An Introduction to Film

And, of course, academic scholars are not the

only movie lovers who find it useful to categorize

films by genre. Genre has a significant effect on

how audiences choose the movies they attend, rent,

or purchase. Movie reviewers often critique a film

based on how it stacks up against others in its

genre. Most movie-rental retailers organize movies

according to genre (along with more general

catchall classifications like drama and comedy).

Online and newspaper theater listings include a

movie’s genre alongside its rating, running time,

and show time. Of the aforementioned fifteen top-

grossing movies for the weekend of June 24, 2011,

at least nine could be considered genre films:

The Green Lantern (Martin Campbell), X- Me n:

First Class(Matthew Vaughn), and Thor(Kenneth

Branagh) are all part of the action movie subgenre

dedicated to comic book adaptations; Fast Five

(Justin Lin) is a full-blown action movie; Super 8

(J. J. Abrams) is a science-fiction thriller; and

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides(Rob

Marshall) updates the classic swashbuckler movie.

Two top-grossing animated kid’s movie sequels

have adopted action film subgenres: Kung Fu Panda

2 (Jennifer Yuh) is a martial arts film, and Cars 2

(John Lasseter and Brad Lewis) is a spy thriller.

There’s no official name for the emerging genre

that places anthropomorphized celebrity-voiced

animals in straightforward, goal-driven plots that

speak to children’s fears of (among other things)

parental abandonment. But this particular kind of

movie has been around since Dumbo(1941; director:

Ben Sharpsteen) and lives on this particular weekend

in the form of Rio(Carlos Saldanha).

Since genre labels allow us to predict with rea-

sonable certainty what sort of movie to expect, these

classifications don’t just help audiences make their

viewing choices; the people that finance movies

often must account for genre when deciding which

projects to bankroll.

Genres offer familiar story formulas, conventions,

themes, and conflicts, as well as immediately rec-

ognizable visual icons, all of which together provide

a blueprint for creating and marketing a type of

film that has proven successful in the past. Studios

and distributors can develop genre-identified stars,

select directors on the basis of proven proficiency

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Genre studyScholars find genre films to be especially

rich artifacts that can reveal a great deal about the culture

that produced and consumed them, as well as about the

filmmakers who made them. What does Martin Scorsese,

a director associated with gangster films such as Mean

Streets(1973) [1], and Goodfellas(1990) [2], do with a

musical like New York New York(1977) [3]? What do the

forty-eight or so thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock produced in

a prolific fifty-year span tell us about the evolution of our

popular culture, film style, the movie business... and

Hitchcock himself?

GENRE 85