Genre

Genre

Refers to a category of media product that audiences can easily recognise because of the repetition over time of key elements, such as narrative, characters and setting.

genre study privileges what is general, standard, ordinary, typical, familiar, conventional, average and accepted in a group of films

narrative - similar (sometimes formulaic) plots and structures, predictable situations, sequences, episodes, obstacles, conflicts and resolutions;

characterization - similar types of characters (sometimes stereotypes), roles, personal qualities, motivations, goals, behaviour;

basic themes, topics, subject matter (social, cultural, psychological, professional, political, sexual, moral), values and what Stanley Solomon refers to as recurrent 'patterns of meaning' (Solomon 1995: 456);

setting - geographical and historical;

iconography (echoing the narrative, characterization, themes and setting) - a familiar stock of images or motifs, the connotations of which have become fixed; primarily but not necessarily visual, including décor, costume and objects, certain 'typecast' performers (some of whom may have become 'icons'), familiar patterns of dialogue, characteristic music and sounds, and appropriate physical topography; and

filmic techniques - stylistic or formal conventions of camerawork, lighting, sound-recording, use of colour, editing etc. (viewers are often less conscious of such conventions than of those relating to content).

There are two main approaches to genre: a descriptive approach and a functional approach.

a descriptive approach

Counteracts any tendency to treat individual texts in isolation from others.

We are situating  our text within textual context.

For example, how do we define genres? Do we rely on categories identified by the industry' or categories defined by critics?

How do we identify the common attributes of genres?

If we start by grouping films together and then identifying their common attributes, we must ask ourselves: Why did we group these particular films together? If you answer that it is because of their common attributes, then you have pre-empted the descriptive aim of genre study, which is precisely to identify those common attributes.

The aim of the descriptive approach to genre is therefore to classify, or organise, a large number of texts  into a small number of groups.

Yet  in film studies at least, this process of classification does not systematically organise films into genres. This is because the boundaries between film genres are fuzzy, rather than clearly delineated. Moreover, genres are not static, but evolve. Therefore, their common attributes change over time.

Most films are hybrid genres, since they possess the common attributes of more than one genre. A typical example is the singing cowboy film, which possesses the attributes of both the musical and the Western.

Further problems arise in the descriptive approach.

Functional approach

Surely one of our basic ways of understanding film genres, and of explaining their evolution and changing fortunes popularity and production, is as collective expressions of contemporary life that strike a particularly resonant chord with audiences.

It is virtually a given in genre criticism that, for example, the thirties musicals are on one level 'explained' as an escapist Depression fantasy;

that film noir in the forties expressed first the social and sexual dislocations brought about by World War II and then the disillusionment when it ended;

and that the innumerable science fiction films of the fifties embodied cold war tensions and nuclear anxiety new to that decade.

They represent problems and issues that are pertinent to society and often offer us ways in which to behave, encourage us to accept a particular set of values.

It also offers us some historical contextualisation

Mary Shelley Frankenstien early 1800s science out of control.

Would the Kenneth Branagh film have the same set of values.

Western – structural approach – does it still hold up in the Western renaissance, The Unforgiven 234 and Dances with Wolves

Primitveness

Savagery

Folklore

Would this stand up historically

Soap as a woman’s genre – still the case ?

Industry

Why is genre useful to industry.