Repetoire of Elements/Christian Metz Genre Theory

The kind of elements that construct a genre?

Character: They will be the type of character that you will in the genre, so when it comes to horror you will always have the typical helpless woman who cannot escape or protect herself from danger that they will be saved by the 'hero' of the film.

Audience: This is crucial, as it must appeal to a certain audience. Whether this genre is appealed more by males and less by females by others. Or appealed by people who who have certain interests in a genre such as someones who likes watching zombie movies.

Setting: This will be where the film will typically take place, the location or the time period that the film is taking place.

Theme: The theme must be related to the genre and how they make the film to create its theme. The theme is what makes the genre and uses the obvious concepts in that genre.

Style: This the way they portray the iconography in the film, the elements to present its genre. For example the use of lighting, for the genre horror you would see natural lighting to create the tension.

Iconography: Within films this is the symbolic meaning of an image that you would see in the type of genre you are watching. This will allow audiences to understand why they used that certain image or object in the movie because it is what you would typically find in the genre.

Narrative: This will help support the genre plot structure, using narratives to explain and narrate over certain scenes to help the viewer to understand meanings.

Christian Metz was a  french film theorist, who was born in Beziers, France. He was best known for pioneering the application of Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of semiology to film.

However he had a genre theory that there is 4 development stages that is applied to  each of the genres.

The 4 stages are: classical, experimental, parody and deconstruction. 

Experimental - 
It is where a genre will be established, it will experiment with the different scenarios or sceneries when producing the film.

Classical - 
Structuring on narrative, to develop codes and conventions of the genre.

Parody -
To mock the genre, changing the structure of one film and make it into a comedy.

Deconstruction - 
When taking one genre and putting it together with another, this creates a sub genres or a hybrid. Most genres will now have sub-categories, such as thriller there are many sub categories e.g. sci/fi/thrillers.