- The horror movie treats monsters as 'incompatible' with humans, and often requires violent means to put it down.
- Thrillers often have human monsters, and scare people by insinuating that anyone they know could be hiding something dark.
- Sci Fi emphasis that monsters are different to us, but can be understood through science and empathy. They occasionally present the human race as monsters to someone else.
Paradigms can be grouped into those relating to iconography i.e. the main signs and symbols, structure and theme.
Genres condense dramatic conflicts to make sense of large abstract social forces. They are an unspoken contract of promise between the film maker and the audience.
Tautological definitions act as checklists e.g., a musical is a movie with musical numbers integrated into it.
Canon definitions look at movies that would be the apex of each genre e.g. comparing all rom coms to The Notebook or all thrillers to Psycho.
Do viewers help define what makes a genre or are we manipulated by the film makers into believing what they want us to?
The Ritual Approach: Looks at how audience participation defines a movie e.g. the Box Office. Viewers create poplar movies, not the film makers.
The Idealogical Approach: Considers that audiences are always being manipulated into believing what the creators want them to, through marketing and social media.
The distinction between Film Genre and the Genre Film - The latter is an actual event in the film that may conform or violate the agreement of the genre. Any film will display a number of genre traits.
The film genre is static and fluid; it has conventions, but these conventions can evolve and change over time to prevent them from becoming cliché.
The Historial Approach - Charting all movies of a certain genre over a vast amount of time and noting the most memorable ones that may have changed the direction of the genre.
Genre Conventions give viewers schemata upon which they can make inferences and create meaning from new films.
The most successful films work with tradition, but change them and throw something new into the mix to prevent the audience from growing bored.
Genres evolve dialectically;
- Thesis - the movies that came before
- Anti-thesis - the new film that deviates from old conventions
- Synthesis - the evolution of the genre as it grows to include the old and new movies.
David Chandler; Conventional definitions of genre tend to be based on the notion that they constitute particular conventions of context (themes and settings) and/or form (structure and style) of the texts they share a genre with.
Every genre positions those who participate in that text to interpret it differently; Listener or storyteller, interviewer or interviewee. Each position implies different possibilities for response and for action.
Each written text provides a 'reading position' for readers, a position constructed by the writer for the 'ideal reader'.Therefore, embedded within texts are assumptions about the 'ideal reader', including their attitudes towards the subject matter and often their class, age, gender, and ethnicity. Consider the 'ideal reader' as the 'target audience'
Steve Neale - "Genres are instances of repetition and difference... Difference is essential to the economy of genre." Repetition is not enough to draw in an audience.
Texts often exhibit conventions of more than one genre.
He argues that Hollywood's generic regime performs two inter-related functions; 1) it guarantees meanings and pleasures for the audience and 2) offsets economic risks of industrial film production by providing cognitive collateral against innovation and difference. (Makes sure things stay fresh without taking too big a risk that may result in a box office flunk.)
David Buckingham - "Genre is not simply given by the culture, rather, it is in a constant process of negotiation and change." He argues that it isn't a fixed form, and can be flexible.
The Uses and Gratifications theory is an approach to understanding why people enjoy certain forms of entertainment, and why they seek them out in the first place. It's audience-centered research into understanding mass consumerism. This research has identified many potential pleasures of genre.
Genres may offer emotional pleasures such as empathy, familiarity and escapism.
One pleasure may simply be the recognition of a particular genre because of our familiarity with it.
Deborah Knight - "Satisfaction is guaranteed with genre; the deferral of the inevitable provides the additional pleasure of prolonged anticipation."
Consider Steve Neale's argument that no one can enjoy a movie is if it's just a repetition of events of conventions form earlier movies, and that differences are essential for pleasure. We can derive pleasure for observing the conventions that have been manipulated and surprise us, as the genre grows and stretches.
Tom Ryall - Genre provides a frame for structuring rules in the shape of patterns. This acts as a form of supervision over the work during production and over the reading by the audience.
John Fiske - Genres attempt to structure some order into the wide range of texts and meanings that circulate in our culture for the convenience of both producers and audiences.
Rick Altman - Genres are typically defined in terms of media language (Semantic elements), codes (Types of scenery, props, character tropes often seen in certain genres), or certain ideologies and narratives (Syntactic elements)
Jonathan Culler - Generic conventions exist to establish a contract between creator and reader. Acts of communication are rendered intelligible only within the context of a shared conventional framework of expression.
Ryall - views this framework as being provided by the generic system; therefore, genre becomes a cognitive repository of images, sounds, stories, characters, and expectations.
Classification by genre is both positive and negative for everyone;
Giving audiences exactly what they want all the time, with a rigorous conformity to past established movies, leads to genres becoming stagnant and boring.
However, there have been exceptions to the rule, take reality television for instance. Essentially, every example of reality TV is the same structure in a slightly different format with the reoccurring theme of public humiliation, and yet it has remained popular with audiences for almost two decades and is only growing in revenue.
Inevitably, changes in the genre becomes cliché as well - Scream was new and exciting when it first came out in 1996, but by 2004 it had been done to death and the satirical take on hour movies had become dull. The 4th wall breaks and jokes in Wayne's World were the first on their kind, but nowadays most references to cult classic go over the head of the intended audience and the jokes have become overused.
This only highlights how fluid the nature of genre truly is - it's constantly changing and adapting to the taste of audience and the context of the modern world. Social influences and political events can change old jokes from funny to taboo and embarrassing.
Nicholas Abercrombie - "Television producers set out to exploit genre conventions."
Jane Feuer - Divided ways to categorise genres into three different groups; Aesthetic, ritual, and ideological.
Aesthetic - Certain sets of characteristics
Ritual - Use of culture to classify categorise
Ideological - Marketing to who and why
Christian Metz - Genres go through stages;
Amy J. Devitt - Focuses on rhetorical genre. Viewing genre as a rhetorical device gives the author and the reader more freedom and allows for personal choices. Genres are not free-standing entities, they're connected and interactive, the audience makes it so. You can't get an audience to watch a movie and not compare it to past movies or books in the same genre.
Due to the interrelatedness of genres none of them are clearly defined at the edges, but other fade into one another.
Jacques Derrida - "A text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without... a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text."
Metagenres - According to Giltrow, they are 'situated language about situated language' and institutional guidelines used for enabling and constraining. The concept of metagenre also provides a valuable way to understand the dynamics of institutional interrelations between genres. In the mental health discourse, for example, has been demonstrated the metageneric function of the American Psychiatric Association's (DSM) for standardizing and mediating the localized epistemological communicative practices of psychiatrists.
Every genre positions those who participate in that text to interpret it differently; Listener or storyteller, interviewer or interviewee. Each position implies different possibilities for response and for action.
Each written text provides a 'reading position' for readers, a position constructed by the writer for the 'ideal reader'.Therefore, embedded within texts are assumptions about the 'ideal reader', including their attitudes towards the subject matter and often their class, age, gender, and ethnicity. Consider the 'ideal reader' as the 'target audience'
Steve Neale - "Genres are instances of repetition and difference... Difference is essential to the economy of genre." Repetition is not enough to draw in an audience.
Texts often exhibit conventions of more than one genre.
He argues that Hollywood's generic regime performs two inter-related functions; 1) it guarantees meanings and pleasures for the audience and 2) offsets economic risks of industrial film production by providing cognitive collateral against innovation and difference. (Makes sure things stay fresh without taking too big a risk that may result in a box office flunk.)
David Buckingham - "Genre is not simply given by the culture, rather, it is in a constant process of negotiation and change." He argues that it isn't a fixed form, and can be flexible.
The Uses and Gratifications theory is an approach to understanding why people enjoy certain forms of entertainment, and why they seek them out in the first place. It's audience-centered research into understanding mass consumerism. This research has identified many potential pleasures of genre.
Genres may offer emotional pleasures such as empathy, familiarity and escapism.
One pleasure may simply be the recognition of a particular genre because of our familiarity with it.
Deborah Knight - "Satisfaction is guaranteed with genre; the deferral of the inevitable provides the additional pleasure of prolonged anticipation."
Consider Steve Neale's argument that no one can enjoy a movie is if it's just a repetition of events of conventions form earlier movies, and that differences are essential for pleasure. We can derive pleasure for observing the conventions that have been manipulated and surprise us, as the genre grows and stretches.
Tom Ryall - Genre provides a frame for structuring rules in the shape of patterns. This acts as a form of supervision over the work during production and over the reading by the audience.
John Fiske - Genres attempt to structure some order into the wide range of texts and meanings that circulate in our culture for the convenience of both producers and audiences.
Rick Altman - Genres are typically defined in terms of media language (Semantic elements), codes (Types of scenery, props, character tropes often seen in certain genres), or certain ideologies and narratives (Syntactic elements)
Can genre be defined by audience? Is it a question of film comprehension?
Neale - Genres consitis of 'specific systems of expectations and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema'. They then 'interact with the films themselves during the course of the viewing process.'
Jonathan Culler - Generic conventions exist to establish a contract between creator and reader. Acts of communication are rendered intelligible only within the context of a shared conventional framework of expression.
Ryall - views this framework as being provided by the generic system; therefore, genre becomes a cognitive repository of images, sounds, stories, characters, and expectations.
- To the producers of films, genre is a template for they make, it helps target movies at niche audiences that already identify pleasure with past instances of said genre. When a genre's universe has already been established, producers can highjack that 'universe' to their own advantage by using previously established conventions of verisimilitude e.g. there is no sound in space, but space battles are often filled with special effect noises.
- To the distributors, genre proves assumptions about who the audience is and how to market the movie.
- To the audience, genre is a label that identifies a formal and provides certain rules of expectation. Certain genres may or may not be approbate for a certain age group, and can help parents chose something suitable for family viewing. Audiences can identify with repeated elements in specific genres and may shape their own identity in response.
- When genres becomes classic they exert tremendous influence; production becomes quicker and more confident because it's a tried-and-tested formula, and certain actors can be filtered into genres as having 'star quality'.
- Viewers can becomes 'generic spectators' and can develop generic memory which helps them guess the end of the movie or the fate of various characters i.e. the good guy always gets the girl.
- Films may use generic memory to subvert tension and cause anticlimactic scenes.
- We don't consume films individually, but as intertextual entities. This makes film a post-modern medium, because the movies make sense in relation to other films not reality.
- Deviation from clichés is what makes a movie work, but for this to work, the audience must already be familiar with the genre the movie is subverting.
David Bordwell - 'Any theme may appear in any genre... could could argue that no set of necessary and sufficient conditions can mark off genres from other sorts of groupings in ways that all experts or ordinary filmgoers would find acceptable.'
Rick Altman and his issues with genre classification;
- Genre is a useful category because it bridges multiple concerns.
- Genres are defined by the film industry and recognised by the mass audience.
- Genres have clear, stable identities and borders.
- Individual films belong wholly and permanently to a single genre.
- Genres are transhistorical.
- Genres undergo predictable development.
- Genres are located in particular topic, structure and corpus.
- Genre films share certain fundamental characteristics.
- Genres have either a ritual or ideological function.
- Genre critics are distanced form the practise of genre.
Classification by genre is both positive and negative for everyone;
Giving audiences exactly what they want all the time, with a rigorous conformity to past established movies, leads to genres becoming stagnant and boring.
However, there have been exceptions to the rule, take reality television for instance. Essentially, every example of reality TV is the same structure in a slightly different format with the reoccurring theme of public humiliation, and yet it has remained popular with audiences for almost two decades and is only growing in revenue.
Inevitably, changes in the genre becomes cliché as well - Scream was new and exciting when it first came out in 1996, but by 2004 it had been done to death and the satirical take on hour movies had become dull. The 4th wall breaks and jokes in Wayne's World were the first on their kind, but nowadays most references to cult classic go over the head of the intended audience and the jokes have become overused.
This only highlights how fluid the nature of genre truly is - it's constantly changing and adapting to the taste of audience and the context of the modern world. Social influences and political events can change old jokes from funny to taboo and embarrassing.
Nicholas Abercrombie - "Television producers set out to exploit genre conventions."
Jane Feuer - Divided ways to categorise genres into three different groups; Aesthetic, ritual, and ideological.
Aesthetic - Certain sets of characteristics
Ritual - Use of culture to classify categorise
Ideological - Marketing to who and why
Christian Metz - Genres go through stages;
- The Experimental
- The Classical
- The Parody
- The Deconstruction
Amy J. Devitt - Focuses on rhetorical genre. Viewing genre as a rhetorical device gives the author and the reader more freedom and allows for personal choices. Genres are not free-standing entities, they're connected and interactive, the audience makes it so. You can't get an audience to watch a movie and not compare it to past movies or books in the same genre.
Due to the interrelatedness of genres none of them are clearly defined at the edges, but other fade into one another.
Jacques Derrida - "A text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without... a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text."
Metagenres - According to Giltrow, they are 'situated language about situated language' and institutional guidelines used for enabling and constraining. The concept of metagenre also provides a valuable way to understand the dynamics of institutional interrelations between genres. In the mental health discourse, for example, has been demonstrated the metageneric function of the American Psychiatric Association's (DSM) for standardizing and mediating the localized epistemological communicative practices of psychiatrists.
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