Identifying Heroes The Godfather and Pulp Fiction Essay

Identifying Heroes: The Godfather and Pulp Fiction The form of Classical Hollywood films is, first and foremost, invisible. In a Classical Hollywood film, the narrative is foremost, and style serves the narrative. Camera angles, lighting and editing patterns such as the shot/reverse-shot pattern aim to give us the best possible perspective on the unfolding events(1). These events are arranged in a strongly causality-oriented linear narrative, with one event causing the next. This narrative is arranged around a central, active protagonist, whose decisions and actions are the key to the pattern of cause and effect that drives the story(2). This pattern seems so logical, so natural, that the audience of the classical Hollywood film is†¦show more content†¦As old movies began to appear on television, the audiences familiarity with them increased, and, as Robert Ray notes(5), this causes audience recognition of the conventions artificiality to increase. Recognition of genre forms was always something to be expected, and was seen by authors such as Thomas Schatz as the driving force behind generic evolution. Yet what occurred in the sixties was profoundly different. Individual genres had reached the point of over-familiarity and died out before (as with screwball comedies), but in this case the rise of television meant the entire body of classical film was being exposed, and the classical Hollywood model itself was therefore vulnerable. The sudden awareness of the artifice that was Hollywood cinema meant that for at least some of the population the old models, if taken completely at face value, could only function as camp or nostalgia. Traditional genre narratives seemed hopelessly naive to an audience increasingly composed of the young, cinematically literate, and (to a lesser extent) politically radical. The search for a solution covered most of the sixties and seventies; it was the eighties before the rise of the blockbuster(5.5) once again gave Hollywood a consistently profitable model to work from. In the meantime, many different strategies were employed to try to deal with the