Revision - Genre #1

Are genres just a convenient way for theorists to categorise texts (not just films!) ?

OR are they infinite?

 Are they timeless (set in stone) or do they transcend (change) over time?

Are genres related to culture?

THERE IS NO RIGHT OR WRONG ANSWER BECAUSE THESE QUESTIONS ARE ALWAYS BEING CONSIDERED

David Bordwell

Recognises that there are many ways of categorising genres and asks if genre is determined by style, structure or content or cultural factors

   'A genre is ultimately an abstract conception rather than something that exists empirically in the world,' notes Jane Feuer (1992, 144). One theorist's genre may be another's sub-genre or even super-genre (and indeed what is technique, style, mode, formula or thematic grouping to one may be treated as a genre by another). Themes, at least, seem inadequate as a basis for defining genres since, as David Bordwell notes, 'any theme may appear in any genre' (Bordwell 1989, 147). He asks: 'Are animation and documentary films genres or modes? Is the filmed play or comedy performance a genre? If tragedy and comedy are genres, perhaps then domestic tragedy or slapstick is a formula'. In passing, he offers a useful inventory of categories used in film criticism, many of which have been accorded the status of genres by various commentators:

Grouping by period or country (American films of the 1930s), by director or star or producer or writer or studio, by technical process (CinemaScope films), by cycle (the 'fallen women' films), by series (the 007 movies), by style (German Expressionism), by structure (narrative), by ideology (Reaganite cinema), by venue ('drive-in movies'), by purpose (home movies), by audience ('teenpix'), by subject or theme (family film, paranoid-politics movies). (Bordwell 1989, 148)

Another film theorist, Robert Stam, also refers to common ways of categorising films: 


While some genres are based on story content (the war film), other are borrowed from literature (comedy, melodrama) or from other media (the musical). Some are performer-based (the Astaire-Rogers films) or budget-based (blockbusters), while others are based on artistic status (the art film), racial identity (Black cinema), locat[ion] (the Western) or sexual orientation (Queer cinema). (Stam 2000, 14).

Bordwell concludes that 'one could... argue that no set of necessary and sufficient conditions can mark off genres from other sorts of groupings in ways that all experts or ordinary film-goers would find acceptable' (Bordwell 1989, 147). Practitioners and the general public make use of their own genre labels (de facto genres) quite apart from those of academic theorists. We might therefore ask ourselves 'Whose genre is it anyway?' Still further problems with definitional approaches will become apparent in due course.