Post 4: Genre as media concept

The Notion of category evolving into genre plan

Intro:

·         Introduce the importance of genre to industry and consequently, audience.

·         Introduce the emergence of a fragmented audience.

·         Repetition and difference.

Whose interests do generic ideas serve?

·         Film industries

·         Audience seeks gratification and pleasure by decoding the encoded, meaning in generic films.

How did the notion of category evolve or shift into genre?

·         Film studios began to make films in a certain genre

-MGM: Musicals

-Warner Brothers: Gangster films

How did the notion of category evolve or shift into genre? Whose interests do generic ideas serve?

Charley Britton

Genre acts as an important element for film makers; it is a fundamental use by which they communicate through story telling in order to relate and interest specific audiences.  Genre allows viewers to experience escapism, a film can allow us to shape reality into how individuals want their personal life to be, which consequently fulfills the viewers expectations and grants them with pleasure and satisfaction. 

With freedom of choice in interests and individuality in society, audiences expect to be presented with a choice in the films they view.  With an audience demand, film industries were forced into creating generic films which are created in the means of targeting specific categories of people and satisfying their demands.  From this demand, a fragmented audience emerged which meant that many different generic films had to be produced.  Woman wanted different aspects of films, alike with males.  Traditional stereotypes of what each gender would want had to be demolished, and this is when genre was introduced.   Film studios rapidly began focusing on specific genres of films they wanted to create, for example MGM Studios produced musicals, while Warner Brothers introduced the emergence of a gangster sub-genre.  They created this in order to captivate a particular group of viewers and secure success.

With a variety of generic films, industries are becoming dependant on films that created and do not want to gamble with film ideas, Steve Neale referred to this as Repetition and Difference.  Film makers are producing films with great similarities in order to be guaranteed success in the box office charts.  This can be argued that stereotypes of audiences needs are reoccurring.  Taking Romantic Comedies as an example, many are very similar in their narrative.  Todorov explains narratives to have a sequence by which they follow.  Beginning in a state of plenitude, the storyline then switches to a state of chaos, finishing in a circuit with a new equilibrium being restored.  This connotes the audiences’ gratification and pleasure.

Audience seeks gratification and pleasure by decoding the encoded meanings that the film makers create.  While the audience thinks their interests are being served for their personal sake, it is in fact the film industries that are benefiting from generic films as they are able to influence the viewers into what they want to seek in genre and are able to continue reproducing these films and, consequently earn millions of pounds from them.