Key Concepts - Genre [Keelan]

• Genre is a category or type for a piece of entertainment or art. For example, a movie or music. Genre helps a piece of art or entertainment to be identified as they are formed of similar conventions. 

• Giving things a specific genre is a key part of capturing a target audience. This is because some of the audience may only take interest into certain types of films, for example, Horror. If someone is interested in only Horror films, they're not going to watch a comedy when expecting something else.





(I Spit On Your Grave, 2010)

• Sometimes Genre can be generally targeted towards a certain audience as well. The majority of the target audience for a film such as the one to the right (I Spit On Your Grave), would be males. Typical conventions of a film in this Genre would be lots of blood, gore and violence. This really helps to identify a target audience. As you can see, this is even identifiable from the poster.

• There are also several other ways of identifying what genre or genres a, for instance movie belongs to. A key one would usually be the setting, a film of the Romance Genre would not be in a dark gritty alley of which a Horror would usually be associated with. It would be in a nice location, with the sun beaming and a blue sky.

• A piece of media text generally belongs to one specific genre, this is because it adopts certain codes and conventions of similar products in the genre.

• This is different to films as most usually span across several Genres, these are labelled Hybrid. A Hybrid is a Genre in fiction that as conventions and elements from more than just one Genre.

• A theorist named Rick Altman (Formerly Charles Altman), is a film theorist who has a theory that Genre can be analysed in two different ways.

-Through Syntactic Codes and through Semantic Codes

- Syntactic codes are codes of narrative structure. This means its what the audience is going to expect to happen in the film. For example, In a Horror film, the audience would expect someone to get killed.

- Semantic codes is a structure in which the genre communicates the meaning to the audience rather. This can be done through things such as props, sound, setting and camera work (the shots used, restricted and unrestricted narrative).