The following two articles, the first two chapters from Thomas Doherty’s Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, are essential reading in your study of genre, context, text and audience.
Read them carefully.
I have annotated them for you. But, read the whole article to explore how it is that movies like Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause came about. In essence, what we learn from these articles is that films (as all texts do) arise as a direct result of their production context. In terms of content (subject matter) and structure (the ways in which the film is made) and society (the ways in which the film is marketed, advertised and sold), these two pictures stand at the precipice of a new genre, a genre that focuses on the teenager and their interactions with the world.
Please write your responses to these two articles below. You can respond generally, as in what the Chapters have taught you; or, you can respond to the following question: Discuss how context and genre are inherently connected.
American Movies as a Less-then-Mass Medium Annotated
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Due: Thursday 15th February.
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