Cover Work

Unit one:

• Genre is a French word meaning "Type" or "Category
• Genres are not fixed, they are used to help us understand films
• Genre is associated with commercial filmmaking, which means that most of the films discussed in terms of genre are part of mainstream commerical cinema.
• Films outside the main stream are called "art films" which are intended for select or specialist audiences

Unit Two:

• Iconography can be both visual image and sound image
• Most genres offer a narrative of Reassurance
• Some characters are so"tightly" associated with the genre that they then become "Generic types"
• The repetoire of elements feature iconogrpahy, style, setting, narrative, charcters, themes

Unit Three:

• "Hollywood is a generic cinema, which is not quite the same as saying it is a cinema of genres" Richard Maltby, 1995
• Genre began to decline because genre theorist argued that "genres began as fairly loose groupings that gradually evolved towards a "mature" or "classic" period."
• "B" films and genres, like genre fiction, were seen as "low status" by critics and commentators

Unit Four:

• 
  There are many pleasures that audiences get from film genres. These pleasures are the following:

Emotional Pleasures

Visceral Pleasures

Intellectual Puzzles

Counter-Culture Attraction

Unit Five:

• Ellis (1992) and Dyer (1987) have suggested ways in which audiences engage with stars and why they have become central to our understanding of hollywood cinema.
• The relationship between stars and genre or even generic elements are fluid
• Dyer identifified various major stars from the studio system as represeneting "social types" across a range of films:

1. the " good joe"
2. the "tough guy"
3. the "pin up"
4. the "rebel"
5. the "independent women"