Genre

Genre, defined as: A way of categorising compositions/texts (film/TV/music/literature ect) based on a certain criteria- a check list of expectations and convections.

There are many reasons why genre is important:

·         It is a way to organise the massive amounts of text available

·         Audiences use it to make preliminary judgments

·         It creates relations between audience and producers

·         It reinforces our values and ideas

·         It creates a structural framework that can be adhered to or played with

From my research I came across film theorist Janet Staiger who says genre can be indentified using the following methods:

Idealist- Judging texts by a predetermined standard

Empirical- Comparing similar texts, such as those already assumed as the same genre

Social Conventions- Using an accepted cultural consensus

A priori- Using common generic elements that are identified in advance

Genre though, does have its limitations. At a basic level it is subjective, what one man finds funny another man see a serious side. Some texts feature many elements and are too sophisticated to fit into one category e.g Titanic which could be viewed as Romance, Action, Blockbuster or Historical Drama. A very contemporary problem is that the genres are consistently changing and few categories can be seen as ‘typical’.

The genre of our video is comedic, which is shown though our contrast of politics and humorous acting. My contrasting the two mise en scence’s we have experimented in a creative style of genre. Jan Feuer’s article in ‘Genre Study and Television’ states that ‘genres is not organic in their conception- they are synthetic: artificial creations of intellectuals’ so you could argue we have helped create our new ‘contrasting comedy’ genre.

In this photo I am dressed in a suit at a computer, the mise en scene of a business location- yet I am welcoming voters with cheese and wine. You will also notice the computer screen says 'The Midnight Beast' on it as we self-promote and add to our mise en scene. Self-promoting is very common for musical artists, and example would be the song 'Written in the Stars' by Tinie Tempah. Eric Turner plays piano and singing in the chorus, during his rap Tinie promotes Eric Turner by mentioning him: 'Eric Turner, Lets Go'.