Genre schema

The components of film narrative, including characters and events, are integrated into ‘a context of situation and of culture’ (Toolan, 2009:5). Genre has been defined using different criteria across various disciplines. For example, Ryall (1975) describes genre as an organizing criterion of artworks and asserts that genres are ‘patterns, forms, styles and structures, which transcend individual art products, and which supervises both their construction by artist and their reading by audience’ (p. 28). Further, Lacey (2000) considers genre as a useful concept in media analysis and defines it as a classifying approach that appears in different media such as literature, television

and film. This means that, for instance, it is highly likely that a science fiction (SF) film is made differently from the science fiction book from which it is adapted due to medium-specific devices and the essential characteristics of the medium in terms of how plot and character are developed.

Within film, genres are more than just simple categories: they consist of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis that viewers bring with them, and, through which they cognitively interact with the on-screen images while watching. Addressing the significant role that genre plays in viewers’ anticipation and assumption, Neal (1980) asserts that ‘[genres] provide spectators with a means of recognition and understanding. They offer a way of working out the significance of what is happening on the screen’ (p.161). Film viewers engage in making predictions based on the cues offered by film text and ground these on genre-generated expectations. Once a text is identified as belonging to a particular genre, viewers activate their expectations about what will happen in the narrative world. The viewers’ body of expectation and hypothesis about particular aspects of film – including narrative, style, characters, costume, make-up etc. – is associated with ‘genre schema’: part of viewers’ prior knowledge of film. Taking a cognitive-constructive approach to genre, Lacey (2000) maintains that genre schema is ‘the repertoire of elements’ repeated in different films that belong to a specific genre and mainly consists of the characters, setting(s), iconography, narrative and style of a text (p. 133). All these visual or thematic motifs offer the basic schema of genre.

Turning now to character, when a viewer recognises the genre of the film they are watching, this activates a set of dramatic roles tied to the characters commonly associated with the particular genre. In some genres, characters with determined functions or dramatic roles can be classed as archetypal or stereotypical. Take for instance, the figure of the femme fatale in film noir; the cowboy dressed in western attire and highly competent at horse riding; the dishonest, evil antagonist; the decent, blonde, dependent, female heroine who is in love with the protagonist: these represent stereotypical characters found in westerns which are repeated in different films of this genre. Drawing on their genre schema, viewers expect films to conform to specific conventions in terms of plot elements (for example, viewers anticipate a musical to involve song and dance scenes), theme (for instance, a common theme of the gangster film genre is the price of criminal success, with the gangster’s rise to power portrayed as a hardening into egoism), film techniques (for example, the action film often relies

on rapid cutting and slow-motion violence), and iconography (for instance, the war film takes place in battle-scarred landscapes).

Further, filmmaker(s) may devise mildly or radically different genres by blending the conventions of a particular genre with those of (an)other genre(s) and coin a cross-genre or hybrid-genre, such as action-comedy, dramedy (drama and comedy), dark fantasy (horror and fantasy) and so on. The Big Lebowski (1998) is an example of blending elements and conventions of different genres including film noir, comedy, crime, western and porn and bringing them all in a hybrid ensemble. The musical dramedy Beloved (2011) is another example of combining the elements of musical, drama and comedy genres in a new context. It is set in the 1960s through the 2000s in five cities (Paris, Rheims, Montreal, Prague and London). And, although the characters use musical dialogue throughout, it is not considered to be a musical because it fails to reference common elements of the genre – most importantly songs interwoven into the narratives which are usually sung by characters and accompanied by dance that advance the plot (Altman, 1999). The film’s generic deviations may cause schema disruption and change the viewers’ existing genre-generated expectations of musicals (for schema disruption see 2.5.1).

Thus, by drawing on genre schema, films are immediately identified in terms of their recurrent elements. Particular genres, such as film noir, SF fiction and western are more easily recognizable in terms of their iconographic features. Others, such as melodrama, have less determined generic elements. This is mainly because, as Piazza (2011:16) points out, over the past two decades film theory has developed as a tool for understanding popular or mainstream cinema, complementing and counterbalancing the other forms of film study such as the auteur approach ‘developed to reconsider those Hollywood directors, who, despite the constraints of the studio system, were able to instil a personal style into their works’ (Schatz, 1981:8, in Piazza, 2011:16). Accordingly, films which constitute themselves as auteur films (the works of filmmakers known as auteurs) and also art films – as independent films which are made primarily for aesthetic reasons and contain unconventional or highly symbolic content, with formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood films – are less genre-based (see 1.4 and Appendix 1 for a detailed discussion on art and auteur film). Accordingly, viewers find it difficult to retrieve the generic qualities in art films and auteur films as they often deviate from accepted genre conventions. This disruption to the way viewers cognitively process genre schema cues can make films of this type

difficult to understand.