Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

V. Conclusions:
1 Genre Revisited
The artist brings to the genre his or her concerns,
techniques, and capacities – in the widest sense, a
style – but receives from the genre a formal pattern
that directs and disciplines the work. In a sense this
imposes limitations (...). (Buscombe 2003:22)
In film theory, genre refers to the method of categorising a film based on the
perceptible similitudes out of which film meanings are constructed. The term remains
however controversial; within film criticism, there seems to be no agreement about what
exactly the term means or what functions it actually performs. Film genres have been
described as pure invention by some (like Robert Stam), as they seem to spring from the
relationship between a specific production system and a given audience. More and more,
however, we are confronted with a range of Hollywood genres, based on the elements from
recurring patterns which are common to all the commercial films that we can call detective
films, or Westerns, or gangster films. Indeed, when studying film genres, our analysis
tends to focus on formulas, icons, motifs, etc, as the persistent elements common to all
these films. It is by contrasting these familiar elements with other films that the discussion
of genre starts, finding particular meanings in a given film within the context of other
similar films. Through repetition and variation, these genre films arouse expectations and
generate experiences similar to those felt in connection with similar pre-existing films.
Nevertheless, the application of genre is rarely so definite, with clearly demarcated
boundaries. On the one hand, the critical recognition of its place and importance is
relatively recent in the categorisation of cinema. In chronological terms, genre criticism
precedes the early work of auteurism, but its subsequent development has not been as
popular as the auteur theory (in the writings of Andrew Sarris, for example). On the other
hand, critical interest in film studies moved from the signifieds of film to the practice of
signification, in other words, from what a film “means” to how it produces meaning, and
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