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The Idea of Film Genre
Film genre can be described in different ways:
a) A film that uses established characteristics of a particular genre in order to be financed, produced, exhibited and advertised as a (particular) genre film.
b) A set of established conventions used by filmmakers to create a recognizable, and to some extent predictable, film story,
c) A way for audiences to recognize and understand certain films.
Some of the key genres established in the classic era of the Hollywood studio system were: the western, the gangster film, the hardboiled detective film (film noir), the screwball comedy, the musical and the family melodrama.
The Studio System: A Background to Film Genre
Thomas Schatz begins his seminal study, Hollywood Genres, with the US Supreme Court decision of 1915 that had enormous repercussions for the development of the Hollywood studio system, and resulted in the standardization of virtually every aspect of the film industry. This decision unambiguously emphasized the economics of the film industry, stating that 'the exhibition of motion pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted by profit'.1 Schatz points out that, until the 1950s, the major studios (MGM, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, RKO) not only made films but also exhibited and leased them to the theatres they controlled. The five major and some minor studios (Columbia, Universal-International, Republic and Monogram) never controlled more than one sixth of all cinemas in the US, yet they controlled a large number of first-run theatres. In the mid-1 940s, when the Hollywood audience was at its peak, the major studios owned and/or controlled the operations of 126 of the 163 first-run theatres in the twenty-five largest cities.2
The establishment of the studio system created a highly pro- ductive relationship between artists and industri- alists, according to Schatz. Filmmakers appro- priated narrative traditions developed in drama and literature, and producers and exhibitors developed the commercial potential anticipated by previous forms of mass entertainment. It is not surprising that, after the early period of standardizing various aspects of the studio system (1915-1930), the classic era, between 1930 and 1960, was the period in which Hollywood films not only dominated the local market, but also occupied between sev- enty and ninety per cent of...