1. Genre

2. Film & TV Genres Film Drama/Comedy Documentary Action/Thriller Sci Fi
Horror
Musical
Western
Sword and Sandals
Romantic Comedy
Chick Flick
High School Comedy TV
Animated
Comedy
Drama
Soap
Police Procedural
Detective & Mystery
Variety
Kids/children
Courtroom drama

3. Film: fiction vs non fiction
TV : scripted vs non scripted
Non scripted: sporting events, game shows, reality shows and news. However, unless they are broadcast live, these "unscripted" TV shows are manipulated and edited to fit a particular running time and a predetermined outcome.

4. Setting: Western, Period, Historical, Courtroom Thriller, WWII Picture
Theme: Disease of the Week, Romance, Alien Invasion
Mood: Horror, Film Noir, Comedy, Tearjerker
Format: 3D, animation, cinemascope, Found footage
Audience: Melodrama, Teen movies, Chick flicks, Family film

5. Generally, the action genres—adventure, war, gangster, detective, horror, science fiction, and of course, the western—were addressed to a male audience, while musicals and romantic melodramas (also known as ‘‘weepies’’) were marketed as ‘‘woman’s films.’’

6. In film, common generic elements include
subject matter,
theme,
narrative
stylistic conventions,
character types,
plots,
and iconography.

7. Ways to identify a Genre
1. Narrative structures:
Types of plots
Plot situations and issues
Characters and character relationships

8. 2. Visual Iconography
Props or costumes and signifiers
Shots and camera movements
Locations and backdrops
Lighting, styles, themes and background music
Mood and tone

9. Iconography
It refers to the signs that we associate with particular genres, such as physical attributes and dress of the actors, the settings and the ‘tools of the trade’ (cars, horses, guns).
It constitutes a pattern of visual imagery that remains common to a genre over a period of time.

10. 3. Ideology and Themes:
Representations of gender, race, sexuality and place
Values and ideologies
Themes

11. The Function of Genre
The concept of genre is useful in looking at the ways in which media texts are organized, categorized and consumed.
The concept of genre suggests that there are certain types of media material, that are recognized through common elements, such as style, narrative and structure.

12. Genre and Audiences
Audiences are said to like the concept of genre because of its reassuring and familiar promise of patterns of repetition and variation.
Audiences become familiar with the codes
and conventions of specific genres. Familiarity through repetition is therefore one of the key elements in the way audiences understand and relate to media texts.

13. Limitations of Genre
1.The concept of genre clearly can have limitations when applied to a range of media texts because of the variety and the need for constant updating of texts that are being produced. Many texts may look similar but are too different to be grouped together

14. 2. Sometimes the category becomes too generalized to be helpful
2. Sometimes the category becomes too generalized to be helpful . Consider the distinction between American fantasy soaps and British realism soap operas.

15. Filmmakers from around the world have responded to the domination of American film by adopting Hollywood genres and ‘‘indigenizing’’ or reworking them according to their own cultural sensibility. Examples are the Italian ‘‘spaghetti western’’ or Hong Kong martial arts films. Other national cinemas have created their own genres. For example, German cinema in the 1920s and 1930s developed a distinctive genre of the mountain film, involving a character or group of characters striving to climb or conquer a mountain. The Heimatfilm, or Homeland film, is another genre of sentimental, romanticized movies about rural Germany and its inhabitants.

16. In Indian cinema, masala (or mixed spice) films combine a variety of heterogenous generic elements, as by inserting musical sequences in a dramatic film in a way uncharacteristic of Hollywood.
In turn, Hollywood genre filmmaking has been influenced by some of these non-American genres. For example, Japanese samurai films