Film Genre

Film genre is an important concept for critics, film-makers and audiences, as well as media theorists. Film genre has both academic and practical applications as films are categorised by genre at every stage of their existence, from the initial approach the screenwriter takes, to where they end up on the shelves of your local store, to how their impact on cultural history is assessed. A lot of formal study has been conducted into the categorisation of film through various paradigms, and into how that categorisation informs our understanding of the film as text. There is also a lot of commercial interest in the way people classify and choose to watch movies - this is very important for the initial marketing of a movie, and for companies like Netflix or LoveFilm.

There are two approaches to the study of film genre. The first is descriptive, which involves viewing a film as belonging to a category, as being an example of a type. The film is perceived as sharing aspects and attributes with other films in the same category, and is analysed accordingly.

The second approach is functional, where the genre film is perceived as "collective expressions of contemporary life that strike a particularly resonant chord with audiences" (Experience & Meaning in Genre Films BK Grant, Film Genre Reader 1986). The repetitions of patterns in a genre film are the repetitions of social questioning — what frightens us (horror films)? What is criminal (gangster films)? What is morality (melodramas)? What is alien(science fiction)? — that must be repeated 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 perhaps enforced.

A combination of these two approaches is perhaps the most successful one - whereby a film is considered as both part of a paradgmatic set, and as the product of a time and place.

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Sub Genres

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. Subgenres 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. The recent global economic meltdown has created a whole subgenre of movies about recession, from Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell (horror), to Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story (documentary)


Further Reading

  • Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System— Thomas Schatz (1981) McGraw-Hill
  • Film/Genre - Rick Altman (1999) BFI
  • The Media Student's Book Branston/Stafford (1999) Ch 8 pp105-124