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The Feel-Good Film: A Case Study in Contemporary Genre Classification

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509208.2013.811357

1543-5326

Noel Brown,

Music History and Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1Usage of the "feel-good film" label in film criticism and studio publicity materials is discussed later in the essay. For indicative examples of usage among the vast array of amateur online discourse, see the website Feel Good Movies; the IMDB list; and the thread "A Question of Genre" on the forum Done Deal Professional. Also pertinent are the production companies Feelgood Fiction, Feel Good Films and Planet Feel Good.2On the subject of scholarly neglect of the family film, see Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter, and Peter Krämer, "'The Best Disney Film Never Made': Children's Films and the Family Audience in American Cinema since the 1960s."3The over-specifications of Altman's definition of the musical become apparent when he excludes several children's musicals from "the genre's major tradition" on the grounds that they "systematically avoid courtship," and thus "fit music into an entirely different framework, one which does not correspond to the methodology" he develops. See The American Film Musical, 104–105.4Of course, just as popular discourses produce their own genre labels, so do film scholars continue to advance labels of their own. An interesting recent example (since its usage, currently almost wholly restricted to academic discourses, is almost the reverse of the feel-good film) is the so-called "smart film." In a 2002 article in the journal Screen, Jeffrey Sconce proposed the "smart film" as a term to describe a stratum of recent North American cinema characterized by "a predilection for irony, black humor, fatalism, relativism, and […] even nihilism."5Ironically, this is true of most of the chapters in the collection in which Egan and Mackley's essay is contained.Additional informationNotes on contributorsNoel BrownNoel Brown received his PhD in Film from Newcastle University, UK, in 2010, where he has taught several courses on film and literature. Currently an independent scholar, his primary research interests are classical and modern Hollywood cinema (particularly the historical dimensions of the family film), children's film and television globally, contemporary youth cultures, and film genre. He is the author of The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (I.B. Tauris, 2012), and the co-editor (with Bruce Babington) of the edited collection Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming). He has written for several peer-reviewed journals, including The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Scope: an Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, and Trespassing: An Online Journal of Trespassing Art, Science, and Philosophy.