In film, genre refers to the method of film catagorisation based on similarities in the narrative elements from which films are constructed. Films are put into specific genres so that when the audience are buying and watching the films, it lets them know what they should be expecting from them. There are so many different types of genre and nowadays there are more and more films using hybrid genres, mixing two types to make a new style. For example instead of just a thriller it could be a crime/thriller. This is not a bad thing, it is just directors and writers coming up with a way to hook the audience even more and trying to be a bit more original. The word ‘Genre’ itself was used around two thousand years ago by Aristotle in Ancient Greece so that plays and poetry could be put into some sort of catagorisation and order. The play or poetry’s quality was judged by how well it suited what its genre was supposed to be. The Romans carried on this tradition of putting different plays and poems into different categories based on quality. It wasn’t until around the 1960’s that film critics started using the word ‘Genre’ to describe films, as it had really only been used for literature beforehand.
In the film ‘Love Actually’, it is easy to tell what type of genre the film is even from the very beginning. The colours red and white in the opening of the credits give us a hint that it may be about love and Christmas. This mixed with the narrative over the camera shots of people as they hug in the airport make you realise this film has to be about love. Doing a narrative over these shots makes the audience focus on what is being said and how it links to what is going on in the mis-en-scene. The audience can immediately tell it is a romantic comedy; a hybrid genre. There are jokes made and friendly hugs and kisses galore, just in the opening scene, if you were to buy this film and were expecting a rom-com then you wouldn’t be disappointed. Love is the theme of this movie, the characters are falling in love, falling out of love, some are with right people, and some are with the wrong people and forth. It’s a typically British romantic comedy, with its sarcasm, its crude jokes, posh characters and happy/ not so happy endings.
Hallmarks have a big impact on the genre of a film. They are the distinctive characteristics of a particular type of film. For instance if the opening of a film has eerie music, shadowy forests, blood splattering and dark characters in the opening scene, the audience would immediately class the film as a horror or possibly a thriller. It is these specific hallmarks that make us associate them with these genres, things that are scary and unusual, delving into the unknown, and even possibly playing tricks on us. Much like in the film Sleepy Hollow, when in the opening scene the main character is writing a letter, the audience is tricked because they see a thick red substance which most would think is blood, it isn’t until the end of the scene that we realise that it is actually a wax seal. Playing clever tricks on the audience like this is a good way to draw them into a film. If a film is boring and has nothing special or interesting at the start then people aren’t likely to carry on watching it.
Camera shots and angles are also a good - if not a subtle - way to guess the genre of a film. Again, taking sleepy hollow as an example, lots of close up shots are used even at the beginning so we can see how pale and scary the faces are of the main characters. If they would have been long shots, then the element of fear of those given off from the characters wouldn’t be there and the audience could get lose interest fast.
The classic old western film ‘Rio Bravo ’ is a good old stereotype of western cowboy genre. Westerns are the major defining genre of the American film industry, a tribute almost to the early days of the expansive American frontier. They are one of the oldest, most stable genres with very recognizable plots, elements, and characters (six-guns, horses, dusty towns and trails, cowboys, Indians, etc.). Over time, westerns have been re-defined, re-invented and stretched out, dismissed, re-discovered, and even spoofed. The main plot of the film ‘Rio Bravo ’ is that a small town sheriff in the American West recruits the help of a cripple, a drunk, and a young gunfighter in his efforts to hold in jail the brother of the local bad guy. In the opening scene there is next to no talking, just loud crashed, fights and intimidating camera shots of the sheriff looking down at his victim. We can tell from the start this is going to be a powerful and violent movie. The establishing shot of this film is a dusty road surrounded by mountains, the music is your typical but sort of Hispanic music, typical music to find in a western and the credits are very jagged and bold like they’d been carved almost. This shot locates the audience and puts them in with the setting of being involved with a typical western film. Although at the time a western with such famous actors wouldn’t have been usual for the audience. The establishing shot cuts to a dirty cowboy entering a bar, acting timid and looking uncomfortable, we get shallow shots of this character which is good because he is a main character in the film.
So in conclusion, we as an audience need genre, to be able to tell what we want to buy and watch, much like the directors and film crews need to know what they are aiming for when working on a product. If this sort of catagorisation didn’t exist, it would make the film industry so much harder to be judged. If an audience can’t tell just but an establishing shot or the front of a DVD cover or film poster exactly what type of genre a film is, then it would be a waste of their time and money. I think genre is important and will be around for as long as films are still made.
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