Table of Content
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| Introduction |
| Why is genre attractive to audiences? |
| The Key Components of Genre |
| Approaches to Film Genre |
| Main Genres of Film |
| Sub Genres of Film |
| Hybrid Genres of Film |
| Reflection |
Introduction
Genre - which originates from a French word meaning 'type' - was first used to classify biological phenomena. Since the nineteenth century it has been used mostly to define texts. During the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood made many films in assembly line fashion in classic genres, such as Westerns, gangster films, musicals, horror films, war films, screwball comedies and romantic melodramas.
One important difference between film and T.V. genres and those of literature is that in written fiction, genre labels were used by theorists and critics to compartmentalise literary output long after poems, plays and novels were in existence. In moving-image production, however, genres were in the minds of producers and directors as well as audiences, critics and academics from the start.
Genre relates to the three 'phases' of the film industry in different ways. To the producer, the genre acts as a template for the film; to the distributor/promoter it provides assumptions about who the audience is and how to market the film to that audience; and to the viewer (at the point of exhibition) genre acts as a label that identifies a liked or disliked formula and thus acts as gatekeeper and filters our tastes.
Graeme Burton emphasises the 'tight relationship between the media industries that manufacture genre products and the audience which consumes them'. Genres are good for media industries because their potential audience, and consequently their potential profit, can easily be accessed and measured.
A generic audience knows what to expect from a horror film or a comedy and judges it according to prior experience of the genre - in this sense they do not consume films as individual entities, but in a fundamentally intertextual way. Films make sense in relation to other films, not reality. However, genre texts do not work by simply copying other texts in the genre, but by adding their own contribution that strays more or less from the norm, depending on the director's intentions. Sometimes directors deliberately frustrate the audience by leading them down blind genre alleys. This frustration is not negative as usually it leads to a more interesting experience for the viewer, but for it to work, it depends entirely on whether the generic template is firmly entrenched in the audience.
Why is genre attractive to audiences?
Audiences find genres satisfying because they know that certain expectations may be fulfilled and they find pleasure in predicting what will happen next. Creators of generic narratives depend on a certain amount of immediate communication with the audience. They want the narrative to be instantly attractive and they do not want to waste valuable time setting up characters and plot and so genres using key components that are quickly recognisable are particularly valuable. The audience know what to expect from a genre but at the same time they want to find something they don't expect as it would otherwise be boring. Thus any text in any genre has a combination of the familiar, repeated and varied elements and themes of the traditional forms.
The Key Components of Genre (paradigms)
The key components are as follows:
Stock characters - Genres nearly always have some key lead and supporting characters. Cop dramas often have a chief cop and his sidekick such as Morse and Lewis.
Stock plots, situations, issues and themes - Certain plots are expected within genres; crime drama usually begins with a crime and then the story of the detection of the perpetrator is told. Stock situations can be found in most genres, e.g. the car chase in police series and detective stories. Greed and power are themes that underlie the plots of many gangster films and good versus evil, jealousy, loyalty, etc. are important themes in a variety of genres.
Stock locations and backdrops - The cratered landscape or starry backdrop in sci-fi, the mean streets and alleyways in cop thrillers; all of these locations are recognisable to the audience and will immediately communicate the type of genre.
Stock props and signifiers - These are often small items but sometimes they hold a great deal of significance. The ray gun is a stock prop in science fiction, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament are used as signifiers of power and authority in news programmes. Certain sounds are also signifiers such as the creak of a door in a horror film.
Music - There are specific types of music for specific genres. News programmes tend to use an insistent repetitive monotone that builds to a crescendo.
Generic conventions - Within genres there are other sets of rules which are the result of certain agreements between industry and audience. In a musical, for instance, the audience happily accepts that characters will suddenly burst into song with full orchestral backing. In soaps, very short scenes, a dominance of head and shoulder shots and a lack of overall narrative resolution are acceptable to an audience where they would not be in a drama (although these conventions are being increasingly adopted by a number of genres).
Approaches to Film Genre
Descriptive
This approach relies heavily on the use of genre paradigms, or readily identifiable elements such as costume, location, character archetypes, shot transitions, or plot content. The film is perceived as sharing aspects and attributes (such as structure, theme, or visual style) with other films in the same category, and is analysed comparatively. The descriptive approach involves putting a large number of films into a small number of groups — sometimes individual movies defy this kind of rigid categorisation. This approach sometimes means an over-emphasis on the formal and stylistic qualities of films, and doesn't take into account how a film's meaning and impact may change over time, and when viewed by different audiences.
Functional
This approach, on the other hand, perceives genre film as "collective expressions of contemporary life that strike a particularly resonant chord with audiences". The repetitions of patterns in a genre film are the repetitions of social questions that we need answers to as part of our shared social experience e.g.
• What is frightening, or what possibilities do we fear? (horror films)
• What is criminal, or what are the boundaries of social morality that we must not cross? (gangster films)
• What is morality? (melodramas)
• What is acceptance and belonging? (romantic comedies)
• What is alien? (science fiction)
• What is the future? (science fiction)
These questions are repeated but also changed from generation to generation, as values change. Therefore genre films are a product of their socio-historic context; watching them becomes a cultural ritual whereby hegemonic values are examined, and either shift or are reinforced.
Main Genres of Film
In the Classic Hollywood system, at the beginning of the 1930s and 1940s films where builded around and split up into 10 separate categories. They are broad enough to accommodate practically any film ever made, although film categories can never be precise. By isolating the various elements in a film and categorising them in genres, it is possible to easily evaluate a film within its genre and allow for meaningful comparisons and some judgments on greatness. All films have at least one major genre.
Here are the 10 classic or main genres:
| Main Genres | Action/ Adventure | Comedy | Crime & Gangster | Drama | Epic/ Historical | Horror | Musical/ Dance | Science Fiction | War | Western |
Sub Genres of Film
Film genres derive from literary genres in the first instance. However, film genres must constantly evolve and mutate, spawning sub-genres, otherwise they will inevitably stagnate and become very repetitive. There are only a finite number of plots, after all, and telling a similar story over and over again within the same set of genre paradigms gets very dull. Sub genres can develop in response to a movie that pushes genre paradigms, and is successful, or in response to external socio-historic factors, and can cross traditional genre boundaries.
Here is a table of some sub genres and their main genres that they are considered to be derivations of:
| Main Genres | Sub Genres | |||
| Action / Adventure |
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| Comedy |
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| Crime & Gangster |
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| Drama |
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| Epic / Historical |
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| Horror |
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| Musical / Dance |
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| Science Fiction |
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| War |
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| Western |
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Hybrid Genres of Film
Film genres need to be fluid, consisting of a shifting, constantly evolving set of paradigms, otherwise cinema as a form would stagnate, with film-makers forced to tell the same stories, in the same style, over and over again. Given that there are only seven basic plots, the only way to keep thrilling and surprising audiences is to keep framing those plots in fresh genre combinations. Often these combinations are something of a 'mash-up', the putting together of conflicting genres that might not, initially, seem like a good match.
Here is another table of some hybrid genres:
| Hybrid Genres | Action Combat Action Comedies Alien Invasion Autobiographies/Biographies Blaxploitation Buddy Buddy Cop Caper Comedy Musicals Coming of Age Crime Dramas Crime/Caper Comedies Disaster Dramatic Musicals Espionage FairyTale Frankenstein/Mad Scientists |
Futuristic Heist/Caper Historical Hood Films Horror Comedies Indian War/History Literary Adaptation Mafia, Organized Crime, Mob Films Military Monsters/Mutants Period Pictures Prison Psychological Quest Religious Road Romance |
Sci-Fi Action Science-Fiction Westerns Space Adventures Space Opera Space Westerns Spoof Westerns Sports Super-Heroes Supernatural War Western Comedies Western Musicals Women in Prison World War I WorldWarll Zombies |
After my research into genre I now have a better understanding of how films are classified into their separate subcategories and some of the criteria that they are measured on. I also have a better understanding of some of the constraints and advantages of starting and developing a film from a genre basis. This research has also enabled me to start thinking about what genre I would consider creating a film around but also some of the paradigms within that genre that I would have to integrate into my short film to retain the familiarity and repetition, but also elements of the main, sub or hybrid genre that I would need to vary to make the audience interested and engaged with my media product.
References:
Books:
Bennett, J., Tanya, J., McDougall, J. (2002). A2 Media Studies for OCR: Second Edition. Hodder Arnold
Nicholas, J., Price, J. (1998). Advanced Studies in Media. Nelson
Mark, J., Angela, B., Danny, R. (2005). Advanced Level Media: Second Edition. Hodder & Stoughton Branston, G., Staffordd, R. (2003). The Media Student's Book. Routledge
McDougall, J. (2003). OCR Media Studies for A2: Third Edition. Hodder Education
Websites:
(2012). Genres. [Online] American Movie Classics Company LLC. Available from: http://www.filmsite.org/genres.html [Accessed 7 August 2012].
Wilson., K. (2000-2011). Film Genres. [Online] Media Know All. Available from: http://www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/alevel.php?pageID=filmgenre [Accessed 7 August 2012].
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