After 40+ years of watching movies, I’ve come to learn a few things about my tastes in film. I don’t want to be taught a lesson (at least not in any non-oblique way). I don’t enjoy movies based on true stories (being rooted in history feels static and without narrative freedom). And 9 times out of 10 my favorite films lean heavily on genre to tell their stories.
There are no clear-cut rules for defining genre–broadly speaking genre is just a method of classification, and as such, is largely up to each individual to both define and subcategorize to their hearts content. High Noon and Rio Bravo are surely both Westerns according to the broad tropes of the Western genre, but, as someone who loves Westerns more than any other genre, only one of those films moves me in a “properly Western” kind of way.
As one creates further personally useful subcategories like “Good-town siege Westerns with a focus on group dynamics” it becomes obvious that genre is just one more way to understand the kind of movies they like. Westerns, Gangster films, Romantic Comedies, Swashbucklers, and Screwball Comedies are all broad genres defined by common tropes and plot elements that let me know a movie might be of interest to myself.
Genre also provides a framework for analysis. By viewing a film in relation to countless other films in the same genre, it can be a comforting starting point to think about the artistic choices made in the movie. This could be a crutch, or at the very least the most primitive way to approach film analysis–but this kind of microscopic examination can be illuminating as well.
The more narrow the genre the more interesting this analysis can be. Take something like a Shaw Brothers Kung Fu film, a genre so narrow that not only are the storylines and plot beat similar, they even reuse the sets (and wigs) from film to film. When watching a new Shaw Brothers film, the aficionado is freed from commenting on the same old formal elements, and instead can dial in on the small things that set the movie apart from the others.
Genre is comforting, it is a warm familiar way to watch exactly the kind of movie you want to watch. Even the sameness of hyper specific genre films can be a freeing way to watch and think about films. It might feel like cheating, but asking oneself why the small genre variations were decided on is no less important than asking the big questions about supposedly more important films.
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