Genres

Some genre thoughts..

Film genres are ways of grouping movies by style and story; a “film genre” is one that can easily be grouped with a culturally familiar rubric.

Film scholars tend to define genres for purposes of interpretation and critical analysis, while producers, publicists, and audiences may use them as descriptive tools
Genres are vehicles for the circulation of films in industrial, critical, and popular discourse
Bordewell – early film criticism adopted many tenets of aestethic modernism, such as “the need for perpetual breaks with academicism” and a “radical” interrogation
Culture itself is seen as an expressive totality
A genre refers to a group of films that share a set of narrative, stylistic, and thematic characteristics or conventions, every film in a given genre will exhibit at least some of them.
Critics argue that horror is defined not by its conventions, but by its emotional response it elicits from it’s audience. A horror film is designed to make the audience feel fear, revulsion, and disgust.
Some critics argue that the most effective means of defining a genre is to articulate the common themes within a group of films.
Contemporary slasher films often equate murder with voyeurism
The definition of any genre is fluid

The repetitive formulas and spectacles of film genres are often defined by their differences from the classical realist style of narrative cinema.T
These classical films have been characterised as efficient action-centered, goal-orientated linear narratives driven by the desire of a single protagonist, involving one or two lines of action, leading to definitive closure
Unmotivated events, rhythmic montage, highlighted parallelism, overlong spectacles – these are the excuse in the classical narrative system that alert us to the existence of a competing logic, a second voice

Most scholarship concerning Dawn of the Deadfocuses on the film’s rather overt criticism of contemporary consumer culture. By setting the bulk of the action in a shopping mall, Romero consciously draws the audience’s attention toward the relationship between zombies and consumerism. The insatiable need to purchase, own, and consume has become so deeply ingrained in twentieth-century Americans that their reanimated corpses are relentlessly driven by the same instincts and needs.
The metaphor is simple: Americans in the 1970s have become a kind of zombie already, slaves to the master of consumerism, and mindlessly migrating to the malls for the almost instinctual consumption of goods. This heavily symbolic role reduces the monsters to little more than supporting characters; of greater interest are the four surviving humans who isolate themselves on the mall’s upper levels.
Having been essentially brainwashed by capitalist ideology, they cannot see the shattered world around them in any terms other than those of possession and consumption—and this misplaced drive ultimately proves strong enough to put all their lives in jeopardy.

Night of the Living dead became a cult independent film not just because of its genre or stylistic features, but also because of where and when it was shown and the way in which different critics had differing perspectives on the film
Part of the films impacts was related to the ideological readings made possible by its innovative style and construction and much of the positive criticism that attended its release related to a reading of the film’s apparent subversive stance
Directors facilitate the coming together of culturally important structuring motifs, the full weight of which may be quite beyond them… they are imagined to be a neutral agent (rather than agency), through which wider social meanings are simply refracted