GENRE THEORY

- Introduction
- -Genre Theory and Hollywood Cinema
- -Genre Theory and Contemporary Cinema
Introduction

 French term imported to film theory from literary studies meaning

‘type’ or ‘class’
 At an informal level, film genre is connected to how audiences make
selections of films to watch.
 Common questions audiences ask before watching a film
 ‘What sort of film shall we watch?’
 ‘What kind of film do you feel like seeing?’
 The result of such deliberations is the choice of watching e.g a thriller
over a western or, a comedy over a musical.
 These deliberations indicate the idea that audiences have particular
likes and dislikes for certain film types.
Cont..
 Issues that underpin such deliberations and discriminations:
 Issues of taste
 Preference
 Identity and pleasure associated with particular kinds of film.

 These issues are taken into account by producers of film in an effort

to make their product appealing to audiences and, by implication, a
contained economic risk.
 Attention to those same issues provides the film reviewer with a
tactical means of evaluating a films relative merits in terms of the
way it may be said to be a classic of its genre
 Genre resembles a golden thread that knits the concerns of industry
together with the desires of audiences.
Why genre?

 From the early stages of the film industry, production began to

classify its output according to ‘story type’

 E.g. Edison Company advertised fictional films on contemporary

social issues

 During Studio Era genres were associated with specific studios

 E.g. Paramount  Comedies.
 Warner Bros  Gangster films, war films, Westerns, Noirs.
Genre criticism

 Much of genre criticism is underpinned by the assumption that genre

is a conceptual prism that allows critics to simultaneously address the
activities of industry, audience and culture.
 This means genre is seen to function as:
 A financial security blanket for the industry by providing a logic, or a framework, for
organizing its output so as to capitalize on previous models of success and thus
minimize financial risk.
 A set of precepts and expectations for audiences to organize their viewing.
 A critical framework for reviewers to arbitrate between the distinctiveness and
putative success of the product and the taste of its implied audience.
Genre Theory and Hollywood Cinema

 Due to genre’s apparent affinity to Hollywood cinema, it has been a

key concept in the development of film theory, and, in return, cinema
has provided an important staging ground for the broader discussion
of genre in relation to mass entertainment and media culture.
 Genre criticism is marked by the possibility it affords critics to
analyse the cinema as an industrial form of aesthetic practice; a
major form of mass entertainment.
 NB: Genre’s more extravert and inherently inclusive critical
disposition contrasts sharply with auteurism’s introversion and
intrinsic exclusivity.
 The development of genre criticism in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s
is usually understood as either a development, qualification,
corrective or outright rejection of auteurism.
Cont…

 This is because auteurist criticism was overwhelmingly trained upon

the work relatively few directors, the focus being more on the artist
or the director.
 Whereas genre casts its critical net wider, offering critics a far more
inclusive and democratic method, one which was attuned to the
industrial and commercial imperatives of Hollywood.
 According to Christine Gledhill, genre is seen as a ‘conceptual space’
in which issues of texts and aesthetics intersect with those of industry
and institution, history and society, culture and audiences…
Cont…

 When used in the context of cinema the term ‘genre’ itself has, as
Barry Keith Grant argues:
 ‘come to refer simultaneously to a particular mode of film production ... a convenient
consumer index, providing audiences with a sense of the kind of pleasures to be
expected from a given film; and a critical concept, a tool for mapping out a taxonomy
of popular film and for understanding the complex relationship between popular cinema
and popular culture’.
 Stam talks of genre as the ‘crystallization of a negotiated encounter
between film-maker and audience, a way of reconciling the stability
of an industry with the excitement of an evolving popular art’.
Cont…

 Auteurism tended to either construct popular cinema as the

insignificant counterpart to genuine art or to simply ignore it
altogether.
 This means that the logic of much auteurist writing runs that it is not
the film but infact the artist that is important.
 This logic implied that it is therefore a few creative geniuses who are
the proper focus of film studies rather than the industrial, historical
and social nexus(holistic approach) that frames the cinematic
process.
Genre vs Auteurism
Genre approach
 Holistic Approach to film process.
 Inclusive (industry, audiences, film
reviewers or critics).
 Corrective or rejection of
auteurism.
Auteurism approach
 The artist is the focus.
 Exclusive (Work of few creative
geniuses).
 Ignores or rejects genre approach.
GENRE THEORY AND CONTEMPORARY
CINEMA.
 According to genre criticism, Hollywood is now often equated with generic
filmmaking.
 Tom Ryall states that ‘whatever else is it, Hollywood is sure a cinema of
genres, a cinema of westerns, gangster films, musicals, melodramas and
thrillers’.
 However, this claim is seen to emerge from analyses of Hollywood’s classical
period and cannot be transposed to the contemporary situation. Genres are
no longer associated with specific studios in the way they were during the
studio system period.
 Studio system: the period of Hollywood history in which the major studios
controlled all aspect of the production, distribution and exhibition of their
products (1920’s-1950’s).
Cont…

 Cinema-going nowadays is for most people a relatively infrequent event in

comparison to the time devoted to other media art forms.
 The majority of film viewing itself now revolves around our television sets:
 Tuning into a movie broadcast on terrestrial networks or one of the satellite cable
channels.
 Hiring a DVD from a rental outlet.
 Watching a movie from our own personal collection.
 Movies are no longer ‘self-contained entities but are seen as a multi-purpose
entertainment machine that initiate an endless chain of other cultural
products,
Cont..

 Today, film production and consumption have changed

  genre is not only increasingly hybridised, but films have become

so self-referential (e.g. Tarantino films) that ‘genre’ seems unable
to encompass the complexities of Hollywood production.
Defining Genres

 General level: genre seeks to understand film as a specific form of

commodity.

 Refined level: genre attempts to disentangle different instances of

that commodity.

 “Genre is addressed as a system for organizing production as well as

groupings of individual films which have collective and singular
significance”.
Genre as taxonomy

 Genre implies a process of categorization, sorting cultural products

into descrete groupings based on similarities and common properties.
 Defining genre as a twofold process:
 Describing the differences between individual genres (e.g musicals, horror
films, gangster films…).
 It also involves mapping the common elements that members of any one
genre share.
 The notions of difference and sameness that taxonomies imply are
central to all generic criticism.
Cont…

 However, Tom Ryall cautions against viewing genre criticism merely as a

question of fitting films into their appropriate generic hole, arguing that this
view of constructing taxonomies and allocating films to their places in the
system puts the intellectual basis of this exercise in a place open to doubt.

 Richard Maltby argues that the generic critic seeks to ‘place movies into
generic categories as a way of dividing up the cinematic map of Hollywood
into smaller, more manageable, and relative discrete areas.
 Various attempts to map the contours of genres in a number of ways have
been developed by critics over time.