Film Genre Part 1
Genre is a term for a particular category of art--literature, music, film, etc--distinguished by a characteristic set of elements. As an organizational system, genre helpfully illuminates narrative and technical patterns, structures, and conventions used to achieve certain effects, tell different kinds of stories, and explore a diverse range of themes.
Below is a list of just a few common genres and subgenres (more on the next page!):
Action- A hero must overcome a series of challenges to defeat some force of evil. There is often a romantic subplot, and such films typically feature lots of visually stimulating scenes--chases, stunts, explosions, etc (Bullitt).
Adventure- This genre shares many conventions of action films, usually in the context of some kind of quest and often set during a distinct, specific place or time in history (Robin Hood).
Comedy- Comedies seek to entertain and amuse the audience throughout (note that this is a departure from the Shakespearean meaning of 'comedy,' where it simply denotes a happy ending--usually marriage). However, many comedies couch social or political commentary within their humor. Subgenres include slapstick, screwball, and dark comedy. Figures such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers produced hugely popular--and stylistically very different--films primarily between the 1920s and 1940s.
Crime- As the name suggests, crime drama takes a criminal (or group of criminals) as its subject. Subgenres include film noir, hood films, heist films, and mob films.
Be careful when considering genre. As with any classification system, there are exceptions to and subversions of genre, and a single text can contain elements of many genres. Many zombie films, for example, are considered horror movies but are also campy, self-aware, and relatively light in tone, despite their gruesome content. A sports film may be--and in fact very often is--also melodrama.
Of course, genre categories are historically contingent, too, and they change over time. For example, screwball comedies, which generally pair a dominant female character with a male who finds his masculinity challenged and highlight differences between economic classes, grew immensely popular during the Great Depression. Currently popular are what might be called male-bonding comedies (like American Pie, The Hangover, Dodgeball, and Superbad), which feature groups of young men--usually underdogs--and often deal with crises of masculinity.
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