Film Genre - Hybrids & Binary Oppositions

The Western has provided us with an excellent case study of how audiences can recognise a genre through a set of visual and audio codes but also how genre can represent certain themes that might tell us something about the world we live in.

In addition to this, the evolution of a genre might see the themes evolve with the society that creates it. Understanding the themes of a text is something which can sometimes demand rigour and analysis. By the same token, recognising the aesthetic conventions of a film may be complicated if the film uses a combination of different genres, known as a hybrid.

This page should help you understand both whilst at the same time give you tips on how to write decent paragraphs of film analysis.