Genre theory and how it applies to my project

Genre theory

John Fiske - "Any one programme will bear the main charachteristics of it's genre, but is likely to include some from others: ascribing it to one genre or another involves deciding which set of charachteristics are most important"

This applies to our project as we are doing a music video to the kooks. The problem we had was that it was hard to define one genre that they would fall into as they could have gone into acoustic, indie, indie rock or rock. However we decided that it suited the indie genre to having the highest amount of charachteristics.

Richard Maltby and Ian Craven claimed that "The success of Hollywood is reliant on the combination of predictable elements with variation." What they were saying is that the only reason Hollywood is a global success is because we as the audience go into a film with an idea of what to expect and prefer to to be able to predict what is going to happen. There theory suggest that the audience don't like surprises in regards to not knowing what to expect. Personally I disagree with this theory because over time, as we watch more and more films, we build a natural bank of information containing repetitive aspects of genres. For example if you go to see a film which you know nothing about, 9/10 you will be able to tell what genre of film it is within the title sequence.

Auteurs and Iconography-
Auteurs are a group of film makers that were considered to be particularly influential and artistic. What this means is that particular names within all platforms of media incorporate certain personal techniques into the majority of there workings as a sort of signature to show that audience that its there film or music track. An example of this is this Steven Spielberg films there is normally a hue on screen which helps give a better sense of atmosphere. This is how a lot of people identify Spielberg films from others.

Rick Altman was a strong believer in that people shouldn't categorise films or another platform of media into genres. He said that;
"Genre theory's presumes that viewers pre-read text." "Viewers become passive voyeurs" "Genres are therefore restrictive" "I do not acknowledge of allow for the hybrid"
What he means by this is that by putting media into genres they go in with an assumption of what to expect. He also claims that because of this we as an audience don't fully engage with the media but do nothing more than drift in and out making it impossible to have a proper story line.