Content area
Full Text
It is arguable that no concept in film study is more central or more problematic than the concept of film genre. Stanley Cavell, for example, refutes "essence of the medium" arguments such as Panofsky's by remarking that the "medium" which matters most in cinema is generic and formal rather than material. "The first successful movies,", says Cavell, "the first moving pictures accepted as motion pictures-were not applications of a medium that was defined by given possibilities, but the creation of a medium by their giving significance to specific possibilities"- by which Cavell means significance of the sort embodied by character types ("types are what carry the forms that movies have relied on") and genres ("for a cycle is a genre. . . and a genre is a medium").1
Andrew Tudor, on the other hand, finds the notion of genre problematic nearly to the point of uselessness, particularly as regards its application to the practical task of film criticism. Thus Tudor describes the scholarship of Jim Kitses and André Bazin on the western as being caught by the "empiricist dilemma." That is, "they are defining a 'Western' on the basis of analysing a body of films which cannot possibly be said to be Westerns' until after the analysis."2 And Tudor goes on to argue that the genre notion is only interesting when used to describe audience expectations: genre has very little to do, for Tudor, with characteristics of films but rather it serves to describe "conceptions held by certain groups about certain films" (p. 147).
In Movie 20 Douglas Pye counters Tudor's first point by appealing to E. H. Gombrich and Wittgenstein: both argue a notion of "family resemblances" loose enough tq be flexible but conceptually specific enough to be useful. Thus, while no single "western" will employ every convention or serve as a perfect model for the genre, the generic term "western" will remain valid for indicating that place where a group of specific aesthetic conventions or conceptual categories intersect. That such conventions exist for particular genres is empirically verifiable (Pye writes at length on the tradition of the western from Fenimore Cooper to Howard Hawks); and the system of such conventions, as formalized by such as Northrop Frye and Tzvetan Todorov, is powerful enough,...