Session 2: Genre

MA RSP
Contents
● Genre and semiotics
● Discussion: A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)
● Different ways of determining the genre of screen media
● Discussion: The Scream franchise
● What different elements construct genre?
Questions
● What are film genres? Are they universal or cultural constructs?
● Are genres culturally bound or transcultural?
● Should genre be descriptive or prescriptive?
Defining genre
● Many ways to understand and define genre
● Semiotic interpretation
History of genre
● From Latin genus = “kind”
● Classification of literary texts, as proposed by Aristotle:
○ modes of representation (the way you depict something)

○ objects of representation (what you are depicting)

● Aristotle first applied this to literary genres

How do we work out what genre something is?
● The definition of genres depends on extremely diverse factors (story,
literature, medium, performers)
● We might think about subject matter, but we should also consider the way the
subject matter is depicted
Genre and semiotics
Preview for ‘Signs and Meaning’:

● Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916): language as a

formal system of signs.
● Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology: looking at the production of
meaning in cultural structures
● Russian formalism: cinema is made up of a grammar of visual and auditory
signifiers
● A genre is a collection of visual, linguistic and cultural signifiers
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes
Craven, 1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Nancy is having nightmares about a frightening, badly-scarred figure who wears
a glove with razor-sharp "finger knives". She soon discovers that her friends are
having similar dreams. When the kids begin to die, Nancy realizes that she must
stay awake to survive. Uncovering the secret identity of the dream killer and his
connection with the children of Elm Street, the girl plots to draw him out into the
real world.
—David Thiel, IMDb
A Nightmare on Elm Street
● What generic conventions in this sequence relate it to the horror genre?
● How do these conventions convey the wider concerns and themes of the
horror genre?
Trope
● A significant or recurrent theme
● When discussing genre in screen studies, a trope indicates the type of genre
that something belongs to
● Tropes can be film style, narrative, setting, characters, mise-en-scene, etc.
Two possible meanings of genre
● Shared tropes or universal structures shared across different screen media

○ Can also refer beyond screen media – to literature, drama, fine art, etc.
● Rules or norms for creating, producing and marketing screen media
Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (1981)
● Because it is essentially a narrative system, a film
genre can be examined in terms of its fundamental
structural components: plot, character, setting
thematics, style, and so on
● What emerges as a social problem (or dramatic conflict)
in one genre is not necessarily a problem in another.
● Law and order is a problem in the gangster and
detective genres, but not in the musical.
● Conversely, courtship and marriage are problems in
the musical but not in gangster and detective genres.
Civilised and contested space
● We might consider a broad distinction between genres of determinate space
and those of indeterminate space, between genres of an ideologically
contested setting and an ideologically stable setting.
○ Determinate = spaces with boundaries, borders
○ Indeterminate = spaces whose boundaries are undefined, or are more fluid
● […] genres of indeterminate, civilized space (musical, screwball comedy,
social melodrama) and genres of determinate, contested space (Western,
gangster, detective). […] The former tend to celebrate the values of social
integration, whereas the latter uphold the values of social order.
Discussion
● Does A Nightmare on Elm Street contain determinate or indeterminate
spaces?
● Is this indicative of the horror genre more broadly?
BREAK
Scream [film] (Wes Craven, 1996)
Scream [TV series] (2015–)
Discussion: Scream
● What generic tropes are used in the film and the TV clips?
● What do you expect will happen in the rest of the film/episode?
● How do the clips refer to the history of horror (in screen media and beyond)?
● What are the key differences between the two clips?
● How has the development of screen media altered the tropes of the genre?
Generic tropes in Scream franchise
Generic tropes in Scream franchise
Steve Neale, “Questions of Genre” (1990)
● Genres are not simply bodies of work or groups of films,
however classified, labelled and defined.
● Genres do not consist only of films: they consist also, and
equally, of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis
which spectators bring with them to the cinema, and which
interact with films themselves during the course of the
viewing process.
—Steve Neale, “Questions of Genre”, in Screen vol. 31(1), 1990
Steve Neale, “Questions of Genre” (1990)
● Systems of expectation and hypothesis involve a knowledge of various
systems of plausibility, motivation, justification and belief.
● Two broad types of verisimilitude applicable to representations: generic
verisimilitude and a broader social or cultural verisimilitude.
○ Verisimilitude = the appearance of being true or real
● Viewers look for cues that relate a screen work to a genre, which gives it a
feeling of authenticity
● They also look for cues that relate a screen work to broader social or cultural
contexts, beyond the screen
● A film can feel “real” even if it’s implausible, or vice versa
Steve Neale, “Questions of Genre” (1990)
● The discourses of film industry publicity and marketing play a key role in the
construction of such narrative images; but important, too are other
institutionalized public discourses, especially those of the press and
television, and the 'unofficial', 'word of mouth' discourses of everyday life.
How does genre adapt?
● Genres are both fixed and dependent on cultural and historical specificities
● This means that they are mutable – subject to change with the times
● And they also contain immutable elements – spanning the history of the
genre