WK 13

ITS OVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NOTES: Comparative Analysis Essay

What are Genres?

• comes from the French word for kind or type

• Ways of categorising films/other cultural artefacts by comparing them to other films with shared traits or characteristics

• These traits can be:

  • Structural - like a romance. every romance is structured to have at least 2 people fall in love

  • Conventional or by subject/theme - like a western

  • Affective/regarding feeling - like a comedy film, it is designed to make us laugh

  • Formal - in a musical people sing. It’s expected for a musical for people to do it out of nowhere

• The genre system consist of specific expectations that all audiences bring with them while watching a movie. It is an explanation for the way the movie is - like if you got told that a movie wasn’t a musical and they just start singing, you’d be deterred from your expectations

• Genre is collectively created by society. You can’t just create a genre out of nowhere, multiple films have to be created in a common set of meanings.

• Genre can be identified by industry. Like when all the dystopian YA films came out, it went really well so a bunch of the them were adapted into film. It became a genre after many of them being created at the same time.

• It can also be established by film critics. People weren’t calling film noir film noir until the cycle was finished. they identified a certain commonality between them and created that genre

• Repetition and Variation: we can predict what will happen in a genre film if we know what it is. Like in a slasher film you’d expect someone to yk get slashed. But there needs to be variation so you don’t just watch the same movie over and over.

Modes, Genres, Cycles, and Clusters