READING & REFLECTION
For this assignment’s reading & reflection task, I have selected the reading “Films: Genres and Genre Theory” by Ib Bondebjerg.
I will admit, genre is not something I have spent much time considering before taking this class (although I obviously know what genres I do and do not like). I’ll watch a low-brow comedy when I’m looking for cheap entertainment, and I’ll stay away from horror movies to avoid ever being too scared, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone to see a film solely because of its genre. Currently, genre exists solely as a tool for attempting to describe a film, or for understanding other people’s descriptions.
One point in the reading I found very interesting was the definition of five “universal story types” by Cawelti (pg. 161). The idea that there are a set number of base ‘genres’ that we can mix and match in different ways to create unique products is intriguing and leads me to think of genre as akin to colour. If we consider genres as soft categorizations, instead of distinctly outlined and binary, then perhaps we should see films as being placed on a ‘colour spectrum’ of genre.
By this logic, we could describe ‘comedy’ as yellow, ‘romance’ as red, ‘sci-fi’ as purple, ‘horror’ as blue, and ‘action’ as green. We can then blend these colours, much like we would with paint, to create the more nuanced subgenres, pink, orange, navy, etc. In the same way that we know the term orange refers to ‘the colour with a bit of yellow and a bit of red’, we know that a rom-com refers to a film with ‘a bit of romance and a bit of comedy’.
This in no way means we can create the language to perfectly represent any given film, as there will always be infinite variations of red, or blue, or white, but to me, this way of thinking provides a better conceptual framework around how I approach discussions of genre.
I think it also helps to note that in the same way two people may disagree on the word which describes a colour, they may also disagree on the way to categorise a film.
One person may describe a colour as beige while another calls it brown, and both descriptions may be equally valid. Our understandings of these terms are never going to be in exactly the same place.
I also find this idea of universal story types raises the question of ‘are there more genres which we have not yet discovered?’, although that is probably outside of the scope of this reflection.
I also really liked the framing of documentary communication as “explorer, reporter, advocate, poet, promoter, and observer” (pg. 164). I think this provides a very interesting alternative to Nicholl’s documentary modes, and these descriptors are something I would like to utilise more in the future.