Since Bordwell and Thompson's
discussion of genre is by and large useless, the following arguments about
Genre are based on the work of Thomas Schatz.
Film genre is a "privileged" cinematic story form--refined into a formula because of its unique qualities--social or aesthetic.
Film genre gradully impresses itself upon the culture until it becomes a familiar meaningful system that can be named as such.
Film Genre is both a static and a dynamic system.
- It is a familiar formula of interrelated narraive and cinematic components that serve to continually reexamine some basic cultural conflict.
- It is continually evolving, however, as a result in changes in cultural attitudes, new influential films, the economics of the industry, etc.
Each genre film incorporates a specific cultural
context in the guise of a familiar social community.
- This generic context is more than physical setting, it is a cultural milieu where inherent thematic conflicts are animated, intensified, and resolved by familiar characters and patterns of action.
- In its animation and resolution of basic cultural conflicts, the genre film celebrates our collective sensibilities, providing an array of ideological strategies for negotiating social conflicts.
Schatz Definition:
The determining identifying featue of a film genre is its cultural context, its community of interrelated character types whose attitudes, values, and actions flesh out dramatic conflicts inherennt in that community.
In the genre film, predictability of conflict and resolution displaces attention from linear cause-and-effect, and redirects it to the conflict itself anad the opposed value systems it represents.
The genre film's plot traces the intensificataion of some cultural opposition which is eventually resolved.
In this sense, a genre's basic cultural oppositions of inherent dramatic conflicts represent its most basic determining feature.
The sustained popularity of any genre indicates the essentially unresolvable, irreconcilable nature of those oppositions.
Resolution involves a point of dramatic closure in
which a compromise or temporary solution to the conflict is projected into
a sort of cultural and historical timelessness.
