Key Media Concepts: Genre

Genre Definition:
A way of categorising compositions/texts (film/TV/music/literature etc) based on a certain criteria – a check-list of expectations and conventions.


How is genre important?
It is a way of organising the huge of amounts of texts that are available.
It can act as a set of audience of expectations.
It creates a relationship between audiences and producers which minimises the risk of financial failure – consider the money put into production and marketing…
It reinforces our ideas and values
It makes clear what ‘works’ artistically allowing for repetition.
It acts as short-hand communication for audiences.
It creates a structural framework that can be adhered to or played with.


How to identify genre
Film theorist Janet Staiger asserts that genre can be identified using the following methods

Idealist: Judging texts by a predetermined standard.

Empirical: Comparing texts to texts that are already assumed to be part of a certain genre. (This is what you have mainly done during your planning stage - comparing the Codes and Conventions of similar texts).

Social Conventions: Using an accepted cultural consensus. (Perhaps this is relevant if you did audience/market research).

A priori: Using common generic elements that are identified in advance.


Limitations of Genre
Genre is always subjective (one man’s comedy could be another man’s horror.)
Texts are often so sophisticated that it is hard to fit them into one category.
It should only be seen as a tool rather than an absolute.
Categories are constantly evolving and changing so there is no such thing as ‘typical’.


How Genre’s are created
Jane Feuer in her article ‘Genre Study and Television’ states that ‘genres are not organic in their conception - they are synthetic: artificial creations by intellectuals.’

Genre can be seen as a retrospective way of categorising texts by identifying trends and patterns in media. These trends and patterns could be established by creators repeating what works and is successful or by the expression of shared experiences (social factors).

For instance the ‘Saw’ films were successful, films that focused on the gratuitous torturing and suffering of entrapped people. Consequently a series of other films that shared the same delight in displaying human suffering followed such Hostel, Devil’s Rejects, Wolf Creek, Captivity and I Know Who Killed Me.
This type of film became known as ‘Torture Porn’ after film critic David Edelstein first used the term when describing Hostel.
‘Torture Porn is a term often used described these type of films, but they could easily be called ‘Splatter Films’ or ‘Horror’.


How Genres Evolve
Producers of mainstream texts have to ensure that they give the audience ‘what they want’ and so use what has been effective and successful before. However they have to keep things fresh to make sure that audiences are not continually being part of the same experience.
This brings in the idea of ‘repetition and variation’ - repeating what is successful but adding enough variation to prevent it from seeming stale.

Another way is creating hybrid genres – taking several elements from two or more genres to create a new experience. e.g. Westworld (Western/Sci-fi), Blade Runner (Film Noir/Sci-fi), Shaun of the Dead (Rom-Zom-Com).

‘Audiences want to have some idea what they are watching. They want to go into the theatre and know what kind of a film they are about to experience. It influences their expectations. But the dynamic quality of genre is also necessary to keep genres fresh. There are times when audiences’ expectations need to be altered. In short, filmmakers working within a genre need to walk a line: expand, develop, elaborate on the genre, but keep it under the overall structure of the specific genre umbrella.’
Charley McLean paraphrasing Thomas Schatz (Film Genre and Genre Film)