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A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre Author(S): Rick Altman Source: Cinema Journal, Vol University of Texas Press Society for Cinema & Media Studies A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre Author(s): Rick Altman Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1984), pp. 6-18 Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225093 . Accessed: 17/10/2011 21:25 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Texas Press and Society for Cinema & Media Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema Journal. http://www.jstor.org A Semantic/Syntactic Approach To Film Genre by Rick Altman What is a genre?Which films are genrefilms? How do we knowto whichgenre they belong? As fundamentalas thesequestions may seem, they are almostnever asked-let aloneanswered-in the fieldof cinemastudies. Mostcomfortable in theseemingly uncomplicated world of Hollywoodclassics, genrecritics have felt little need to reflectopenly on the assumptionsunderly- ingtheir work. Everything seems so clear.Why bother to theorize,American pragmatismasks, when there are no problemsto solve?We all knowa genre whenwe see one. Scratchonly where it itches.According to thisview, genre theorywould be calledfor only in the unlikelyevent that knowledgeable genre criticsdisagreed on basicissues. The taskof the theoristis thento adjudicate among conflictingapproaches, not so much by dismissingunsatisfactory positions,but by constructinga modelwhich reveals the relationshipbetween differingcritical claims and their function within a broadercultural context. Whereasthe Frenchclearly view theory as a firstprinciple, we Americans tend to see it as a last resort,something to turnto whenall else fails. Evenin this limited,pragmatic view, whereby theory is to be avoided at all costs,the timefor theoryis neverthelessupon us. The clockhas struck thirteen;we had best call in the theoreticians.The more genre criticism I read, the moreuncertainty I notein the choiceor extentof essentialcritical terms. Often,what appears as hesitationin the terminologyof a singlecritic will turn intoa clearcontradiction when studies by twoor morecritics are compared. Now,it wouldbe one thingif these contradictionswere simply a matterof fact. On the contrary,however, I suggestthat these are not temporary problems,bound to disappearas soonas we havemore information or better analysts.Instead, these uncertaintiesreflect constitutive weaknesses of cur- rent notionsof genre.Three contradictions in particularseem worthyof a goodscratch. Whenwe establishthe corpusof a genrewe generallytend to do two thingsat once, and thus establishtwo alternategroups of texts, each corre- Rick Altman is associate professor of Film, French, and ComparativeLiterature at the Universityof Iowa. His book on the problemsof genre criticism,history, and theory, as seen through the musical, will soon be publishedby Indiana University Press. 6 Cinema Journal 23, No. 3, Spring 1984 spondingto a differentnotion of corpus.On the one hand we have an unwieldy list of texts correspondingto a simple,tautological definition of the genre (e.g., western= film that takes place in the AmericanWest, or musical= film with diegeticmusic). This inclusive list is the kind that gets consecratedby generic encyclopediasor checklists. On the other hand, we find critics, theoreticians, and other arbitersof taste sticking to a familiarcanon which has little to do with the broad, tautologicaldefinition. Here, the same films are mentioned again and again, not only because they are well known or particularlywell made, but because they somehowseem to representthe genre more fully and faithfullythan other apparentlymore tangentialfilms. This exclusive list of films generally occurs not in a dictionarycontext, but instead in connection with attempts to arrive at the overall meaning or structure of a genre. The relative status of these alternate approachesto the constitutionof a generic corpus may easily be sensed from the followingtypical conversation: -I mean, what do you do with Elvis Presley films? You can hardly call them musicals. -Why not? They're loaded with songs and they've got a narrativethat ties the numbers together, don't they? -Yeah, I suppose. I guess you'd have to call Fun in Acapulco a musical, but it's sure no Singin' in the Rain. Now there's a real musical. When is a musicalnot a musical?When it has Elvis Presley in it. What may at first have seemed no more than an uncertaintyon the part of the critical community now clearly appears as a contradiction.Because there are two competing notions of generic corpus on our critical scene, it is perfectly possiblefor a film to be simultaneouslyincluded in a particulargeneric corpus and excluded from that same corpus. A second uncertainty is associated with the relative status of theory and history in genre studies. Before semiotics came along, generic titles and definitions were largely borrowed from the industry itself; what little generic theory there was tended therefore to be confused with historical analysis. With the heavy influence of semiotics on generic theory over the last two decades, self-conscious critical vocabulary came to be systematically preferred to the now suspect user vocabulary. The contribution of Propp, Levi-Strauss, Frye, and Todorov to genre studies has not been uniformly productive, however, because of the special place reserved for genre study within the semiotic project. If structuralist critics systematically chose as object of their analysis large groups of popular texts, it was in order to cover over a basic flaw in the semiotic understanding of textual analysis. Now, one of the most striking aspects of Saussure's theory of language is his emphasis on the inability of any single individual to effect change within that language. The fixity of the linguistic community thus serves as justification for Saussure's fundamentally Cinema Journal 23, No. 3, Spring 1984 7 synchronic approach to language. When literary semioticiansapplied this linguisticmodel to problemsof textual analysis, they never fully addressed the notionof interpretivecommunity implied by Saussure'slinguistic commu- nity. Preferringnarrative to narration,system to process, and histoire to discours, the first semiotics ran headlong into a set of restrictions and contradictionsthat eventually spawned the more process-orientedsecond semiotics. It is in this context that we must see the resolutely synchronic attemptsof Propp,Levi-Strauss, Todorov, and many anotherinfluential genre analyst.' Unwillingto compromisetheir sytems by the historicalnotion of linguistic community, these theoreticians instead substituted the generic contextfor the linguistic community,as if the weightof numerous"similar" texts were sufficientto locate the meaningof a text independentlyof a specific audience. Far from being sensitive to concerns of history, semiotic genre analysis was by definitionand from the start devoted to bypassinghistory. Treating genres as neutral constructs, semioticiansof the sixties and early seventies blindedus to the discursivepower of generic formations.Because they treated genres as the interpretive community, they were unable to perceive the importantrole of genres in exercisinginfluence on the interpre- tive community.Instead of reflectingopenly on the way in which Hollywood uses its genres to short-circuitthe normalinterpretive process, structuralist critics plunged headlonginto the trap, taking Hollywood'sideological effect for a naturalahistorical cause. Genres were always-and continue to be-treated as if they spring full-blownfrom the head of Zeus. It is thus not surprisingto find that even the most advancedof current genre theories, those that see generic texts as negotiatinga relationshipbetween a specific productionsystem and a given audience, still hold to a notion of genre that is fundamentallyahistorical in nature.2More and more, however, as scholars come to know the full range of individualHollywood genres, we are finding that genres are far from exhibitingthe homogeneitywhich this synchronicapproach posits. Whereas one Hollywood genre may be borrowed with little change from another medium, a second genre may develop slowly, change constantly, and surge recognizablybefore settling into a familiar pattern, while a third may go throughan extended series of paradigms,none of which may be claimed as dominant.As long as Hollywoodgenres are conceived as Platonic categories, existingoutside the flow of time, it willbe impossibleto reconcilegenre theory, which has always accepted as given the timelessness of a characteristic structure, and genre history, which has concentrated on chroniclingthe develoment,deployment, and disappearanceof this same structure. A third contradictionlooms larger still, for it involves the two general directionstaken by genre criticismas a whole over the last decade or two. FollowingLevi-Strauss, a growingnumber of critics throughoutthe seventies dwelled on the mythical qualities of Hollywood genres, and thus on the 8 Cinema Journal 23, No. 3, Spring 1984 audience'sritual relationship
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