Trope (cinema)
In cinema, a trope is a type of stereotypical situation or mannerism of a character that is commonly used in its setting or genre.
A common thematic trope is the rise and fall of a mobster in a classic gangster film; this trope 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 wikt:τρόπος, "turn, direction, way", derived from the verb τρέπειν, "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. Tropological criticism 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 was an "important exemplar".The use of the term in relation to cinema may be more common in American English than in other dialects.