What is generally understood by the notion of film genre ?
Genre, in it’s most basic sense, is a borrowed French word which refers to a type or grouping. In film it is used in general to mean certain groupings or types of film. The way in which these groupings occur, though, and the differences and similarities between them have been an issue of debate. The main arena where this type of classification is used is Hollywood, from it’s classical age right through until present. Critics, producers and viewers all, to some extent, use genre in this basic sense to convey even a vague meaning to others but the meaning of genre can go far beyond this. It is perhaps misleading to think that within all of the varied film institutions, the viewers, the critics, and the film makers themselves there is going to be one overall complete or fixed notion of genre, that even any two people might have the same idea of what this concept means and entails and also the particular variations which can be applied to it in order to categorise individual films. To the
