Barry Keith Grant and Steve Neale's evolving genre

Barry Keith recognized how all genres feature a sub genre within them, this means that a media text can be divided up into more specific categories. He suggests that these sub genres allow audiences to identify a product by their familiar and recognizable characteristics. Sub genres are identifiable sub-classes of a larger category for example biopics, chick-flicks, disaster films and many more.

As Barry Keith Grant writes in the introduction of his genre reader, “the work of defining film genres is surprisingly difficult and complex’” [1] because “…recognition of the importance of genre in the cinema is a relatively recent development….although chronologically it narrowly predates the early work of auteur criticism.” [2] Grant takes notice that until the late 1940s and early 1950s – when Robert Warshow and genre pioneer André Bazin wrote the first significant essays on film genre (about gangster movies and about the Western) – films were only distinguished by a phrase (for example, ‘a war movie’) “used as a convenient label to give one an idea of what the story was like, what to expect generally from a film.” [3] As before in literature, in painting and in other forms of art, “genre became a critical term, providing another conceptual framework for understanding movies.” [4] A genre classification can also double as a precise commercial study because it evokes certain audience expectations and therefore it allows one to establish classifications, comparisons, balance-sheets, valuations for the future and so on. Although it has been helpful for cinema studies, classifying films in accordance with their genre remains a difficult and risky endeavor because genre ‘impurity’ is by now, some twenty years after the solidification of genre study, a constant characteristic and a usual practice of the cinema as art and as industry.

Some films trailers within the same genre but display Barry's concept of sub genres are:

Thor the movie is classed as an action, adventure and fantasy

Whereas Jumper however is seen as an action, adventure, science fiction. This is due to the sub genres within the film and the mise en scene within the film. Although both protagonists from both films have similar conventions as they are both 'heroes' the narrative within the film can categorize the films in separate genres.

Steve Neal then begins to explain how genre further processes as it is a form of systematization as it changes over time. This is from new conventions forming and culture changing. An example of this would be horror movies, in the early days of cinema horror movies would have been terrifying however since the audience became familiar with the conventions and cinematography they would now be seen as more of a comedy.

Within my product I am going to use current conventions in order appeal to the audience and make my product more consumable. In terms of sub genres I plan to use the diegesis to represent more of a superhero movie as my protagonist will be very selfless and heroic.