Apply Genre theorist to your work

Apply Genre theorist to your work:

For my AS coursework I constructed the opening of a film in the genre of coming of age and romantic drama. We took inspiration from films such as If I Stay, The Perks of being a Wallflower and Spectacular now. The storyline of our film was that a teenage girl, Melody is in a critical life condition whilst her boyfriend Harry was away on your with his band the 98 boys which means that all characters have big choices to make that could affect them and the others around them but what will they choose?

Rick Altman states that films can be categorised into genres in 3 different ways: semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic. The semantic codes, (Altman"s building blocks) which clearly indicates our films genre are the location, dramatic piano music and costumes. This clearly indicates our genre as it has been used in other movies such as, Juno.

I can apply Altman's syntactic code to my movie as our film shares many key narrative characteristics in the genre of coming of age drama. For example our protagonist leaves the talk show to see his dying girlfriend to show how intense his love is which can be linked to If I Stay storyline.

Finally I believe that our title best fits Altman's pragmatic approach. We chose to name our film Nostalgia, which clearly indicates to an audience that our film shares similar codes and conventions to such productions as The Fault in our Stars. 

Steve Neale's stance on genre is that it is important for filmmakers in terms of how to attract audiences. He states that "genres are instances of repetition  and difference"maintaining that films only attract audiences by pushing the boundaries of its genre. An example of this would be the horror genre where recent movies have parodied the original codes and conventions on horror films - e.g. Scream. We have replicated certain genre codes of romantic drama films by including elements such as having a strong theme of painful and desperate love which impacts the   family, friends, band members and fans therefore also pushing the boundaries of this genres themes.

Me and my partner decided that our pre-title sequence should hook the audience by clearly indicating our genre through narrative codes. Roland Barthes discusses narrative in terms of a number of codes that are used to help to unravel the text for the viewer. One of these is his enigma code - the purpose of this is to keep the audience gripped, by having them guess what is going to be happening next and questioning how the plot will unravel. In order to hook our audience we cut from Melody alone in the hospital room to Harry leaving the TV talk show to start the  sequence of shots showing the flash backs of the restaurants and journey of their love that will result in the audience wondering what will happen next and how Melody ended up in hospital.