Genre & Theme

Before you begin to organize and shoot your film it is important to begin to construct the message you would like to send and how you will go about getting that message across to your audience.  Here we will take a look how the elements "Genre" and "Theme" play a role in how a film is able tell a story.

Genre: Film genres are various forms or identifiable types, categories, classifications or groups of films that are recurring and have similar, familiar or instantly-recognizable patterns, syntax, filmic techniques or conventions - that include one or more of the following: settings (and props), content and subject matter, themes, mood, period, plot, central narrative events, motifs, styles, structures, situations, recurring icons (e.g., six-guns and ten-gallon hats in Westerns), stock characters (or characterizations), and stars. Many films are considered hybrids - they straddle several film genres.

Theme: According to A Handbook to Literature, a theme is "the central or dominating idea in a literary work" (Holman 443). Sylvan Barnet defines theme as the "underlying idea of a work." A theme is an idea that underlies the story, but any work can be about more than one thing, so any can have more than one theme. Therefore, writing about theme is simply identifying what the film is about.

Lets take a look at a few films and see if we can identify Genre and Theme for each:

Here are the results to how you reacted to the fils above.  Lets have a discussion about what you saw and you reaction to how classmates see those films fitting into genre and theme....

Use this doc to get an idea for categories of Genres and Themes.  Make a copy of the Google Doc or download by clicking here.