“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.”
Genre is a style or category of a piece of art, literature, a song or film etc.
genre should be predicable and expected, but also unpredictable and unexpected. different people see genres differently
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 .
Steve Neale:
The work of Steve Neale is often referred to when discussing genre. One area he looks at, is the relationship between genre and audiences. For example, the idea of genre as an enabling mechanism to attract audiences based around predictable expectations. 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.
For example, 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 (ie genre). Expectations are based not only on key textual elements (as highlighted above) but also around overarching generic structures such as the idea of verisimilitude which involves a clear understanding and knowledge of’various systems of plausibility motivation, justification and belief'(1990 p.46) This brings up quite an important point in relation to the way in which cultural production – in this instance, the generic mass production of film – is able to structure our understanding around realism or how we understand and recognise the construction of reality.