Steve Neale said that genres are instances of repetition and difference and that difference is absolutely essential to the economy of genre.
Steve Neale says that a film and it's genre is defined by two things:
- How much it conforms with its genres stereotypes and conventions. He says that a film must conform to these conventions enough that it can still qualify and be identified as a film of that genre.
- How much a film subverts the genres stereotypes and conventions. He says that a film must subvert these conventions enough that it is still viewed as a unique film, not just a copy or a clone.
Steve Neale argues that Hollywood's generic regime performs two inter-related functions:
- To guarantee meanings and pleasures for the audiences.
- To offset the considerable economics risks of industrial film production by providing cognitive collateral against innovation and difference.
- Much of the pleasure of popular cinema lies in the process of difference in repetition i.e. recognition of familiar elements and in the way those elements might be orchestrated in an unfamiliar fashion or in the way that unfamiliar elements might be introduced.
- Genre is constituted by 'specific systems of expectations and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema and which and which interact with the films themselves during the course of the viewing process.
To the distributor genre provides assumptions about who the audience is and how to market the films for that specific audience.
To the audience, it is a label that identifies a liked or disliked formula and provides certain rules of engagement for the spectator in terms of anticipation of pleasure e.g. the anticipation of what will happen in a scene.
Here is a powerpoint slide on Steve Neale's Theory.
