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This chapter reviews Johnnie To's enunciating role as an auteur of genre film through the convention of the happy ending, as a method of drawing certain conclusions about To's achievements to date. The happy ending is an ironic way of ending this epilogue, as will be made clear, but since To's career is ongoing and likely to contain more revelations and surprises, this chapter cannot make conclusions about his career as such, but about the way his films have ended — as a means to indicate To's contributions to genre and the art of cinema. To's ability to unsettle our perception of genre as a world of pleasure and closure is all part of his vision of Hong Kong on the road to Avici, but his action cinema carries a dialectical weight — fatalism carries meaning and redemption, thus the destiny of his films is something else entirely. The final action in the action films of Johnnie To is the act of inducing thought.

The science fiction film genre is separate from the irrational or unconscious meanderings of the human mind. In line with this, this book regularly pertains to examples of the genre that can found on television, in books, comics, video games and even fine art, as part of the project to locate the films within a wider cultural context. Science fiction has surely adopted material from both the musical and horror film. The genre of science fiction film allows the kind of debate witnessed among critics, writers and aficionados of the written novels. The chapter then looks at what might be called proto-science fiction films. These films came before the science fiction film which boom in the 1950s. It is shown that Metropolis had a huge impact on science fiction. The interwar films evidently address the political and social unrest of their times. Until the 1950s, the science fiction feature film genre actually started in America.

This chapter examines the Japanese film genre known as “middle-class film” (shoshimin eiga), a formative genre in the classical Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. It first considers genre criticism as a strategy for national cinema studies, as well as an elaboration of genre’s specific historical construction in Japanese cinema. It then explores how the middle-class film genre established connections with an audience of the urban middle class and how idiosyncratically the Japanese film industry employed genres apart from Hollywood in the cinematic modes of that period. It also discusses the politics of genre in Japan’s national cinema and the creation of a modern national subject in two films by Ozu Yasujiro: Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no gassho, 1931) and I Was Born, But… Finally, the chapter explains how notions of Japanese genre have been molded in cross-cultural misunderstandings within Western film scholarship, along with the culturally specific use of genre appropriation in Japan.

This chapter discusses the history of the American boxing film from the coming of sound to the end of the twentieth century. It characterizes the chief cycles of film production in order to explain the cinematic influences, film industry practices, and social trends that shaped the evolution of the genre.

The “Introduction” describes the theoretical and practical understanding of what metacinema is and does in the context of Chinese filmmaking. Metacinema is a kind of textual reflexivity that foregrounds the mechanisms involved in the creation or reception of a film. Consideration of metacinema reveals a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. A key, but often overlooked, metacinematic category is genre: collective semiotic codes adopted, adapted, updated, or subverted that allow another vantage on the ways films influence each other. In the context of Chinese cinemas, this discourse ricochets amongst and between the industries of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. Further, focus on film audiences within films allows us to theorize the personal and social effects film watching has on viewers. The films provide models for ways of being in the world that characters within the films, and by analogy audiences in the real world, adopt, update, and subvert in their own lives.

This chapter defines the boxing film genre and describes its conventions, including animating conflicts, model plot, major characters and settings, boxing’s mise-en-scène, and the viewer’s typical emotional response, followed by a consideration of genre history. It concludes with a discussion of the goals of genre criticism and an outline of this book.

As feature film has become mainstream entertainment again, it has coincided with the emergence of new forms of piety and religious practices amongst Indonesian Muslims. Beginning in 2008, a new kind of feature film with Islamic themes began to be made capturing these new modes and ideas of Islamic piety. Tracing the emergence and development of this genre, this chapter looks in depth at how polygamy is represented by culturally progressive filmmakers. To balance normative values around love and gender roles, the films take an anti-polygamy stance by showing the impossibility of polygamous marriage. Behind many Islamic themed films is the director Hanung Bramantyo who has emerged as the most commercially successful but also controversial directors making Islamic films today.

This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the basis of a diverse output: the middlebrow drama adaptations of Shaw and Rattigan, lowbrow genre films including a comedy thriller and a costume melodrama, patriotic war pictures and documentary dramas. Asquith resumed his directing career with While the Sun Shines (1947), and his next film, The Winslow Boy (1948), was a Rattigan adaptation in which he corraborated with Korda's revived London Films and British Lion. The Importance of Being Earnest, a version of Oscar Wilde's famous play from the 1890s, was his first film in colour. Asquith's genre exercises from the early 1950s, though containing much of interest – innovatory narrative structures, imaginative mise-enscène, lyricism, and poetry, the radical ideological questioning of war – remain little-known films on the periphery of the mainstream British cinema of the time.

This chapter examines the “Oriental Detective” genre in Hollywood cinema during the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas most discussions of the Oriental detective genre have tended to focus on whether or not the character reflects a positive or negative stereotype for Asian America, this chapter analyzes a discursive convergence of machine culture, corporate aesthetics, and ethnic and racial stereotyping, pausing to notice not only what the Oriental detective genre says about American racial attitudes during the 1930s and 1940s, but also what it says about the corporate production of film and film culture.

This chapter examines the film, Raging Bull. It reviews the film’s production history and reception, and then analyzes the genre conventions governing plot, character, setting/iconography, mise-en-scène, and its dramatic conflicts to understand how Raging Bull adopts and transforms these practices to achieve its artistry. An awareness of the interaction of genre conventions with cinematic art offers an illuminating perspective on Raging Bull—for many the most stellar achievement of the Hollywood boxing film.

This chapter offers a critical overview of the serial killer film, especially in the light of the subgenre’s intense cultural significance during the 1980s and 1990s and its subsequent descent into relative insignificance after 9/11. While pondering the larger questions of why and how horror film archetypes drift in and out of the culture’s focus of attention, it also demonstrates how the serial killer film, though often pronounced dead, has instead managed to spread throughout a field of cultural production much larger than that of a strictly defined and narrowly circumscribed cinematic genre. The chapter argues that the serial killer has even made a comeback with recent high-profile productions directed by auteurist filmmakers such as Spike Lee (Summer of Sam) and David Fincher (Zodiac).

This chapter examines violence in the boxing film, arguing that though an entertainment, the boxing film portrays suffering as central to experience. The genre also highlights conflicts between righteous anger and powerlessness, as well as the dilemmas posed by the tension between emotional discipline and sensitivity. The analysis includes films such as City for Conquest (1940), From Here to Eternity (1953), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), and Fat City (1972).

This chapter explores the body and soul conflict in the boxing film genre. The boxing film highlights the quest in American culture for a spiritual alternative to the sensual. In the genre, art, education, romance, the family, and religion all serve as manifestations of the spiritual. The analysis includes films such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Body and Soul (1947), and On the Waterfront (1954).

Hand-held cameras and night vision technology have become increasingly common in the contemporary horror film. Taking Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's phenomenally successful REC films (2007, 2009, 2012) as exemplary of this and other recent trends (e.g. intertextual cannibalism and girl monsters), this chapter will examine how these innovations relate to the certain generic constants of the horror film (such as obstructed visibility and mounting dramatic structure). The driving motor of both REC and REC2 is their use of video recording technology. While the threat seems to shift from zombie-like contagion in the first film to demonic possession in the second, the technological gambit of the two films remains the same: both films are entirely mediated by recording equipment. A single professional TV camera occupies center stage in the first case while in the second, there is a proliferation of devices and locations (including cameras embedded into firefighters’ helmets). Both films give the night vision function a key role in the final (climactic) segment during which the dialectic between visibility and invisibility itself becomes the main drama and the camera the central protagonist.