What is Genre Film?

Genre films are distinguished by their style, subject matter, structure and even character types. Among the most common of film genres are musicals, thrillers, crime dramas, horror, and westerns, each of which employs its own characteristic story arcs and stylistic devices, and has its own particular audience.

In a way, genre films are constructed from a set of conventions to which both the audience and filmmaker have given their tacit approval. Moviegoers who enjoy watching the play of flashing blades as swordsmen leap and fly are naturally fond of martial arts films. Those who are enthralled by deep-space exploration and close encounters of the third kind gravitate towards science fiction. In the workaday world, there's no secret kung fu for flying, and extraterrestrials don't just drop in. The magic of genre film is that moviegoers can let their imaginations soar with the images on the silver screen, momentarily escaping the confines of the mundane world.

When the American film industry began to boom in Hollywood in the early 20th century, its success was built on the large numbers of films in the western, crime, and musical genres that were made by the major studios. Even today, almost all major box-office hits are genre pictures.

Taiwan is not without its own genre film tradition. In the 1970s, for example, the popular genres were Chiung Yao-style romances and a kind of gangstery "social realism." But Taiwan's film industry has been in decline since the 1980s. Genre films have given way to the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, et al., directors who rejected the tenets of commercial film. Instead, they proposed a New Taiwan Cinema that returned to Taiwan's historical roots and emphasized humanistic values.

Their New Taiwan Cinema grew out of a reaction against romantic melodramas and socially realistic film, and explicitly rejects genre film. Although Hou Hsiao-hsien's Daughter of the Nile and Goodbye South, Goodbye reference teen movies and gangster films, and Tsai Ming-liang is an avowed fan of musicals, both directors are fundamentally opposed to commercialism in film. They see genre as simply a means for filmmakers to expound upon their ideas, and have little interest in the market potential of genre film. Instead, they make art films that cater to a very small audience of cultural elites, and do little to boost the overall box office of Taiwanese film.