The genre mask: Rhetorical style and audience activation in the investigation film

The Genre Mask discusses the use of genre and generic tropes as a mask for hidden or subversive meaning held beneath the familiar aesthetic of genre-observant film productions.
This idea is approached from the perspective of genre classification and identification, and for the purposes of this study the Investigation Film genre, which includes detective films, films noir and police procedurals, comes under scrutiny largely because of its links with social realist cinema.
Using several films in the corpus for close reading, the study charts the progression of the genre as films navigate its resistance and malleability to social preoccupations, before using this tension to describe how genre can be used to construct horizontality between film and viewer.