CHOOSE

A GENRE

A DEFINITION OF GENRE

While film, as a medium, operates within textually and culturally inscribed codes and representations, certain codes and representations come to be associated with a specific type of film and charged with significance as a result of this connection.  This is roughly what a genre is, a collection of narrative conventions organised into recognisable types of narratives.  Genres are differentiated from each other by characteristics of style, technique, or narrative content.  Spectators become familiar with these codes, anticipate them, and take satisfaction as they play themselves out within structures that allow, but limit, variation.  They did not originate with the movies.  They were an intrinsic aspect of popular entertainment, intensified by the proliferation and diversification of cultural products in the emerging mass society.  They are primarily associated with, though not exclusive to, Hollywood cinema. 

Films that belong to a specific genre draw from a more or less fixed body of filmic conventions.  The five defining categories of genres are:

1. Pro-Filmic Codes (Mise-en-scene and Iconography)

2. Filmic or Technical Codes

3. Narrative Patterns and Stock Scenes

4. Character Types and Networks

5. Social Themes

Neale (1990) suggests that these generic conventions are informed, to varying degrees, by two types of verisimilitude (implies probability or plausibility): generic verisimilitude (i.e. the rules of the genre) and a broader social or cultural verisimilitude.  “Certain genres appeal more directly and consistently to cultural verisimilitude.  Gangster films, war films and police procedural thrillers often mark that appeal by drawing on and quoting ‘authentic’ discourses, artefacts and texts.  But other genres, such as sci-fi, Gothic horror, etc, make much less appeal to this kind of authenticity, and this is certainly one of the reasons why they tend to be despised, or at least ‘misunderstood’, by critics in the ‘quality’ press.” (Neale, 1990) 

Genre help make sense of:

1. The production and marketing practices of the industry;

2. The meaning systems at work within the film text;

3. The range of expectations which determine spectatorship.

They have two essential roles:

1. They function as structures to be deployed by those making the film;

2. They function as discourses for those who wish to talk about the film, make sense of it.

Genres address particular industrial concerns important to the profit-making operations of Hollywood.  As Belton suggests, “[t]he genre system, which structures the American film industry, represents an attempt by the film industry to control the entertainment marketplace in a way that is similar to the control that brand name products exert among the consumers of durable goods” (Belton, 1994).  For producers, the advantage of classifying movies by genre is the promise (or possibility) of an ample financial guarantee through audience attendance, as some genres have a higher earning capacity than others.  This is never a set guarantee, but generic movies are always pre-sold to audiences on the basis that textual events will unfold with a measure of certainty and that expected satisfactions will be provided.  The boundaries of genre should not be limited to films, but include the surrounding practices that lead up to and frame the production and reception of a particular text – e.g. the surrounding discourses of advertising, marketing, publicity, press and other media reviewing, reporting and gossip, and the ‘word-of-mouth’ opinions of other viewers.  As Maltby (1995) points out, “[t]hese all contribute to the expectations and knowledge of the audience prior to the commercially crucial moment when they purchase their tickets at the box-office” (113/114). 

From the perspective of the spectator, the importance of genre resides in its organisational and interpretative functions.  Genres are formal systems for transforming the world in which we actually live into self-contained, coherent and controllable structures of meaning.  Genres can thus be considered to function in the way that a language system does – offering a vocabulary and a set of rules which allow us to ‘shape’ reality, thus making it appear less random and disordered.  Genres have a reassuring capacity, then, for replacing the complexities and ambiguities of the social world we inhabit for more ordered and continuous structures.  It is the very recognisability and understandabilty of genres that contributes to their spectatorial comfort and reassurance.  Genres consist of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators posses as a means of working out the significance of what is happening on the screen and anticipating further events and actions (Neale, 1990).  It is important to emphasise the particular ‘expectations’ shared by audiences and producers in defining a genre, because genres are not exclusive systems of signifiers, instead, they share features common to other genres and develop and change over time.  The specificity of a genre arises from its particular combination of these features and its appeal to certain generic knowledges possessed by the viewer.  Genres are inherently flexible, mutable; subject to the constant changes and adaptations that arise as genre films introduce new elements or transgress old ones or as the broader regimes of social or cultural conventions undergo change.  What distinguishes a genre film from other films is that the textual components have prior significance as elements of some generic formula, so despite the individual discrepancies, the viewer negotiates with the film by weighing these variations against the genre’s pre-ordained, value-laden narrative system.

Genres and genre films are more than just individual, isolated narrative formulas that gain their acceptance solely through repetition and historical familiarity with the audience.  They are, also, representations of cultural beliefs and myths circulating within a particular society.  Genres draw heavily upon a broader social or cultural verisimilitude, so the recurrent structures of a genre distil social rather than individual meanings (Maltby, 1995:3).  Genre study is often conceived as a myth study – i.e. reading popular narratives as the secularised myths of modern society.  However, the relationship between film and society is not absolute and the correlative between ideals and myths inherent in the text and those circulating within the culture is never exact.  The relationship between the genre’s meaning and cultural context is complex, as meanings are not necessarily fixed in any one text or generic collection of texts.

Genre study allows us to examine the values, traditions, representations and myths of the culture in which they emerge and address how viewers experience and relate to film texts as examples of communal behaviour.  The systems of signification and representation that inform a textual product can reveal the complex system of beliefs that the associated culture participates in and go some way to explaining those cultural members participation within that textual product.  I do not wish to simply reiterate structuralist concepts that members of a mass-mediated society simply participate in socially and culturally refined systems of beliefs, as the discursive forces operating within any society are multi-variant.  However, textual forms can be identified in terms of their mythical qualities and these can suggest how viewers interact with and experience these products. 

Due to the increasing commercialisation and commodification of film in contemporary Hollywood cinema, it is argued that genre is no longer relevant as all film are driven by market imperatives and similarly structured and constructed to meet these financial aims.  However, films still exhibit certain structural and textual connections to genres.  Genres are, by nature, inherently temporal, mutable and historic.  Genre is a mobile category, not a ‘pure’ category.  While the industrial context of Hollywood filmmaking is constantly developing, shifting the terms of popular narrative, generic production continues through the play of familiarity and difference within films, rather than the repeated enactment of any static criteria.

Genre can no longer (if it ever did) lay claim to definitively delineating the cultural myths, expectations and beliefs of the populace.  At the most, it can be seen as proffering certain discursive perspectives and evoking cultural myths that may exist more textually than socially.  Genre, though, is still relevant because at the heart of genre is a concern with the process of communication between the text and the spectator.  Genre still allows us to access this communication process and reflect on how and why viewers engage with visual texts.  A contemporary understanding of genre needs to be employed, which accommodates the hybridity of form, fluctuations in knowledges, and fluidity of meaning by revealing the dominant generic form at work and the various generic practices at play within the text.  How contemporary genre filmmaking dispenses its meanings within the Hollywood institution and shapes and mirrors the collective dreams and desires of its audience are still important considerations to address in film and cultural studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belton, John (1994) American Cinema, American Culture, McGraw Hill: New York.

Kellner, Douglas and Ryan, Michael (1988) Camera Politica, The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film, Indiana University Press: Bloomington.

Maltby, Richard and Craven, Ian (1995) Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction,

Neale, Steve (1990) “Questions of Genre”, Screen, 31, 1:45-66.

Tasker, Yvonne (1993) Spectacular Bodies, Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema, Routledge: London.