Genre.

Genre

Genre is a French word that refers to type or category. It helps people to choose what movie they'd like to watch, to describe what they've watched using just some words and it identifies groups of film that have common characteristics.

Genre was used at the beginning of the 21st century by a film viewer who described "Singing in the Rain" (Donen/Kelly, 1952) using the term "musical". This wasn't the only example he made, but there are a few more... The genre can be also decided basing on the settings, topic, theme, mood, target audience and budget.

In media studies there's a classification of media texts into types groupings. Genre then is made of:

-Narrative, what's the story about...

-Iconography

-Characters, typical characters depending on the genre. On crime movie, there's always a killer, police, commissioner...

-Setting, where the story is placed: war, western, urban.

-Technology

There are so many different genres, pure and hybrids. The Pure are all of those movies which have just one genre. The hybrids are all those movies which are mixed with more than one genre for example really usual is romance-comedy, most of the films now take part of this category. Down here, I wrote some examples but there are obviously many more...