In cinema, a trope is what ''The Art Direction Handbook for Film'' defines as "a universally identified image imbued with several layers of contextual meaning creating a new visual metaphor". A common thematic trope is the rise and fall of a mobster in a classic

gangster film A gangster film or gangster movie is a film belonging to a genre that focuses on gangs and organized crime. It is a subgenre of crime film, that may involve large criminal organizations, or small gangs formed to perform a certain illegal act. Th ...

. The film genre also often features the sartorial trope of a rising gangster buying new clothes.

Etymology

The term has the same origin as that of "trope" in the sense of literature, and derived from this. In turn, this came from the Greek (''tropos''), "turn, direction, way", derived from the verb τρέπειν (''trepein''), "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change". Tropes and their classification were an important field in classical rhetoric. The study of tropes has been taken up again in modern criticism, especially in

deconstruction The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essen ...

. Tropological criticism (not to be confused with tropological reading, a type of biblical

exegesis Exegesis ( ; from the Greek , from , "to lead out") is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text. The term is traditionally applied to the interpretation of Biblical works. In modern usage, exegesis can involve critical interpretation ...

) is the historical study of tropes, which aims to "define the dominant tropes of an epoch" and to "find those tropes in literary and non-literary texts", an interdisciplinary investigation of which

Michel Foucault Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and ho ...

was an "important exemplar". The use of the term in relation to cinema may be more common in

American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States and in most circumstances ...

than in other dialects.

In film studies

A trope is an element of film semiotics and connects between

denotation In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of an expression is its literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of being warm. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning including connotation. For insta ...

and

connotation A connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation. A connotation is frequently described as either positive ...

. Films reproduce tropes of other arts and also make tropes of their own. George Bluestone wrote in ''Novels Into Film'' that in producing adaptations, film tropes are "enormously limited" compared to literary tropes. Bluestone said, " literary tropeis a way... of packed symbolic thinking which is specific to imaginative rather than to visual activity... henconverted into a literal image, the metaphor would seem absurd."

Etymology

In film studies

See also

References

Further reading