Question 1b: Genre

L.O. To understand how to

apply genre theory to your
own production work
 Genre
Genre is the classification of any media text into a category or
type
It can describe the way that companies producing and trading
in media goods try to minimise risk by grouping and selling
their products through established expectations.
3 types of genre - major, subgenre and hybrid genre
A media text is classified in a genre through the identification
of key elements (genre signifiers) which occur in that text and
in others of the same genre.
Audiences recognise these genre signifiers and bring a set of
expectations to their viewing of the text. These expectations
may either be fulfilled, denied or subverted by the producer.
What is the genre of your product?
What are the audience expectations associated with this genre?
Next to each expectation note down if you fulfilled, denied or subverted it.
 How does genre benefit
institutions and audiences?
 Genre and institution
Film producers use genre as a means of
minimising the economic risk of making films -
audiences tend to stick to their favoured genres
so the films will have a ready-made paying
audience.
Distributors use genre as a means of advertising
and promoting films - a film poster or trailer can
simply utilise genre conventions. If stars have
generic associations that can also be utilised.
These depend on audiences knowledge past
experience.
 Genre and audience
It is easy to recognise what genre a film belongs
to. This helps audiences select what texts to
consume.
Audiences are thought to like genre because of its
reassuring and familiar patterns of repetition and
variation. Audiences do expect genre films to
involve innovation and subversion of generic
conventions
Genre provides audiences with certain
expectations which they hope will be followed.
 What does this quote mean?
What do you think should stay the same?
What is easy to change?

Task:
Buddy Cop trailers. What do you expect from this kind of film?
Watch the trailers and identify:
Genre conventions used
Any differences that make the
film unique.
How does your product use genre
conventions? How is it unique?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yltSJYFlscY
How does your product show cultural change?
Does it hark back to an older style of film
making? Or does it subvert it in a new way?
 GENRE THEORY DANIEL CHANDLER

CHARACTERS - similar types of characters (sometimes stereotypes), roles,

personal qualities, motivations, goals, behaviour.
NARRATIVE - similar plots and structures, predictable situations, sequences,
episodes, obstacles, conflicts and resolutions.
SETTING - geographical and historical;
ICONOGRAPHY - echoes the narrative, characters, themes and setting, a
familiar stock of images or motifs, the connotations of which have become
fixed. Includes dcor, costume and objects, certain 'typecast' performers
familiar patterns of dialogue, characteristic music and sounds,
FILMING TECHNIQUES (micro features) - stylistic or formal conventions of
camerawork, lighting, sound-recording, use of colour, editing etc.

List the genre signifiers you used in your chosen

media product.
You should consider typicality and subversion, as
well as sub-genres or generic hybrids.
Question 1b: Genre
L.O. To understand how to
apply genre theory to your
own production work
 GENRE THEMES AND IDEOLOGIES
THEMES - topics, subject matter (social, cultural, psychological, professional, political,
sexual, moral), ideologies and values.

Values in a media product are not the same as codes and conventions. Values are the
ideological and cultural ideas embedded in a film. In a Western, the lone gunslinger
represents the power of good to destroy evil.
In gangster films greed and the lust for power or wealth undermine the possibly attractive, but
deeply flawed, central gangster character. Jealousy, revenge, loyalty and deception are
themes of many thrillers and crime movies.
In horror films the monsters and zombies can be interpreted as metaphors for serious
diseases, death or destiny. In the end the films give some hope that the audiences worst fears
can be overcome.
In Bond films the audience feel safe in knowing that Bond (or his British MI5 equivalent) will
save them from the political evils of the world whatever they may be at the time
In Pop videos, the audience will often see good being represented as pop icons are often
considered as role models for young children

List the themes or ideologies that are conventional to your

product. Have you developed or subverted these in any way?
Have you borrowed themes from another genre?
 Rick Altman argues that genres are usually
defined in terms of media language
(SEMANTIC elements) and codes (in the
Western, for example: guns, horses,
landscape, characters or even stars, like John
Wayne or Clint Eastwood) or certain
ideologies and narratives (SYNTACTIC
elements).
 Bordwell suggested that film genres
could be split into
Some suggestion for classifying/grouping genres (Bordwell 1989: 148):
period or country (American films of the 1930s)
director or star or producer or writer or studio
technical process (CinemaScope films)
cycle (the 'fallen women' films)
series (the 007 movies)
style (German Expressionism)
structure (narrative)
ideology (Reaganite cinema)
venue ('drive-in movies')
purpose (home movies)
audience ('teenpix')
subject or theme (family film, paranoid-politics movies)
Which one fits your text?
Which pleasures are offered by your product?
 Audience as reader and consumer
Each written text provides a 'reading position' for readers, a position
constructed by the writer for the 'ideal reader' of the text. (Kress 1988,)
Thus, embedded within texts are assumptions about the 'ideal reader',
including their attitudes towards the subject matter and often their class,
age, gender and ethnicity.
How does your ideal reader consume your product? Will other
readers bring oppositional or negotiated readings?
Viewers become generic spectators and can be said to develop generic
memory which helps in the anticipation of events, even though the films
themselves might play on certain styles rather than follow closely a clichd
formula. E.g. the attic scene from The Exorcist we expect something to
jump out on the woman because all the generic conventions are in place,
but in the end, the director deflates the tension. We do not consume films
as individual entities, but in an intertextual way. Film is a post-modern
medium in this way, because movies make sense in relation to other films,
not to reality.
Which existing texts may intertextually influence the way your
target audience consume your product?
 Auteurs
Auteurs - A group of film makers that were
considered to be particularly influential and
artistic. Does work show a particularly unique
style?
 Now

Look at the A grade exemplar.

Together, lets make a success criteria of what
you will need to do in your exam answer for
genre.
Theorist Quote
Steve Neale Genre is a set of expectations
David Chandler Conventional definitions of genre are based on the idea that they share
particular convention of content e.g. themes or setting
Steve Neale Genres are instances of repetition and difference
Steve Neale Difference is absolutely essential to the economy of genre

David Buckingham Genre is a constant process of negotiation and change

Rick Altman He argues that there is no such thing as pure genre anymore. Genre is
progressive, in that it will always change.
Daniel Chandler Familiarity with a genre enables viewers to generate feasible predictions
about events in a narrative.
John Corner Genre is a principal factor in the directing of audience choice and of
audience expectations
Steve Neale Genre is constituted by specific systems of expectations and hypothesis
which spectators bring with them to the cinema and which interact with
the films themselves during the course of the viewing process.
What pleasures are How have the signifiers
What intertextual links
being offered in the been used, subverted or
can be made?
consumption? developed?

Genre signifier Example Explanation Audience Theory

Characters
Narrative
Setting
Iconography
Themes/Values
/Ideology
Micro features

You dont have to stick
to these or you may
want to do more than
one para on one of
them
How are the audience positioned to read
the signifiers?
What expectations do they bring?
What negotiated or oppositional readings
may occur?