Genre Theory Continued

Can Genre be defined by audience? Is it a question of film  comprehension? 

Neale - Genre is constituted by “Specific systems of expectations and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema and which interact with the films themselves during the course of the viewing process.”

Jonathan Culler - Generic conventions exist to establish a contract between creator and reader so as to make certain expectations operative, allowing compliance and deviation from the accepted modes of intelligibility. Acts of communication are rendered intelligible only within the context of a shared conventional framework of expression.

Ryall - Sees this framework provided by the generic system; therefore, genre becomes a cognitive repository of images, sounds, stories, characters, and expectations

Framework

1. To the producers of films, genre is a template for what they make
2. To the distributor/promoter, genre provides assumptions about who the audience is and how to market the films for that specific audience
3. To the audience, it is a label that identifies a liked or disliked formula and provides certain rules of engagement for the spectator in terms of anticipation of pleasure, E.g. The anticipation of what will happen in the attic scene of The Exorcist
4. When genres become classic, they can exert tremendous influence: production can be come quicker and more confident because film-makers are following tested formulae and have a ready shorthand to work with, and actors can be filtered into genres and can be seen to have assumed "Star quality" when their mannerisms, physical attributes, way of speaking and acting fit a certain style of genre
5. In turn, viewers become "Generic spectators" and can be said to develop generic memory which helps the in the anticipation of events, even though the films themselves might play on certain styles rather than follow closely a clichéd formula. E.g. The attic scene from The Exorcist – we expect something to jump out on the woman because all the generic conventions are in place, but in the end, the director deflates the tension. We do not consume films as individual entities, but in an intertextual way.  Film is a post-modern medium in this way, because movies make sense in relation to other films, not to reality
6. It is the way genre films deviate from the clichéd formulae that leads to a more interesting experience for the viewer, but fore this to work properly, the audience must be familiar with generic conventions and style

David Bordwell notes, "Any theme may appear in any genre" (Bordwell 1989) "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"

PROBLEMS WITH GENRE CLASSIFICATION 

Theorist and Critic Rick Altman (1999) came up with a list of points he found problematic with genre classification: 

• Genre is a useful category, because it bridges multiple concerns
• Genres are defined by the film industry and recognised by the mass audience
• Genres have clear, stable identities and borders
• Individual films belong wholly and permanently to a single genre
• Genres are trans-historical
• Genres undergo predictable development
• Genres are located in particular topic, structure and corpus
• Genre films share certain fundamental characteristic
• Genres have either a ritual or ideological function
• Genre critics are distanced from the practice of genre