Film Canon | Film Genres

A genre picture is a specific type of picture and is distinguished by a characteristic set of conventions in style, subject matter,
and values. Many genre movies are directed toward a specific audience. All genre movies are "a form in search of a content" (Bazin).

The major shortcoming of genre pictures is that they're easy to imitate and have been debased by stale mechanical repetition.
Genre conventions are mere cliches unless they're united with significant innovations in style or subject matter.

The most critically admired genre pictures strike a balance between the form's reestablished conventions and the
artist's unique contributions.

Genre pictures automatically synthesize a vast amount of cultural information, freeing the filmmakers to explore more personal concerns. A non-generic picture must be more self-contained. The filmmaker is forced to communicate virtually all the major ideas
and emotions within the work itself. On the other hand the genre filmmaker never starts from scratch.
He can build on the accomplishments of predecessors, enriching their ideas or calling them into question.

Genre pictures can be classified into 4 main cycles:

1. Primitive - "The Great Train Robbery" (Edwin S. Porter - 1903)

This phase is usually naive, though powerful in its emotional impact, in part because of the novelty of the form. Many of the conventions of the genre are established in this phase.

2. Classical - "Stagecoach" (John Ford - 1939)

This intermediate stage embodies such classical ideals as balance, richness, and poise.
The genre's values are assured and widely shared by the audience.

3. Revisionist - "High Noon" (Fred Zinnemann - 1969)

The genre is generally more symbolic, ambiguous, less certain in its values.
This phase tends to be stylistically complex, appealing more to the intellect than to the emotions.
Often, the genre's pre-established conventions are exploited as ironic foils to question or undermine popular beliefs.

4. Parodic - "Blazing Saddles" (Mel Brooks - 1973)

This phase of a genre's development is an outright mockery of its conventions, reducing them to howling cliches and
presenting them in a comic manner.

One might divide the history of film into four major traditions:
FICTION, NONFICTION (or DOCUMENTARY), ANIMATION, and EXPERIMENTAL.

Some of the most suggestive critical studies have explode the relationship of a genre to the society that nurtured it.
Hippolyte Taine claimed that the social and intellectual anxieties of a given era and nation will find expression in its art.
This approach tends to work best with popular genres, which reflect the shared values and fears of a large audience.
As social conditions change, genres often change with them, challenging some traditional customs and beliefs, reaffirming others.

The study of artistic genres is as old as Aristotle, and at least one of his generic terms, "comedy" has been regularly applied to films. Significantly, "tragedy" has not established itself as a film genre. The generic approach to art has frequently been attacked, however, for its terms are often imprecise and its methods of categorization unclear.

The most familiar system by which films are generically classified distinguishes between the different kinds of fictional narrative films: westerns, gangster films, newspaper pictures, detective dramas, screwball comedies, courtroom dramas, film noirs, musicals, war films, spy films, prison films, horror films, science fiction, fantasies, thrillers.
An obvious difficulty with such commonly used categories is that they overlap. In classifying films one would have to rely on a judgement about what is important.

There are 2 kinds of connection which genre films achieve.
First, genre films forge a deliberate connection between each new instance of the genre and its past tradition.
Second, genre films, because of their popularity and familiarity, have a more powerful impact on their audience.