What is Genre:

– A style or category of art, music, or literature.

It helps identify how media texts are classified, organised and understood, essentially around SIMILARITIES and DIFFERENCE. Media texts hold similar patterns, codes and conventions that are both PREDICTABLE and EXPECTED, but are also INNOVATIVE (different) and UNEXPECTED.

Genre is a way of thinking about media production (INSTITUTIONS) and media reception (AUDIENCES). 

. . . saddled with conventions and stereotypes, formulas and
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 . . .Scorcese, A personal Journey through American Cinema (1995)

Genre is important for institutions as they become recognisable by their own styles.

The genre may be considered as a practical device for helping any mass medium to produce consistently and efficiently and to relate its production to the expectations of its customers. Since it is also a practical device for enabling individual media users to plan their choices, it can be considered as a mechanism for ordering the relations between the two main parties to mass communication.Dennis McQuail 1987, p. 200

Steve Neale:

He argues that definitions and formations of genres are developed by media organisations (he specifically discusses the film industry), which are then reinforced through various agencies and platforms, such as the press, marketing, advertising companies, which amplify generic characteristics and thereby set-up generic expectations. He suggests that genres are structured around a repertoire of elements which creates a corpus or body of similar texts, which could all belong to the same category

However, Neale also promotes the idea that genre is a process, that genres change as society and culture changes. As such, genres are historically specific and reflect / represent changing ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs of society at any particular moment in history. This may explain, why genres are often blurred across different conventions and expectations, creating sub-genres, or hybrid genres, that mix-up, shape, adapt and adopt familiar ideas and expectations.

In general, the function of genre is to make films comprehensible and more or less familiar.

Turner p.97 ‘Film as Social Practice’

•  predictable expectations– something that could be guessed.
• reinforced– strengthen
• amplify– enlarge upon or add detail to (a story or statement).
• repertoire of elements– essentially features of a film that are repeated within a genre
•  corpus– he main body or mass of a structure.
• verisimilitude– he appearance of being true or real.
• realism– the quality or fact of representing a person or thing in a way that is accurate and true to life.
• construction of reality– the way we present ourselves to other people is shaped partly by our interactions with others, as well as by our life experiences.
• historically specific– Historical people, situations, or things existed in the past
• sub-genres– a genre that is part of a larger genre
• hybrid genres– genre that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres
• different– distinct; separate
• familiar– well known/common