2. What is genre?
“A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized
by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.”
Various film genre’s include Horror, Comedy, Romance, Thriller, Action,
Sci-Fi and many more.
Genre is important to audiences as they have expectations as to what
certain genre’s include. This allows them to take pleasure in particular
texts and genres. Audiences identify with these specific elements
associated with specific genre’s, so by knowing the genre of a media
text, they know whether it is something they may be interested in, and
vaguely know what to expect.
Genre is important to producers as they market texts in relation to their
genre and target audience. Producers standardise production according
to genre conventions.
3. Genre Theorists
Tom Ryall (1978) – “Genres may be defined as
patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend
individual films, and which supervise both their
construction by the film maker, and their reading by an
audience.”
Ryall proposes a wider-reaching model of generic
classification. He contends that some genres, such as
horror, comedy or the thriller may be better
conceptualised by considering their effects, in other
words, what they do to the audience, to their bodies. For
example, a film of horror genre intends to make the
viewer feel tense and scared.
4. John Fiske – Fiske defines genre as attempts to structure
some order into the wide range of texts and meanings
that circulate in our culture for the convenience of both
producers and audiences.
“A representation of a car chase only makes sense in
relation to all the others we have seen - after all, we are
unlikely to have experienced one in reality, and if we did,
we would, according to this model, make sense of it by
turning it into another text, which we would also
understand intertextually, in terms of what we have seen
so often on our screens. There is then a cultural
knowledge of the concept 'car chase' that any one text is
a prospectus for, and that it used by the viewer to
decode it, and by the producer to encode it.”
5. Daniel Chandler – Conventional definitions of genres tend to
be based on the notion that they constitute particular
conventions of content (such as themes or settings
-iconography) and/or form (including structure and style)
which are shared by the texts which are regarded as
belonging to them.
• Iconography is an important aspect of genre. We expect
to see certain objects on screen when we see a particular
genre, for example, in a Western, dusty lonely roads, saloon
bars, cowboy hats and horses, jails, sheriffs badges, guns,
etc..
• In a modern horror film, we expect young girls, ‘normal’
objects, use of dark and light, etc. These ‘genre indicators’ are
called the iconography of the mise-en-scene or genre.’
Daniel Chandlers theory can therefore be applied to the horror
genre as said above, as we expect to see certain elements
within horror texts.
6. Similar to John Fiske, Rick Altman argues that genres are
usually defined in terms of media language (SEMANTIC
elements) and codes (in the Thriller, for example: guns,
urban landscape, victims, stalkers, menaced women or
even stars, like James Stewart or Jack Nicholson) or
certain ideologies and narratives (SYNTACTIC elements
– Anxiety, tension, menacing situation)
Again, this can be applied to the horror genre as we expect
to see certain elements within horror films such as
darkness, victims, evil/killers etc, and we expect certain
syntactic elements like fear, anxiety, suspense, tension.
