Genre Theory

Steve Neale
·      Belief that genre is in constant flux, changing and evolving
·      Five main stages in film genre:
1.     The form finding itself (Psycho)
2.     The classic (Halloween)
3.     Stretching the genre boundaries (Nightmare on Elm Street)
4.     Parody (Scary Movie)
5.     Homage (Scream)

Andre Baslin
·      Introduced the idea of genre in films looking at Westerns in the 1950s
·      He was the first to look at the significant advantages of genre from the point of view of the institutional perspective (e.g. reuse of sets, props etc.; easier to market) and more than simply arbitrary: these originated at production level

Robert Stam
·      Genre is hard to define, doesn’t really exist and is a concept made up by theorists and critics.
·      He argues that the four main problems are: extention (the breadth or narrowness of labels); normativism (having preconceived ideas of criteria for genre membership); monolithic definitions (as if an item belonged to only one genre); biologism (a kid of essentialism in which genres are seen as evolving through a standardised life cycle

Rick Altman
·      Genre is defined by:
·      Semantic elements (e.g. signs like knives, blood, dark colours, eerie music in horror) which are easy for the audience to recognise and identify
·      Or, syntactic elements, such as THEMES (e.g. fear, revenge, rage etc.) and PLOTS (e.g. a group going on a trip, one by one they get killed with only the innocent girl surviving then killing the killer

Bordwell

·      Borwell 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)

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