13D1 & 13C2 Cover Work: Wed 10.03

Unit 1: Introducing Genre

• Genre is actually a French word for "Type" or "Category"

• Genres are not fixed; they are used to help us understand films.

• Films outside the main stream are called "art films" which are intended for select or specialist audiences

Unit 2: Genre Classification

• Most genres offer a narrative of Reassurance

• The repertoire of elements features iconography, style, setting, narrative, characters.

• Iconography can be both visual image and sound image

Unit 3: Hollywood and Genre

• Genre declined as genre theorist argued that "genres began as fairly loose groupings that gradually evolved towards a "mature" or "classic" period."

• "B" films and genres, like genre fiction, were seen as "low status" by critics and commentators

• Hollywood is a generic cinema, which is not quite the same as saying it is a cinema of genres" Richard Maltby, 1995

Unit 4: Audiences and Genres

Audiences get from film genres. These pleasures are the following:

• Emotional Pleasures-Some genres are generically designed to make the audience feel emotional in different ways

• Visceral Pleasures- This is how the film is style to have a physical effect on audiences

• Intellectual Puzzles- This allows the audience to interact and allows them to try and unravel the mystery of "who dunnit"

• Counter-Culture Attraction- Where the audience can unravel the genre from the conventions of the films or in other words, the "Repertoire of Elements"

Unit 5: Stars and Genres

• Theorist "Ellis" stated that "Stars hold a "promise" to audiences”

• Ellis (1992) and Dyer (1987) have suggested ways in which audiences engage with stars and why they have become central to our understanding of Hollywood cinema.

• Dyer identified various major stars from the studio system as representing "social types" across a range of films:

• “Good Joe"

• "Tough guy"

• "Pin up"

• "Rebel"

• "Independent women"