Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films

He wanted to move in and out of the various signature styles of all these genres Western, melodrama, thriller, horror, said cinematographer Robert Richardson of Quentin Tarantino's goals in making Kill Bill: Vols. 1 & 2. Through close readings of work by major U.S. filmmakers such as Tarantino, David Lynch, Errol Morris, Todd Haynes, and Joel and Ethan Coen, Hollywood Hybrids studies provocative, disorienting strategies of genre mixing in contemporary cinema. The book also investigates foreign parallels to U.S. hybrid cinema in films by such directors as Pedro Almodovar (Spain) and Stephen Chow (Hong Kong). Rather than explore genre primarily from the standpoint of movie critics, producers, marketers, and spectators, Hollywood Hybrids focuses on genre mixing as a key creative interest motivating celebrated filmmakers. The book thus relates genre to auteur theory. Hollywood Hybrids also links recent hybrid cinema to earlier instances of hybrid form in film and other arts, including painting, music, literature, and architecture. The book concludes that hybrid films allude not only to multiple films and genres, but also to hybrid features of consciousness and identity that increasingly heighten as well as complicate human experience.

Classifying films by genre is useful, to a point. But how do you describe films with intersecting or shifting genres? One moment comedy may rule, then tragedy, horror, sci-fi, kung fu, film noir, the Western or a combination of these. Ira Jaffe celebrates these hybrid films for their ability to both understand and subvert genres. He honors classic hybrid works by Charlie Chaplin and Jean Renoir and guides us through current mlanges fiction in documentaries, farcical gangster films, morbid melodramas, and more. Featured filmmakers include Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen, Michael Moore, David Lynch, and Pedro Almodovar.

Through close readings of films by U.S. filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Errol Morris, Todd Haynes, and Joel and Ethan Coen, Hollywood Hybrids studies provocative, disorienting strategies of genre mixing in contemporary cinema. The book also explores foreign parallels to U.S. hybrid cinema in films by such directors as Pedro Almodovar (Spain) and Stephen Chow (Hong Kong). Hollywood Hybrids regards genre mixing as a key creative interest motivating major filmmakers around the globe.