Things You May Not Know About Genre

1. Genre is a French term with Latin roots – it means TYPE or KIND.
2. Genre study is a formal way of examining the system of conventions whereby genres establish patterns of repetition; but this goes further because Genres are not closed – They are partly open systems.
3. Genres are then complex sites of cultural repetition andcultural differences.
4. Audiences play a big part in maintaining or extinguishing genres. Most films fall into some sort of genre, even the more ‘difficult’ art films. When an audience recognises a genre it sees broad social allegories in which society plays out its problems in imaginary forms (wish fulfilment).
5. Cawelti identified five primary moral fantasies- Adventure, Romance, Mystery, Melodrama and Alien States or Beings (A.Ro.M.M.A).
6. Genres can have ‘therapeutic’ values, but Genres may blind audiences to the realities of social experience.
7. Genres then work through social concerns, producing new experiences for the audience and providing the audience with new knowledge, but it could be argued that genres simply reproduce existing social relations and if so, they are ‘formulae’ – no more than rigid and unchanged stereotypes.
8. Genres overlap.
9. Law and disorder are main themes of the crime genre and narratives can be superior to those of other film genres and more complex.
10. In its complexity, the crime film may be among the more intellectual of genres. Masculine identity is always at issue.
11. Each addition of a new film to a particular genre seems to alter that genre as a whole, redefining its rules and characteristics.
12. In popular cinema, although genres vary, there is little room for formal and stylistic variation.
13. According to the writer Propp’s analysis, the tale of the hero figure is a deep structure underlying many genres.
14. Popular genres almost always produce texts which support the status quo. Eg. Crime is un-American and crime does not ultimately pay.