Movie Genres

Rituals, Conventions, Archetypes & Formulas

Understanding Genres• Genre: a category or classification of a group of

movies in which the individual films share similar subject matter and similar ways of organizing the subject through narrative and stylistic patterns.

• Genres are not formulaic categories, but practices connected to the human need for archetypes, rituals, and communication.

• Genres are grounded in audience expectations about characters, narrative, and visual style.

• Genres function as cultural rituals because the repetition of formulas help coordinate our needs and desires. These rituals are both formal and ideological practices.

Historical Origins

• Genres have historically been used to classify works of literature, theater, music, painting, etc.

• Tragedy (Aristotle 350 BCE)

• Functions:

• To provide models for producing other works

• To direct audience expectations

• To create categories for judging or evaluating work

Early Film Genres

• Cinema used genres from its origins, building on arts like theater, music, and literature.

• Early Genres (short films):

• Scenics

• Historical Events

• “Blue Movies” (pornographic)

• Scenes from the Theater

• Sporting Events

• Slapstick Comedies

• Westerns

1920s-1940s: Genre & the Studio System

• Rise of Hollywood Studio System in 1920s fueled production of genre films.

• Fordism: economic model that defined U.S. industry in the 20th century through the division of labor and mass production of parts.

• Film genres enabled movie producers to reuse script formulas, actors, sets, and costumes so that similar types of films could be mass produced.

• All major studio production systems in Hollywood were based of efficiently recycling formulas, conventions, stars and sets. Each studio established associations with particular genres.

1948-1970s: Postwar Film Genres

• Paramount Decision 1948: Studio System begins decline

• Film Noir

• Independent Films

• Recycling genres through U.S. subcultures (Revisionist Genres).

1970s-Present: New Hollywood, Sequels, and Global Genres

• New Hollywood

• Blockbusters

• Studios develop worldwide markets with corporate strategies that rely on sequels, franchises, and ancillary marketing (t-shirts, video games, phone apps, etc.)

• Today’s World Cinema is not Hollywood Centric

The Elements of Film Genre

• “Genres” identify group, social, or community activities and are made based on concepts from past films. Thus, the idea of genres violates ideals of individual creativity and artistic purity.

• Film Genres are social contracts between filmmakers and audiences, determined by historical evolution and cultural community.

Conventions, Formulas & Expectations

• Generic Conventions: properties or features that identify a genre, such as character types, settings, props, or events that are repeated from film to film.

• Iconography: images or image patterns with specific connotations or meanings.

• Archetypes: spiritual, psychological or cultural modes for expressing certain virtues, values, or timeless realities.

• Generic Formulas: patterns for developing stories in a particular genre. These formulas suggest that conventions can be arranged in multiple ways.

• Myths: spiritual and cultural stories that describe a defining event for a group or community.

• Generic Expectations: the viewer’s experience and knowledge that help he/she to anticipate the meanings of various conventions, or direction of certain narrative formulas.

Movie Genres: Six Paradigms

• Genres originally categorized in terms of subject matter, but later became associated with specific narrative and formal conventions.

• Hybrid Genres: created through the interaction of different genres to produce fusions (ex. Rom Com, Musical Horror)

• Subgenres: specific versions of genres denoted by an adjective (ex. Spaghetti Western, Slapstick comedy).

• Genres as constellations that overlap & shift over time.

Comedies• Central characters are often defined by distinctive

physical features

• Narratives emphasize episodes or “gags” more than plot continuity

• Theatrical acting styles in which characters interact playfully with Mise-en-Scene.

• Comedy:

• Social Reconciliation

• Associated with laughs and humor

• Social Disruption ☞ Happy Ending

Slapstick, Screwball & Romantic Comedies

• Slapstick Comedies: emphasize physical humor & stunts (orig. 1910s).

• Screwball Comedies: use fast-talking humor, rather than physical. Often displaced sexual energy with barbed verbal exchanges between men and women (orig. 1930s-1940s).

• Romantic Comedies: Humor takes second place to happiness. These films concentrate on emotional attraction of a couple in a lighthearted way, drawing attention to awkward social predicaments (orig. 1930s-1940s).

Westerns• Characters are almost always male, and physical/

mental toughness distinguish him from modern civilization.

• Narrative follow a quest into the natural world.

• Stylistic emphasis on open, natural spaces and settings (U.S. frontier).

• Themes: characters uneasy with law/civilization, quests involve vague searches for “justice,” or “freedom,” use of scenery to challenge and inspire characters, rugged individualism, violence symbolizing justice or revenge.

Epic, Existential & Political Westerns• The Western in particular has been subject to waxing

and waning popularity, as well as cycles of production.

• Epic Western: concentrates on action and movement, developing a heroic character whose quests and battles define the nation and its origins.

• Existential Western: an introspective version of the genre in which the traditional western hero is troubled by his changing social status and self-doubts and the frontier becomes more civilized (orig. 1950s).

• Political Western: evolved from existential westerns to critically focus on ideology and politics. These films question core western ideas like individual independence and naturalized violence (orig. 1960s-1970s).

Melodramas• One of the earliest and most influential genres, and thus one of

the most difficult to define.

• Influenced by 19th Century Theater, in which social and domestic oppression create heightened emotional dramas.

• Melodramas are about the difficulty of acting/speaking within an established family/community. Melodramas develop conflict between interior emotions and external restrictions.

• Film Melodrama’s Current Conventions:

• Characters defined by their situation or basic traits (not actions), and struggle to express feelings or emotions. Characters are often repressed or victimized.

• Narratives rely on coincidences and reversals, building toward emotional or physical climaxes.

• Visual style emphasizes emotion or elemental struggle.

Physical, Family & Social Melodramas

• Physical Melodramas: focus on the physical plight and material conditions that repress or control the protagonist’s desires and emotions; physical conditions may be related to the setting or the character’s identity.

• Family Melodramas: elaborate the confines and restrictions of the protagonist by investigating the psychological and gendered forces of the family. These films often feature struggles of youth against patriarchal authority, economic dependency, and confining gender roles (prominence in Postwar Era).

• Social Melodramas: extend the melodramatic crisis of the family to include larger historical, community and economic issues. The losses, sufferings, and frustrations of the protagonist are visibly part of social or national politics.

Musicals• Arrive with synchronized sound in 1927, influenced

by vaudeville, opera, and musical theater.

• Characters act out and express emotions and thoughts through song and dance.

• Plots are interrupted or moved forward by musical numbers

• Spectacular sets and settings.

• Musicals are the flip-side of Melodramas: highlighting the joy of expression rather than the pain of repression. Focus on the joy of the present moment.

• Melos and Musicals both focus on emotion, but Musicals use song and dance to express the inexpressible emotions of melodrama.

Theatrical, Integrated & Animated Musicals

• Theatrical Musicals: situate the musical convention onstage or ‘backstage,’ where the fantasy of art and theater supersede everyday reality.

• Integrated Musicals: integrate musical numbers into more common situations and realistic actions. In these films the idyllic and redemptive moments of song and dance are part of everyday lives. Musical numbers allow the characters to overcome obstacles.

• Animated Musicals: use cartoon figures and stories to present songs and music.

Horror Films• Origins: Sophocles’s account of Oedipus.

• 19th Century Gothic Novels (sci-fi overlap).

• Characters with physical, psychological, and/or spiritual deformities.

• Narratives built on suspense, surprise and shock.

• Visual compositions that move between the dread of not seeing and the horror of seeing.

• Horror films deal with fear, dramatizing our personal and social terrors in different forms.

Supernatural, Psychological, and Physical Horrors

• Supernatural Horror: a spiritual evil erupts in the human realm.

• Psychological Horror: locate the dangers and distortions that threaten normal life in the minds of bizarre and deranged characters.

• Physical Horror: films in which the depiction of graphic violence is emphasized over character psychology.

• “Slasher” films

Crime Films

• Crime stories are a staple of “modern” culture.

• Characters who live on the edge of a mysterious or violent society, either criminals or individuals dedicated to crime detection.

• Plots of crime, increasing mystery, and often ambiguous resolution.

• Urban, often dark and shadowy, settings

• In Crime films, deviance becomes a barometer of the state of society.

Gangster, Hard-Boiled Detective Films & Film Noir• Gangster Films: typically set in 1930s (when underworld crime

thrived in defiance of Prohibition laws). In these films, criminal activity characterizes a social world continually threatened by the most brutal instincts of its outcasts. Codes of loyalty and family are often strained by the lure of fame, drugs, or cash.

• Yakuza Films

• Hard-Boiled Detective Films: focus on a protagonist who represents the law in some form. Usually these characters must battle a criminal element (and sometimes also the police) to solve a crime.

• Film Noir: subgenre of crime films orig. in 1940s elevating legal, moral, and atmospheric ambiguity. These films uncover darkness and corruption in nearly all characters, which never seem fully resolved. Visual style emphasizes darkness and shadows that reflect the film’s shady moral universe. Protagonists waver between law and lawlessness. Femme Fatale.

The Significance of Film Genre

Prescriptive & Descriptive Approaches

• Prescriptive: assume that a model for genre preexists any particular films in that genre; that a successful genre film deviates as little as possible from that model; that viewers should be objective in determining a genre.

• Descriptive: assume that a genre changes over time by building on older films and developing in new ways; that viewers prize genres for different reasons; that viewers’ subjectivity could help determine a genre.

Classical & Revisionist Genres• Classical Genre Traditions: aligned with prescriptive approaches

that place a film in relation to a paradigm that remains the same over time. These films establish relatively fixed sets of formulas and conventions.

• Historical Paradigm: presumes that a genre evolved to a point of perfection at some point in history, and that one or more films at that point describe the generic ideal.

• Structural Paradigm: relies on formal or structural ideals to evaluate genres.

• Revisionist Genre Traditions: see a film as a function of changing historical and cultural contexts that modify the conventions and formulas of that genre.

• Generic Reflexivity: films that are self-conscious about their generic identity and clearly and visibly comment on generic paradigms.

Local & Global Genres

• Local Genres: use generic patterns to connect to specific times, places and events, taking shape to express the interests and traditions of a particular community or nation.

• Jidai-Geki: set in pre-1868 feudal Japan

• Global Genres: use generic patterns to speak to universal concerns that minimize local differences and national boundaries.