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I am not entirely sure
of what constitutes a "drama." For my purposes, "drama" is a dumping ground
for anything that doesn't fit my other categories. For instance, some
"epic" dramas of the sort made by David Lean stradle this category and
the Action/Adventure category. Certainly, Douglas Sirk worked in a different
idiom than Frank Capra, but both made "dramatic" films. We get melodramas
here, as well as biographies, hagiographies, spectacles, romances, courtroom
dramas, and expose`. As a result, films as diverse as Raging Bull,
Beckett, and American Beauty will rub elbows here. When
in doubt, I will probably just continue my practice of listing some films
in multiple categories. This category in particular will probably have
a lot of redundancies. My apologies to all.
A word about foreign films: It is common practice among movie guides to list foreign language films in their own separate category. Even within this framework, categorization breaks down, since films like Mario Bava's Black Sunday still wind up listed with horror movies. Now, I generally don't care for genre distinctions--there is an implied qualitative judgement involved in segregating some movies from others. When I first began to work on this site, I didn't want to break things out by genre at all, but nobody liked that idea but me. The categories on my site are a capitulation to popular demand. However, I am not going to create a foreign film archive. I think it makes more sense to treat foreign films like any other movies, so I am arbitrarily placing them in with the genres to which I think they belong. Many of the greatest foreign films will wind up here. A word to the wise... |