Film studies has made Hollywood cinematic genres a fundamental source of scholarly enquiry, genre theory providing the background for discussions of 'categories', from the musical to the war film. The specification of generic conventions is often accompanied by distinct analysis of the film groupings as expressions of social and historical circumstances. The article that follows is set in this area of film studies. Together with the western, the crime film is probably the Hollywood genre most often studied from a social and cultural perspective. From the classic work of Robert Warshow to recent studies by Martin Rubin, Nicole Rafter or Thomas Leitch, critics have argued that crime voices discourses about specific social issues, the conflicting relationship between the individual and social organization taking central ground. Ever since Warshow stated that the gangster embodied the contradiction between democracy and capitalism at the heart of US American society, critical analyses have tended to stress the genre's capacity to reflect the paradoxes that plague the notion of individualism. Books of the late 1970s and early 1980s by Jack Shadoian and Carlos Clarens, or the more recent research by Jonathan Munby, combine historical vocation with a more or less explicit discussion of crime genres as social indicators. Even the more ideological analysis of film noir by J.P. Telotte points out how the genre possesses the specific political agenda to uncover social contradictions. In their search for consistency, these critics have tended to remain faithful to the concept of generic category, at times contributing new definitions, but generally dealing with more or less closed groups of films that represent the main features of each crime genre. This essay proposes to approach genre by looking primarily not into film categories but into cultural discourses in order to then explore the interactions of these discourses with film genres. This approach will not avoid generic categories, the crime film genre will still delimit the scope of the analysis, but that generic consistency will not be emphasised. Rather, emphasis is placed on the way cultural discourses affect conventions that have been associated with the crime film genre, or on how these discourses directly create new conventions. The category of the
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