Christian Metz
French film theorist
- December 12th 1932 – September 7th 1993.
- Believed that there are always certain structures that go into the constitution and pleasure of cinematic spectator.
- Also that genre is developed in four stages:
Stage one: Experimentation
Setting up building blocks for the future texts of the genre. This is when the generic codes and conventions are being developed.
Stage two: Classic
Texts which become seen as iconic of the set codes and conventions
Stage three: Parody
Media texts which mock the codes and conventions of genre becoming farcical.
Stage four: Deconstruction
Texts which begin to unpick the well-established codes and conventions to form hybrids and often ‘unconventional’ texts from the genre.
Example of Parody -
Scary Movie 4
Example of Parody -
Scary Movie 4
Scary Movie 4 is a parody of 'War of the 'Worlds' and 'The Grudge' and 'Saw', all three films are thriller. This one film combines them all and turns it into one big comedy film as the final of 'The Scary Movie' sequence. This makes the element of murder and death into one big joke of life and the murderers themselves not having the seriousness of typical murderers.
Gunther Kress
- Born 26h November 1940
- Professor of Semioties and education at the Institute of Educaion of the University of London
- He is a world leader in the study, theorising and exploration of the multimudality and its impact on communication in an inerasingly fragmented, individualised world.
- Believes that 'sequencing' and 'staging' is relevant, his conception of genre remains broader.
- Also believes that genres and new genres are developed when situations in society change.
- A situation is essentially a social aswell as a rhetorical concept, genres change with society.
- Argues that genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them.
* Essentially Kress believes that texts are embedded with assumptions about the 'ideal reader' including their attitudes towards the subject matter and often their class, age, gender and ethinicity.
Bad Meets Evil ft Eminem - Fast Lane.
This video is a Rap/Hip Hop genre music video, however it does not consist of the same characteristics as the 'old school' rap music videos. The video is made up of various animations which give a comedy sense to video, no explicit use of drugs or girls are shown as typical videos in this genre show. Society has become largely aware of drug use and its effects, Eminem is a prime example as he himself has just recently come out of rehab due to drugs. No women/girls are portrait as inferior to the two men in the video, again society shows that women are no longer inferior and property of men.
David Buckingham
His research focuses on children's and young peoples interactions with electronic media and media education. He relates the development of genre to the complex issue of ever-changing identities.
He says "Genre is not... simply 'given' by the cultures rather it is constant process of negotiation and change".
He also explores the development of how individuals understand the concept of identity. According to Buckingham, as we grow older our understanding of identity becomes very complex. It is no longer a simple method of just establishing gender.
Identity -> Genre = unique and ever-changing.
Buckingham notes,
"There has hardly been any empirical research on the ways in which real audiences might understand genre or use this understanding in making sense of specific texts"
Children start to understand different genres according to the stereotypes they are exposed to.
It would be a mistake to regard the data as a demonstration of children's pre-existing 'cognitive understandings' since he stresses that categorization is a social process as well as a scognitive one. Never the less, his finding do offer some evidence that children progressively acquire a discourse of genre as they mature that is, a set of terms which facilitate the process of categorization or tleast make some tends of categorization possible.
This is an image of JLS, a famous pop boy band. The type of clothes and song they sing are seen as 'gay' to a large audience however none of these four are homosexual.
