Film Genres

Catalog description

Film genres are a way of classifying films that share similar subject matter and/or similar narrative and stylistic patterns. Grounded in viewers’ expectations about characters, narratives, and visual style, a film genre is a set of conventions and formulas repeated and developed in film history. Examples include comedy, western, melodrama, musical, horror, and crime. The three key functions of genre are to provide models for producing other works; to direct viewers’ formal and thematic expectations; to establish a basis for evaluating other works within the genre. The course will focus on the historical development of a single genre or related genres by identifying the characters, narrative structure, and visual style associated with the genre(s); the reflection of social rituals in the genre(s); the creation of hybrids or sub-genres out of the generic model. The course may be taken for credit more than once with focus on a different genre.