بازاندیشی ژانر: از طبقه‌بندی‌های کلاسیک تا تقسیم‌بندی سینمایی

Rethinking Genre: From Classical Classifications to a Cinematic Taxonomy

1. Introduction: Genre as Everyday Recognition There is hardly any viewer who cannot recognize what genre a film belongs to, while many audiences remain uncertain about its style. A teenager leaving the cinema may not know whether a film is realist, expressionist, or postmodern in style—but almost everyone can tell whether it is horror, comedy, or melodrama.

This everyday accessibility shows something crucial: genre belongs to reception. It does not require academic expertise or technical literacy. Genre is a shared code that bridges the gap between ordinary spectators and professors. One can easily imagine a professor asking a teenager at the exit: “What genre was this movie?”

Yet this very simplicity shows the limits of reducing cinematic classification to only “style” and “genre.” We need a richer, more systematic framework.

2. Historical Glimpses In classical Greece, genres were seen as absolute categories. Tragedy, comedy, and epic were fixed modes of representation, each tied to particular subject matter and performance. This system worked as long as the arts were controlled by elites and shared expectations were stable.

During the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, critics tried to expand these categories, but they often confused style with genre. For instance, labeling realism or naturalism as genres is misleading: these are stylistic orientations, not genres. Such confusion meant that analyses frequently misclassified works. A film can be realist in style yet melodramatic in genre, or surrealist in style yet horror in genre.

This conflation haunted genre criticism until the late twentieth century.

3. Theoretical Turns Several key interventions reshaped genre theory:

Mikhail Bakhtin (The Problem of Speech Genres, 1986) emphasized that genres are recognizable patterns of speech-in-context. They are not abstract forms but pragmatic tools of communication.

Carolyn R. Miller (Genre as Social Action, 1984) defined genres as typified rhetorical actions. Genres are not containers but ways of doing things with discourse.

Jacques Derrida (The Law of Genre, 1980) made the most radical claim: texts do not “belong” to genres; they “participate” in them. The marks of genre are never entirely inside or outside a work. Genre is inherently hybrid, impure, and unstable. Derrida’s paradox—the law of genre is that genre has no law—means that genre does not remain in the work itself, but comes alive at the boundary of recognition in the audience.

Later, scholars such as Charles Bazerman and Amy Devitt expanded the view of genre as cognition, as activity system, and as social practice. Genres shape how communities produce and use knowledge.

4. Genre as Reception: The Dracula Example These theoretical insights become clearer through lived experience. As a teenager, I remember hiding under a blanket while watching Dracula, terrified of the vampire’s teeth. Today, many teenagers laugh at the same image.

The subject matter and iconography have not changed, yet the genre attribution has. In the 1930s and 40s, the vampire’s fangs were symbols of pure horror. Today the same image is often seen as camp or cliché.

Why?

Historical distance: What once shocked now appears naïve.

Media change: Digital effects and new aesthetics reshape expectations of horror.

Viewing habits: New generations, raised on parody and hybrid genres, consume horror with irony.

This example illustrates Derrida’s point: genre does not remain in the text; it emerges in the shifting horizon of recognition between text and audience.

At the same time, we should note that the vampire as a cultural icon can still terrify. What has shifted is the tone: fear no longer comes from Dracula’s simple fangs but from psychological atmospheres, graphic violence, or modernized horror scenarios. Tone, therefore, plays a decisive role: the same subject matter can appear as serious horror in one context or parody in another.

5. Changing Perceptions of Reality and Style This relativity is not limited to genre. The other four categories—medium, style, format, and tradition—are also dependent on reception.

Medium: Cinema in 1900 was perceived as magical spectacle; today the same medium is part of everyday life.

Style: Perceptions of realism differ across cave paintings, Greek sculpture, Balzac’s novels, and contemporary cinema. Each era redefines “reality,” shaping both artistic creation and audience reception.

Genre: As noted, the vampire’s horror is fantastical, yet in the 1930s it felt tangible; today it often feels unreal or even comic.

Format: A 10-minute short in 1910 was a complete cinematic experience; today it may be regarded as a student exercise or promotional video.

Tradition: Bollywood in the 1950s evoked nostalgia and national identity; today, for some global viewers, it signifies kitsch or exaggerated spectacle.

Thus, all five categories are historically relative. None have fixed essences; all depend on shifting cultural horizons.

6. Toward a Cinematic Taxonomy To avoid confusion, we need a broader system that distinguishes these levels. One proposal is the five-part Cinematic Taxonomy:

Medium – material basis (film, television, streaming, VR).

Style – expressive modes (realism, surrealism, expressionism).

Genre – narrative categories and audience expectations (horror, melodrama, musical).

Format – industrial/technical packaging (short, feature, serial, IMAX).

Tradition – cultural-historical lineages (Bollywood cinema, Ashura films, Hollywood studio system).

This taxonomy clarifies why “realism” is not a genre, why “IMAX” is not a style, and why “Bollywood” is neither just medium nor genre. It situates genre within a larger ecosystem of cinematic categories.

7. Conclusion Genre is not a fixed essence but a tool of recognition, reception, and social practice. From Aristotle’s taxonomy to Derrida’s paradox, from Bakhtin’s speech genres to Miller’s rhetorical actions, the history of genre theory reveals both its necessity and its instability.

The Dracula example shows how audience horizons transform genre across generations: what was once horror may now be comedy. Similarly, shifts in the perception of realism across cave art, Greek sculpture, Balzac’s novels, and today’s films show that even style, medium, format, and tradition depend on historical reception.

Therefore, genre studies must move beyond purely literary inheritances and embrace frameworks that integrate medium, style, format, and tradition alongside genre. Only then can we resolve the contradictions that have long troubled genre criticism.

References (selective, not overwhelming) Bakhtin, M. (1986). The Problem of Speech Genres.

Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping Written Knowledge.

Derrida, J. (1980). The Law of Genre.

Devitt, A. (1993). Generalizing about Genre.

Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as Social Action.

Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Genre studies. In Wikipedia.