Genre as Institutional Practice
Genre is often used by institutions, organisations and individuals to organise and understand different creative media texts. Think for example, how different music is organised on our Myriad database for the school radio station. Is it possible to categorise a media text as just a single generic expresssion? What happens when they don’t quite fit into a single generic category? What happens if the text doesn’t fit any recognisable categories? All of these questions help us to understand why generic classification is used, by whom and for what purpose.
As Strinati puts forward, ‘genres are commodities shaped by the pressures of capitalism’ (1990, p. 44). Or as Neale puts it, there are ‘financial advantages to the film industry of an aesthetic regime based on regulated difference contained variety, pre-sild expectations adn the re-use of resources in labour and materials (1990, p 64). In other words, to understand genre is really to understand the structures and models that frame the media industry.
As an example, Martin Scorcese, in his 1995 documentary A personal Journey through American Cinema talks about the way Hollywood was organised around large corporations who could be defined by recognisable styles. This shows the extent to which institutions can become genres in themselves – think for example, of Disney, Pixar, Working Title, Momentum, etc etc. While Scorcese recognises the innovation and creativity of many of the ‘tudio directors’, for others, it illustrates the extent to which ‘genres are dependent upon profitability and exemplify the standardisation associated with Hollywood cinema’ (Strinati, p. 48) which could equally applied to other media forms.
. . . saddled with conventions and stereotypes, formulas and
Scorcese, A personal Journey through American Cinema (1995)
clichés and all of these limitations were codified in specific genres. This was the very foundation of the studio system and audiences love genre pictures . . .