Genre

Genre

• Everything belongs to a genre, it is presented to the audience through codes and conditions. 

• A genre is something that we can categorise from typical codes and conventions through things such as narrative and mise-en-scene. 

• Genre is a critical tool that helps us study texts and audience responses to texts by dividing them into categories based on common elements. 

• Genre conventions inform the text which are produced by institutions who are aware of what makes a particular genre. This is a cultural awareness between the institutions and audience.
• Archetype = Original stereotype of a genre.

• Comedy and animation are not genres, they are styles or treatments.

Daniel Chandler 2001

He argues that the word genre comes form the french word for 'kind' or 'class'. The term is widely used in rhetoric, literary theory, media theory to refer to a distinctive type or 'text'. 

Barry Keith Grant 1995

All genres have sub-genres

This means that they are divided up into more specific categories that allow audiences to identify them specifically by their familiar and what become recognisable characteristics.

Steve Neale 1995

He suggests that genres are dynamic and evolve over time. They are not systems, they re processes of systematisation, this is often dependant of the time period of which they were created.  

Jason Mittel 2001

He argues that genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience, and cultural practices as well.

Industries use genre to sell products to audiences. Meda producers use familiar codes and conventions that very often make cultural references to their audience knowledge of society, other texts.

Genre allows audiences to make choices about what products they want to consume through acceptance in order to fulfil a particular pleasure.

Martha Reeves and The Vandellas - Nowhere to run (1965)
Video is in a car factory which represents the genre of Soul and Motown due to this being dominated by black artist. Therefore the video represents the ideologies of a black member of society during the time having to do manual labour and have a hard life in order to make a living. The ideologies of this genre therefore reflect what live is like at the time of which the song is made, this is reinforced through the video itself. 

Rick Altman 1999
Emotional pleasures: The emotional pleasures offered to audiences of genre films are particularly significant when they generate a strong audience response.
Visceral Pleasure: 'gut' responses and are defined by how the film's stylistic construction elicits a physical effect upon an audience. 
Intellectual Puzzles: Certain film genres such as the thriller or the 'whodunit' offer the pleasure in trying to unravel a mystery or puzzle.

David Bordwell 1989
'Any theme may appear in any genre'
Horror films, for example, are basically just modern fairy tales and often act as morality plays in which people who break society's rules are punished.
Fear of the unknown - the monster is the 'monstrous other' i.e. anything that is scary because it is foreign or different.
Sex = Death - in horror movies, especially Slasher movies, sex is immoral and must be punished.
Duality of man - the conflict between man's civilised and his savage, primal instincts. 
Segregation and alienation - two opposing cultures or beings going through a struggle to survive.

David Buckingham 1993
Argues that 'genre is not simply "given" by the culture: rather, it is in a constant process of negotiation and change.

Jacques Derrida
A postmodern theorist who states "the law of the law of genre...is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity.
For example, short films and music videos are in the process of genre cross-over. 
Some narrative videos borrow from the conventions of short films and in fact are short films. 

The Strengths of Genre theory 
Everybody uses genre theory and understands it. Media experts use it to study texts, the media industry uses it develop and market texts and audiences use it to decide what texts to consume. 
The potential for the same concept to be understood by producers, audiences and scholars makes genre a useful critical tool. It's accessibility as a concept also means that it can be applied across a wide range of texts. 

Music Videos
Music video is a medium intended to appeal directly to youth subcultures by reinforcing generic elements of musical genres.
They are called pop-promos as they are used to promote a band or artist.
Music video are postmodern texts whose main purpose is to promote a star persona (Dyer, 1975)
They dont have to be literal representations of the song or lyrics.

Andrew Goodwin's 6 features of Music video

1. Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics (e.g. stage performance in metal videos)
2. There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals. The lyrics are represented with images. (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting)
3. There is a relationship between music and visuals. The tone and atmosphere of the visual reflects that of the music. 
4. The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work. (a visual style)
5. There is frequently reference to notion of looking (screens within screens, mirrors, stages, etc) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.
6. There are often intertextual reference (to films, TV programmes, other music videos etc)

Hedonism - living purely for pleasure 

My Bloody Valentine - Soon

My Bloody Valentine fall under the alternative genre of Shoegaze which incorporates loud guitar riffs with melodic vocals in order to create a noisy atmospheric feel. Shoegazing (also known as Shoegaze) is a sub-genre of alternative rock that emerged from the United Kingdom in the late 1980's and reached peak popularity in the early 1990.This therefore conforms to Barry Keith Grant's theory due to the band being of an alternative sub-genre as he states that all genres have sub-genres.This allows the audience to divided up into more specific categories that allow audiences to identify them specifically by their familiar features and what become recognizable characteristics. these recognizable characteristic fall under mise-en-scene as they consist of everything from clothing to hair cuts, to instruments choice. The bands long hair and over-sized clothing has become a convention of this alternative genre of music, as has the use of the fender Jazzmaster and fender jaguar and have almost become a stereotype of Shoegaze music, and almost a modern cliche. However due to My Bloody valentine pioneering the genre, the cliche does not apply to them.This also relates to Steve Neale's point of genres evolving over time as this alternative rock genre has evolved into many sub-genres that did not exist in the past, such as Shoegaze. My Bloody Valentine themselves set the archetype of this genre of music and therefore have basically created the genre itself and therefore created the codes and conventions that are associated with it and them as a band. This therefore suggest that everything the band do is conventional of the genre due to the band pioneering it. However they still follow many conventions of alternative rock.