subcategories. These distinctions are both useful
and inevitable. Any art form practiced by ambi-
tious innovators and consumed by a diverse and
evolving culture can’t help but develop in multiple
directions. When filmmakers and their audiences
recognize and value particular approaches to both
form and content, these documentary or experi-
mental subcategories are further differentiated
and defined. And the moment such a distinction is
accepted, filmmakers and viewers will begin again
to refine, revise, and recombine the elements that
defined the new categorization in the first place.
Genrerefers to the categorization of narrative
films by the stories they tell and the ways they
tell them. Commonly recognized movie genres
include the Western, horror, science fiction, musi-
cal, and gangster film. But this is far from a complete
list. The film industry continues to make action
movies, biographies (biopics), melodramas, thrillers,
romances, romantic comedies, fantasy films, and
many others that fall within some genre or subgenre
category.
A long list like that may lead you to believe that
all films are genre movies. Not so. A quick scan of
the movies in theaters during a single week in 2011
reveals many narrative films that tell stories and
employ styles that don’t fit neatly into any existing
genre template. The nongenre titles filling out the
top fifteen box-office leaders during the week of
June 24, 2011, for example, included Midnight in
Paris(Woody Allen), The Tree of Life(Terrence Mal-
ick), Bad Teacher(Jake Kasdan), Mr. Popper’s Pen-
guins(Mark Waters), and Judy Moody and the NOT
Bummer Summer(John Schultz). And genre is cer-
tainly not the only way that narrative movies are
classified. The film industry breaks down films
according to studio of origin, budget, target audi-
ence, and distribution patterns. Moviegoers often
make viewing decisions according to the directors
and/or stars of the films available. Film scholars
may categorize and analyze a movie based on a
wide range of criteria, including its specific aes-
thetic style, the artists who created it, its coun-
try or region of origin, the apparent ideologies
expressed by its style or subject matter, or the par-
ticular organized cinematic movement from which
it emerged.
Unlike these film movements (such as French
New Wave or Dogme 95), in which a group of like-
minded filmmakers consciously conspire to create
a particular approach to film style and story, film
genres tend to spring up organically, inspired by
shifts in history, politics, or society. Genres are
often brought about inadvertently—not through any
conscious plan, but rather because of a cultural need
to explore and express issues and ideas through
images and stories. Many classic genres, including
Westerns, horror, and science fiction, emerged in
literature and evolved into cinematic form during
the twentieth century. Others, such as the musical,
originated on the Broadway and vaudeville stages
before hitting the screen. Some, like the gangster
film, were born and bred in the cinema. Cultural
conditions inspire artists to tell certain kinds of
stories (and audiences to respond to them), the
nature of those narratives motivates certain tech-
nical and aesthetic approaches, and eventually the
accumulation of like-minded movies is detected,
labeled, studied, and explicated by cinema scholars.84 CHAPTER 3TYPES OF MOVIES
Cinema of ideasAll cinema is about ideas——many about
the idea of cinema itself——and there are many ways to
approach making one. Some filmmakers find nothing more
challenging than making a movie about an idea for its own
sake. With The Tree of Life(2011), writer/director Terrence
Malick gently deals with such abstract ideas as life and
death, love, family, joy and sorrow, the flow of time, and
whether or not eternity exists. Its visual impact, produced
by vivid images of our natural world, creates an overlaying
structure, under which he gently tucks a beautifully realized
account of one family’s life in the 1950s American Southwest,
thus letting us experience the universe and the individual.
But its principal purpose, like that of all cinema, is to make
us see and help us understand its ideas.