Film genres are easier to spot than to define, and they keep shifting
When The Great Train Robbery came out in 1903, it was sold as a chase film, a railroad film and a crime film. Today it counts as a landmark early Western. Film genres feel obvious, yet they drift over time, blend constantly, and some theorists doubt they exist outside critics' heads.
A genre groups films by shared story elements, look, or the feelings they aim to provoke. Some labels point to a setting, as the Western and the space opera do; others to a subject, like the sports film; others to mood, like horror or comedy; and some to audience or budget, from the teen film to the B movie. Alan Williams sorts all cinema into three broad families: narrative, avant-garde and documentary.
Genre shapes craft. Film noir leans on flashbacks and low-key lighting, horror on tight framing, romantic melodrama on lush strings, while science fiction often gets electronic scores. Stock characters come attached too: noir has its femme fatale and hardboiled detective, the Western its gunslinger and schoolmarm. Technology plays a part, with widescreen suiting the open plains of Westerns and computer-generated imagery serving fantasy series such as Harry Potter.
Hollywood's studio system between the 1920s and 1950s favoured genre pictures because they were dependable products, easy to make and easy for audiences to read. The same assembly-line logic runs through the James Bond series, which keeps its formula of action, gadgets and colourful villains even as stars and directors change. English used the word genre for art and literature from at least 1770, and by the 1950s André Bazin was using the Western to think through the idea.
Pure examples are rare. The Band Wagon (1953) drops film noir and detective touches into a ballet sequence, and 1970s New Hollywood parodied genres so often that labels blur. Robert Stam asks whether genres exist in the world or only in analysts' minds, and definitions vary by country: American audiences tend to picture war films about conflicts with heavy US involvement, such as the world wars and Vietnam.
Source: Film genre
