Film Genre's Nature, Functions and Study Approaches

Genres are certain types or species of cultural and artistic products having certain elements in common. These shared factors for films include cliché plot, setting, characters, style and iconography. In film studies, genre is an industrial approach and an indicator for consumers as well as a critical concept and a tool for theorizing on the relationships between different sets of films, all at the same time.
In the latter sense, film genres are considered as standard ways for representing gender, class, race and ethnicity. Genres are semantic systems with many values, and therefore, could not be deemed abstract and ideologically pure. Genres could be studied under three rubrics, i. e. industry, audience and text. At the text level, genre is considered as a part of popular culture and a useful tool for dealing with media texts from an academic perspective. Genres are studied through six major approaches: Structuralist, socio-cultural, political economy, aesthetic, family resemblances and the discursive approach.