Genre is a word used as a sort of classification, it tells us the style or kind of particular art form we’re interested in. For music it can be rap, pop, rock etc, for art it could mean whether the art is abstract or realist and for film it can mean various things.

Genre can be whether a film is action, romance or horror etc, it allows the industry to categorise and market a film and for the audience to be able to seek out that particular film genre they fancy with ease.

So what constitutes genre? That was a question I mused over during the reading this week. Is it the recurring themes, tropes and motifs we see that place a film into the horror genre over the action? I think as humans we like to look for commonalities and then draw conclusions from what we have observed. This plays into the idea of genre iconography – things such as themes and imagery that occur similarly from film to film, within the same genre. If a film is entirely focused on two people who have a romantic relationship with the narrative, it’s safe to say that because the film is focused upon that are, that romance is the genre of the film.

Labels are often way too broad so the reading talks about sub genres such as buddy movies as an offset of action movies and I also came up with Mob films as another branch of action films. Sub-genres allow for further specificity for the viewer and those wishing to analysis film but it also clearly shows some of the unoriginality of film.

Genre evolves over time, often as technology, the audience and creators change. We want to consume and create different things as time changes. It also goes through cycles where certain genres and subgenres make a resurgence after time has passed, an example of a cycle would be the Western genre with John Wayne starring in many western hits during the 1950’s and 1960’s then the genre faded from popularity until 2010 when the film True Grit brought back the western genre for a few years, though the cycle has ended for now.