A historical drama (also period drama, costume drama, and period piece) is a dramatic work set in a past time period, usually used in the context of film and television.
Historical drama, a type of historical fiction, includes historical romances, adventure films, and swashbucklers. A period piece may be set in a vague or general era such as the Middle Ages, or a specific period such as the Roaring Twenties, or the recent past.
In different eras different subgenres have risen to popularity, such as the westerns and sword and sandal films that dominated North American cinema in the 1950s. The costume drama is often separated as a genre of historical dramas. Early critics defined them as films focusing on romance and relationships in sumptuous surroundings, contrasting them with other historical dramas believed to have more serious themes. Other critics have defended costume dramas, and argued that they are disparaged because they are a genre directed towards women. [1] Historical dramas have also been described as a conservative genre, glorifying an imagined past that never existed. [2]
Historical drama may include mostly-fictionalized narratives based on actual people or historical events, such as the history plays of Shakespeare, [3] Apollo 13 , Braveheart , Chernobyl , Enemy at the Gates , Les Misérables , and Titanic. [4] Works may include references to real-life people or events from the relevant time period or contain factually accurate representations of the time period.
Works that focus on accurately portraying specific historical events or persons are instead known as docudrama, such as The Report. Where a person's life is central to the story, such a work is known as biographical drama, with notable examples being films such as Alexander , [5] Cinderella Man , Frida , House of Saddam , Lincoln , Stalin , and W. .
The cinema of the Soviet Union includes films produced by the constituent republics of the Soviet Union reflecting elements of their pre-Soviet culture, language and history, albeit they were all regulated by the central government in Moscow. Most prolific in their republican films, after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldavia. At the same time, the nation's film industry, which was fully nationalized throughout most of the country's history, was guided by philosophies and laws propounded by the monopoly Soviet Communist Party which introduced a new view on the cinema, socialist realism, which was different from the one before or after the existence of the Soviet Union.
A film genre is a stylistic or thematic category for motion pictures based on similarities either in the narrative elements, aesthetic approach, or the emotional response to the film.
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror in the 20th century, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name is a reference to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Science fiction films This is a list of science fiction films organized chronologically. These films have been released to a cinema audience by the commercial film industry and are widely distributed with reviews by reputable critics. This includes silent film–era releases, serial films, and feature-length films. All of the films include core elements of science fiction, but can cross into other genres such as drama, mystery, action, horror, fantasy, and comedy.
Wuxia, which literally means "martial heroes", is a genre of Chinese fiction concerning the adventures of martial artists in ancient China. Although wuxia is traditionally a form of historical fantasy literature, its popularity has caused it to be adapted for such diverse art forms as Chinese opera, manhua, television dramas, films, and video games. It forms part of popular culture in many Chinese-speaking communities around the world.
Historical fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting related to the past events, but is fictional. Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for historical fiction literature, it can also be applied to other types of narrative, including theatre, opera, cinema, and television, as well as video games and graphic novels.
Docudrama is a genre of television and film, which features dramatized re-enactments of actual events. It is described as a hybrid of documentary and drama and "a fact-based representation of real event".
A literary genre is a category of literature. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or length. They generally move from more abstract, encompassing classes, which are then further sub-divided into more concrete distinctions. The distinctions between genres and categories are flexible and loosely defined, and even the rules designating genres change over time and are fairly unstable.
Romance films, romance movies, or ship films involve romantic love stories recorded in visual media for broadcast in theatres or on television that focus on passion, emotion, and the affectionate romantic involvement of the main characters. Typically their journey through dating, courtship or marriage is featured. These films make the search for romantic love the main plot focus. Occasionally, romance lovers face obstacles such as finances, physical illness, various forms of discrimination, psychological restraints or family resistance. As in all quite strong, deep and close romantic relationships, the tensions of day-to-day life, temptations, and differences in compatibility enter into the plots of romantic films.
A biographical film or biopic is a film that dramatizes the life of a non-fictional or historically-based person or people. Such films show the life of a historical person and the central character's real name is used. They differ from docudrama films and historical drama films in that they attempt to comprehensively tell a single person's life story or at least the most historically important years of their lives.
Chinese television dramas, sometimes colloquially known as C-dramas or C-dorama, are television dramas originating from China or the Greater China region. China produces more television dramas than any other country. The most popular genre of dramas in China is fantasy romance, with 47 of the 50 most watched dramas in the country in 2016 being in this genre. Chinese television dramas are popular and regularly broadcast throughout Asia; particularly in Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Cambodia.
Epic films are a style of filmmaking with large-scale, sweeping scope, and spectacle. The usage of the term has shifted over time, sometimes designating a film genre and at other times simply synonymous with big-budget filmmaking. Like epics in the classical literary sense, it is often focused on a heroic character. An epic's ambitious nature helps to set it apart from other types of film such as the period piece or adventure film.
Heritage film is a critical term as opposed to a film genre label used by the film industry or filmmakers themselves. It initially referred to a cluster or cycle of late 20th-century British films that were argued to depict the United Kingdom of the pre-World War II decades in a nostalgic fashion. However, this original polemic use has broadened out, and the term is now also used more loosely to refer to period films with high-quality visual production values, including those produced in France, other European countries and beyond.
In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super-genre, macro-genre, or micro-genre, such as soap opera, police crime drama, political drama, legal drama, historical drama, domestic drama, teen drama, and comedy-drama (dramedy). These terms tend to indicate a particular setting or subject-matter, or else they qualify the otherwise serious tone of a drama with elements that encourage a broader range of moods. To these ends, a primary element in a drama is the occurrence of conflict—emotional, social, or otherwise—and its resolution in the course of the storyline.
Guzhuang, also called ancient-style dress, refers to a style of Chinese costume attire which are styled or inspired by ancient Chinese clothing. Guzhuang is typically used as stage clothes in Chinese opera and in Chinese television drama, such as in period drama which are normally set in imperial China prior to 1911, and in the Wuxia and Xianxia genre. While the style of guzhuang is based on ancient Chinese clothing, guzhuang show historical inaccuracies.
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