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

on social aspects through a dramatisation of the individual’s anxiety about his or her own
repressed sexual desires, which are unable to coexist with the morals of civilised life. From
the point of view of social conventions, I also believe that they help us to identify the genre
of a film according to the established cultural consensus within that society.
It is perhaps for this reason that notions about genres are relevant for exploring the
psychological and sociological interplay that exists between the filmmaker, the film, and
the audience rather than for the immediate purpose of interpreting film’s meanings.
Because a genre, as Andrew Tudor suggests, is “what we collectively believe it to be”
(Tudor 1973:139), our expectations of what we believe a genre is condition our responses
to a genre film from the very first frame. This methodology in turn raises theoretical issues.
In particular, it sends us back to the need to develop sociological and psychological
theories of film, involving contemporary versions of social myth. And as spectators we
obviously model our values and behaviours, to a significant degree, on conventions and
traditions that are connected to values within a community.
As critical spaces, genres can thus be said to be artistic constructs or paradigms, and
if “genre” is a vague term with no fixed boundaries, as I said at the beginning, one might
simply doubt their existence. In this respect, film theorist Robert Stam has questioned
whether they are no more than the invention of film critics:
[Are] genres really “out there” in the world, or are they merely the constructions of
analysts? (...) [Is there] a finite taxonomy of genres or are they in principle infinite?
(...) Are they timeless Platonic essences or ephemeral, time-bound entities? Are
genres culture-bound or trans-cultural? (Stam 2000:14)
As I have mentioned in my Acknowledgments, when I interviewed French director
Luc Besson, he too pointed out that he was not convinced that genres existed as such, but
that in the complex exchange system which makes up cinema, what are inaccurately
designated “genres” could rather be seen as autonomous stylistic mechanisms (the various
uses of actors, sets, camera movements, montage) that function as specific signifying
nexuses to ensure that the production of meaning and its ideological agendas can be
prescriptive. Whether this might be considered a way of “existing” is arguable, yet it shows
that genres have served a definite function in the economy of cinema as a whole, involving
a vast quantity of human subjects, a technology, and an evolving set of signifying
practices, etc.
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