film’”
Resources:
Ryan Gardener, “Storming off the Tracks: Zombies, High Speed Rail and South Korean Identity in Train to Busan”
Dal Young Jin, “Webtoon-Based Korean Films on Netflix”
Kevin Wynter, “An Introduction to the Continental Horror Film”
Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient, “South Korean Cinema’s Transnational Trajectories”
Will McKeown, “Self-Sacrifice in Train to Busan (2016)”
Week 7 Reimagining Kaju
Screenings:
Pacific Rim (Guillermo Del Toro, 2013, USA), Prime Video
Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki 2023, Japan), Prime Video
Readings:
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”
Noël Carroll, “Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery”
Steven Rawle, “Every Country Has a Monster”
Joyce E. Boss, “Hybridity and Negotiated Identity in Japanese Popular Culture”
Erin Suzuki, “Monsters from the Deep”
Resources:
Steven Rawle, “National Films, Transnational Monsters”
Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient, “From Gojira to Goemul: ‘Host’ Cities and ‘Post’ Histories in East Asian Monster Movies”
Kristine Larsen, “Shattering Reality: Monsters from the Multiverse”
Donna Haraway, “The Promise of Monsters: Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others”
Anthony Lioi, “Of Swamp Dragons: Mud, Megalopolis, and a Future for Ecocriticism”
Steven Rawle, “Distributing Kaijū: Localisation and Exploitation”
Barack Kushner, “Gojira as Japan’s Postwar Media Event”
Week 8 Self-Reflexive Musicals
Screenings:
Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001, Australia), Hulu
Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams, 2021, Rwanda), Kanopy
Readings:
Rick Altman, “The American Film Musical as Dual-Focus Narrative” and “The Structure of the American Film Musical”
Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” Film Genre Reader IV
Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage”
Corey K. Creekmur and Linda Y. Mokdad, “Introduction”
Björn Norðfjörð, “The Postmodern Transnational Film Musical”
Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia”
Resources:
Rick Altman, “Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process”
Aeron Gerow, “Japan”
Michael Lawrence, “India”
Week 9 The Action Film
Screenings:
RRR (S. S. Rajamouli, 2022, India), Netflix
Sisu (Jalmari Helander 2022 Finland), Prime Video
Readings:
David Bordwell, “The Bounds of Difference,” and “Formula, Form and Norm”
Barry Langford, “The Action Blockbuster”
Week 10 Performance and Genre
Screenings:
Jawan (Atlee, 2023, India), Netflix, YouTube
Polite Society (Nida Manzoor, 2023, UK), Prime Video
Readings:
Richard Dacordova, “Genre and Performance: An Overview,” and Yvonne Tasker, “The Family in Action,” Film Genre Reader IV
Rajinder Dudrah, Elke Mader and Bernhard Fuchs, “Introduction”
Rajinder Dudrah, “Unthinking SRK and Global Bollywood”
Ashish Rajadhhyaksha, “SRK, Cinema and the Citizen: Perils of a Digital Superhero”
Elke Meader, “Shah Rukh Khan, Participatory Audiences, and the Internet”
Week 11 The Global Superhero
Screenings:
The People’s Joker (Vera Drew, 2022, USA), Prime Video
Oya: Rise of the Orishas (Nosa Igbinedion, 2015, Nigeria), YouTube
Sanjay’s Super-Team (Sanjay Patel, 2015, US/India), Prime Video
How I Became a Superhero (Douglas Attal, 2020, France), Netflix
Readings:
Ellen Kirkpatrick, “Transformation ⇌ Representation ⇌ Worldmaking” and “‘I Am a Superhero’; or, A Casting Call (to Arms)”
Rayna Denison, Rachel Mizsei-Ward and Derek Johnson, “Introduction: Superheroes on World Screens”
Lizelle Bischoff, “‘They Have Made Africa Proud’: The Nollywood Star System in Nigeria and Beyond”
Charlie Michel, “Whose Lost Bullet? Netflix, Cultural Politics and the Branding of French Action Cinema”
Week 12 Genre and Ideology
Screenings:
The Act of Killing (Christine Cynn and Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012, Indonesia), Prime Video
El Conde (Pablo Larrain, 2023, Chile), Netflix
Readings:
Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur” and Barbara Klinger, “‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism Revisited: The Progressive Genre,” Film Genre Reader IV
Stefan Iversen and Henrik Skov Nielsen, “The Politics of Fictionality in Documentary Form: The Act of Killing and The Ambassador”
Annette Hill, “Documentary Imaginary: Production and Audience Research of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence”
Resources:
Oki Rahadianto Sutopo, “Using Bourdieu to Understand Perpetrators in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence”
Week 13 Wuxia Swordsmen and Ottoman Sultans
Screenings:
Battle of Empires (Faruk Aksoy, 2012, Turkey)
House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, 2004, China), Prime Video
Readings:
Ian Kinane, “The Wuxia Films of Zhang Yimou: A Genre in Transit”
Christina Klein, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A Diasporic Reading”
Stephen Teo, “Film Genre and Chinese Cinema: A Discourse of Film and Nation”
Resources:
Excerpts from Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
Michael Curtin, “Media Capital in Chinese Film and Television”
Stephen Teo, “Film Genre and Chinese Cinema: A Discourse of Film and Nation”
Week 14 Wrapping Up
Screenings:
Kill Bill (Quentin Tarentino, 2003/2004, USA), Amazon
Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973, Japan), Prime Video
Readings:
Joseph Kupfer, “Woman Warriors Unite,” “No Muscles, No Splatter,” and “Hyper-Violence: The Thrill of Kill Bill”
Peter Hitchcock, “Niche Cinema, or Kill Bill with Shaolin Soccer”
Biography
Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.