Police film

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The police film is a sub-genre of the crime film . In police films are employees of the police and their work in solving criminal cases in the center of action. Often these films are structured with an emphasis on action and often contrast the activities of law enforcement officers and criminals by means of parallel montages , until the storylines are brought together in a showdown at the end of the film .

history

The first designated police films were made in the USA in the 1950s. In Film noir in particular , the work of hardened police detectives in the fight against city crime was discussed, for example in Hot Iron ( Fritz Lang , 1953). Don Siegel's 1968 Madigan can be seen as the prelude to a whole series of modern US police films. In the police films of the 1970s, the hero figure often assumed tragic dimensions. The policemen in William Friedkin's French Connection - Focal Point Brooklyn (1971) or in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) are becoming ever more similar to the criminals who pursue them in their relentlessness, coupled with an inability to have a relationship in their private lives. The juxtaposition of police and criminal methods in the context of the society that produces them has repeatedly led to the integration of socially critical issues in the police film, such as the subject of racism in Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967). In Sidney Lumet's police films Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City (1981), the police break out of the community of law enforcement officers in order to represent a higher morale than that of the corrupt police apparatus as lone fighters.

The popularity of muscle-bound action stars also led the police film to renewed popularity in the 1980s. For example, Sylvester Stallone in Die City-Cobra (1986), Arnold Schwarzenegger in Der City Hai (1986) and Bruce Willis in Die City-Cobra (1989) played policemen fighting powerful criminals. The buddy film found its way into the police film genre. In films like those in the Lethal Weapon series , the genre's rituals of masculinity are exposed through the focus on two male investigative partners, and their motifs are exhausted to the point of homosexual connotations. Kathryn Bigelow led the gun fetishism of the genre into the title of her police film Blue Steel (1990) and presented a police officer as a heroine for the first time with the main character played by Jamie Lee Curtis . The serial killer film ( Das Schweigen der Lämmer , 1990 and Sieben , 1995) in particular gave the police film genre a new impetus in the 1990s and addressed investigators who are led into the depths of their own souls by their criminal opponents.

While in the Federal Republic of Germany the police film was mainly the domain of television, which led to independent forms of the topic, especially in the Tatort series , an individual tradition of police film has emerged in France. The films policiers were largely shaped by directors like Jean-Pierre Melville and actors like Alain Delon .

literature