Abstract
Genre is a concept used in film studies and film theory to describe similarities between groups of films based on esthetic or broader social, institutional, cultural, and psychological aspects. Genre labels are used by industry in the production, marketing, and distribution of films; by film analysts and critics in historic analysis of film; and also in popular discourse as a framework for audiences in the selection and experience of films. The development of studies of film genre from classical to modern film theory have shifted between focus on different aspects of genres. Studies of particular film genres may stress the social and cultural aspects of genre, as ideological or ritual expressions of American history, values, and mythology, or as part of the Hollywood studio system and the institutional development of production norms. Or studies may stress the formal narrative, visual, iconographic, and thematic structure of particular groups of films in order to find similarities and variations and historical changes and developments. But studies of genre may also focus on psychological aspects of genre as in psychosemiotic and feminist genre studies or in more cognitive and emotional theory of basic prototypes of film genres.
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