The most interesting thing I took from the reading was the conventions and rules that are placed into genres. When you think of genres you think of very general and flexible categories for films and other media to fit into, it can be hard to imagine that something so mundane can have so many rules it must follow. I thought it was very interesting to learn about the process of categorizing media into genres.

This topic of rules and conventions within genres reminded me a lot of how many conventions go into things like cinematography and general filmmaking rules. Once again from an outside perspective, a lot of people may think there aren’t so many rules to how a shot is filmed or blocking a busy street fighting scene but when you delve deeper into the process you realize there are a lot of rules like camera angles, shot length, blocking, camera movement, what you may use to move the camera, camera focus, depth of field, 180 rule, 30 degree rule etc. A lot of rules may seem arbitrary, but they make filmmaking into what it is perceived from the outside and allow us to get into these films past simply telling a story. Now looking into genres, we can see a lot of rules similar to this that may also seem arbitrary. When choosing a genre for your film you must think about the narrative, what your goal for the movie is, your target audience, what genre will do the best. Then when categorizing a film you must think about the language used, what kind of jokes or lack thereof were made, how gory was the film, what was it about, was it historical? Then going further within the genres, you have sub genres that you must differentiate which is an entirely new playing field within that genre. I would be willing to bet if you asked the average person to ask all these questions and work within the genre world, they couldn’t. It would be extremely hard for the average person to tell you the difference between romantic drama and rom com past the obvious tell-tale answers.

I thought this reading was very insightful and educational within a film class. It may be a less technical topic but that has proven to not take away the significance or level of complexity that it may have. I think learning this within a film class after learning the most baseline rules allows us to use the rules we have learned and be able to draw our own conclusions about films and think critically about the genre, how the narrative fits within the genre and how do the most technical things in film help to push this genre categorization.