An Introduction to Genre

A way of understanding
cinema that has shaped
cinema itself.
There are two ways of thinking
about the creation of cinema
• The first, or more traditional way of
looking at understanding films is
through analysing the Auteur;
taking the director of a film and
looking at his work as a fluid body
of ideas and concepts.
• Great examples of Auteur directors
would be Orson Welles, Jean Luc
Goddard, Alfred Hitchcock or
Stanley Kubrick.
 Why were these directors
considered Auteurs?
The direct translation of the word is
‘author’. The director who is thought of
as an auteur is looked upon as a wholly
original artist who doesn’t allow himself
to be confined by the conventions of
the Hollywood studio system.
The term auteur is used more and more

sparingly these days and in many ways

becomes less and less useful in our
attempts to understand the relationship
between film and audience.
 Why is understanding about
Genre useful
• What is it that we are really trying to
uncover?
• The relationship that exists between
the film maker and the audience,
that is mediated by the film

maker creates
The filmaismovie
encoded, for anthe
When
part of audience
the to see
viewer decodes
narrative process
the film narrative, he or she is engaged with
involves making a ‘mystery’ for the viewer to solve
th
 Genre is as old as
Hollywood
• To understand more about why this
process is so important, we need to
go back to the birth of Hollywood and
the studio system.
• In the infancy of cinema audiences
were enormous, in the USA and UK it
became the predominant form of
mass entertainment in the 1930s they
stood in the US at about 55 million,
peaking in 1956 at 95 million.
• Demand for films out stripped supply:
They needed to be made quickly,
cheaply and had to be easily
accessible to audiences
How the Western Genre
Evolved
Auteurs have always been few
and far between and
dependent on studios.
• The same has been true with much of
film criticism. The auteur film director
is massively out numbered by the
genre film maker or none auteur.
• Studios also have far more power than
directors and the later is often reliant
on the former. By focusing on the
auteur we can get stuck thinking
solely about the director’s artistic
‘vision’.
• If we ignore genre, we are ignoring a
‘conceptual space’ a canvas upon
which society, film maker, audience
and in many ways history itself paints.
 How can we define what a
genre is?
• In order for us to do this we have to
think about a genre having
conventions. Things that are always
there in every film of that type.
• So if we were to take the example of
the Western what ‘things’ are
always present?
• Take a few minutes to discuss some
coventions in a Western, a
Romantic Comedy, a Horror film
Ingredients of a Western
 The tacit agreement
• With costs in the tens in not hundreds
of millions, a studio has to be
absolutely certain that it reads its
audience correctly.
• It advertises, brands and markets its
product in the same way that any
manufacturer does, it needs to clearly
define not what the film is about, but
where it lies in the public’s
understanding of genre. This is the
tacit (unspoken) agreement between
 Break
• Take ten minutes and then we will
have a half hour screening. This
powerpoint can be found online at
http://www.scribd.com/History1917

 WRITE THIS DOWN!
• I am going to show two clips, I want you
to write down what genre the film falls
into (easy).
• Identify conventions that support your
view.
• Identify if there are conventions of
other types of films in there.
• Are the conventions visual? Are they
related to the the dialogue? Are they
related to the music? Do either ignore
conventions you see normally in the
 Break
• Take five minutes and then we’ll
finish off this morning talking about
iconography.

 What is an icon?
• An icon is a • What does this
symbol, a image signify in
signifier, it can the context of
be a person, an cinema?
object,
foreground or
background.
• Its presence in a
scene is meant to
give us a coded
message about
the meaning of
 Iconography isn’t all about
image however
• Iconic images, sounds, even plot
conventions are used in co-ordination by
film makers in order to fulfill the
audience’s expectations.
• Some icons, ie the gun, are present across
many different genres, crime, westerns,
science fiction, even comedy.
• However their significance, function and
consequences are different depending on
the context that the genre places on the
film.
• When we start to think in this way, a rather
elementary language of film starts to