This document discusses various aspects of genre in film and television. It defines genres based on setting, theme, mood, format, and intended audience. It also distinguishes between fiction and non-fiction films as well as scripted and non-scripted television. Common genres in both mediums are listed. The document then explores conventions, characters, iconography, ideology, and how genres evolve and are adapted across cultures.

1. Generalizing Genre

2. • Setting: Western, Period, Historical, Courtroom
Thriller, WWII Picture
• Theme: Disease of the Week, Romance, Alien
Invasion
• Mood: Horror, Film Noir, Comedy, Tearjerker
• Format: 3D, animation, cinemascope, Found
footage
• Audience: Melodrama, Teen movies, Chick
flicks, Family film

3. • Film: fiction vs non fiction
• TV : scripted vs non scripted
• Non scripted: sporting events, game
shows, reality shows and news. However,
unless they are broadcast live, these
"unscripted" TV shows are manipulated
and edited to fit a particular running time
and a predetermined outcome.

4. Film & TV Genres
Film TV
• Drama/Comedy • Animated
• Documentary • Comedy
• Action/Thriller • Drama
• Sci Fi • Soap
• Horror • Police Procedural
• Musical • Detective & Mystery
• Western • Variety
• Sword and Sandals • Kids/children
• Romantic Comedy • Courtroom drama
• Chick Flick
• High School Comedy

5. • Generally, the action genres—adventure,
war, gangster, detective, horror, science
fiction, and of course, the western—were
addressed to a male audience, while
musicals and romantic melodramas (also
known as ‘‘weepies’’) were marketed as
‘‘woman’s films.’’

6. In film, common generic elements include
• subject matter,
• theme,
• narrative
• stylistic conventions,
• character types,
• plots,
• and iconography.

7. Convention kya hotee hay?
• In any art form or medium,
conventions are frequently used
stylistic techniques or narrative
devices typical of (but not necessarily
unique to) particular generic
traditions. Bits of dialogue, musical
figures, or styles and patterns of
mise-en-scene are all aspects of
movies that, repeated from film to film
within a genre, become established
as conventions.

8. • Conventions function as an implied agreement
between makers and consumers to accept
certain artificialities in specific contexts. In
musicals the narrative halts for the production
numbers, wherein characters break into song
and dance; often the characters perform for the
camera (rather than for an audience within the
film) and are accompanied by offscreen music
that seems suddenly to materialize from
nowhere. Conventions also include aspects of
style associated with particular genres. For
example, melodrama is characterized by an
excessively stylized mise-en-scene, while film
noir commonly employs low-key lighting.

9. • The familiarity of conventions allows both
for parody and subversive potential.
Parody is possible only when conventions
are known to audiences

10. Fictional characters kyoon hotay
hain
• E. M. Forster distinguished two kinds of fictional
characters: flat and round.
• Flat characters, which also may be ‘‘types’’ or
‘‘caricatures,’’ are built around one idea or
quality; it is only as other attributes (that is,
‘‘depth’’) are added that characters begin ‘‘to
curve toward the round’’. In genre movies,
characters are more often recognizable types
rather than psychologically complex characters,
as with black hats and white hats in the western,
although they can be rounded as well.

11. • The femme fatale is a conventional character in
film noir, like the comic sidekick and the
gunfighter in the western. Ethnic characters are
often stereotyped as flat characters in genre
movies: the Italian mobster, the black drug
dealer, the Arab terrorist, the cross-section of
soldiers in the war film’s platoon. Flat characters
are usually considered a failure in works that
aspire to originality, but in genre works, flat
characters are not necessarily a flaw because of
their shorthand efficiency.

12. Iconography?
• Conventions, settings, and characters are part of a
genre’s iconography. Icons are second-order symbols, in
that their symbolic meaning is not necessarily a
connection established within the individual text, but is
already symbolic because of their use across a number
of similar previous texts. Ed Buscombe concentrates on
the iconography of the western in drawing a distinction
between a film’s inner and outer forms. For Buscombe,
inner form refers to a film’s themes, while outer form
refers to the various objects that are to be found
repeatedly in genre movies—in the western, for
example, horses, wagons, buildings, clothes, and
weapons.

13. Ideology
• From this perspective, genre movies tend
to be read as ritualized endorsements of
dominant ideology. So the western is not
really about a specific period in American
history, but the story of Manifest Destiny
and the ‘‘winning’’ of the West. The genre
thus offers a series of mythic
endorsements of American individualism,
colonialism, and racism, as well as a
justification of westward expansion.

14. • The civilization that is advancing into the
‘‘wilderness’’ (itself a mythic term suggesting that
no culture existed there until Anglo-American
society) is always bourgeois white American
society. Similarly, the monstrous Other in horror
films tends to be anything that threatens the
status quo, while the musical and romantic
comedy celebrate heteronormative values
through their valorization of the romantic couple.

15. • Genres are neither static nor fixed; they undergo change
over time, each new film and cycle adding to the tradition
and modifying it. Some critics describe these changes as
evolution, others as development, but both terms carry
evaluative connotations. Some genre critics accept a
general pattern of change that moves from some early
formative stage through a classical period of archetypal
expression to a more intellectual phase in which
conventions are examined and questioned rather than
merely presented, and finally to an ironic, self-conscious
mode typically expressed by parody

16. • Filmmakers from around the world have responded to
the domination of American film by adopting Hollywood
genres and ‘‘indigenizing’’ or reworking them according
to their own cultural sensibility. Examples are the Italian
‘‘spaghetti western’’ or Hong Kong martial arts films.
Other national cinemas have created their own genres.
For example, German cinema in the 1920s and 1930s
developed a distinctive genre of the mountain film,
involving a character or group of characters striving to
climb or conquer a mountain. The Heimatfilm, or
Homeland film, is another genre of sentimental,
romanticized movies about rural Germany and its
inhabitants.

17. • In Indian cinema, masala (or mixed spice)
films combine a variety of heterogenous
generic elements, as by inserting musical
sequences in a dramatic film in a way
uncharacteristic of Hollywood.
• In turn, Hollywood genre filmmaking has
been influenced by some of these non-
American genres. For example, Japanese
samurai films