Trope (cinema)

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". It is an element of film semiology and connects between denotation and connotation. 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, "[A literary trope] is a way... of packed symbolic thinking which is peculiar to imaginative rather than to visual activity... [when] converted into a literal image, the metaphor would seem absurd."

A common thematic trope is the rise and fall of a mobster in a classic gangster film. The film genre also often features the sartorial trope of a rising gangster buying new clothes.

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