Revision - Genre #2

Why is genre important to film makers and producers?

Denis McQuail refers to the commercial and industrial significance of genres. 


The genre may be considered as a practical device for helping any mass medium to produce consistently and efficiently and to relate its production to the expectations of its customers. Since it is also a practical device for enabling individual media users to plan their choices, it can be considered as a mechanism for ordering the relations between the two main parties to mass communication.

In other words it helps producers target audiences and capitalize on the success of previous films because audiences may choose to see a film based on the genre or generic content of the film. They can repeat a successful formula based on audience expectation.

 Christine Gledhill notes that 'differences between genres meant different audiences could be identified and catered to... This made it easier to standardise and stabilise production'

In relation to the mass media, genre is part of the process of targetting different market sectors.


Contemporary theorists tend to emphasize the importance of the semiotic notion of intertextuality: of seeing individual texts in relation to others. Katie Wales notes that 'genre is... an intertextual concept' (Wales 1989, 259). John Hartley suggests that 'we need to understand genre as a property of the relations between texts' (O'Sullivan et al. 1994, 128). And as Tony Thwaites et al. put it, 'each text is influenced by the generic rules in the way it is put together; the generic rules are reinforced by each text' (Thwaites et al. 1994, 100). 
Roland Barthes (1975) argued that it is in relation to other texts within a genre rather than in relation to lived experience that we make sense of certain events within a text. There are analogies here with schema theory in psychology, which proposes that we have mental 'scripts' which help us to interpret familiar events in everyday life.