Genres

The Concept of Genre

- A set of conventions - recognisable usually through iconography, familiar narrative, mise-en-scene, actors and style of representation

- Genres ar

e not static, but constantly renegotiated between industry and audience - a combination of familiar reassurance and new twists.

- A creative strategy used by film producers to ensure audience identification with a film - a means of trying to predict risk.

- Genre is a way of working thro

ugh important myt

hs and fears by repetition, variation and resolution

- Genre offers comforting reassurance in an uncomfortable world. Threat is quashed, outlaws become civilized, gangsters are punished. Genre is a way of tidying up the mess of life.

- Genre functions like a language - a set of rules and a vocabulary with which to organise meaning.

- Robert Altman believes that genre is defined in terms of certain signs (iconography)

Hybridisation

This is when genre mixes and links together.

It can be argued that there is only a set of semantics and no syntax, and the continuing shift social ideology and technological advances e.g. Predator begins like Rambo and ends like Aliens.

Robert Altman

Altman argues that the relationship between syntax and semantics link how we understand genre evolution and hybridisation. Genre begins with semantics and eventually evolves into genre. What limits this is the shifting social ideologies that can affect themes, issues and ideas. He argues that genres start out with a set of semantic elements, and only achieve true genre status when they complete a process of evolving an accompanying syntax.

Traditional Theorists

Traditional theorists look at genre in a compartmentalised way, thus no overlapping with specific ways of identifying genre, these traditional theorists include Thomas Schatz and William Wright.

Regenrification

This is when the boundaries of genre are merged into one e.g. the creature from the 1956 sci-fi "Black Lagoon"