Towards a catalogue of cine-genres

KEYWORDS:

• Cine-genre
• Adrian Piotrovsky
• film genres
• film theory
• medium specificity

We all know a genre when we see one.

- Rick Altman, ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre’ (1984, 6)

As part of his leading work on film genres in the 1980s, Rick Altman identified a curious dilemma: Despite their easy recognizability, film genres are very difficult to explain. The difficulty, for Altman, was exacerbated by the way that the very premise of a genre as something known and familiar had sidelined the systematic work of theory. And what theorizing had been done, particularly by way of semiotics and structuralism, was prone to confusion and contradiction. The situation had in turn stalled productive inquiries into challenging questions about the origins of film genres and how their contours take shape; and about who sets the terms of classification and how those classifications relate to history. Such questions of genre have since been taken up systematically by scholars with an eye to historicizing and theorizing narrative patterns, iconographies, production and reception practices, and, increasingly, matters of hybridity and national context. And yet, for everything that has been brought into focus, genre studies remain strangely fuzzy on questions of cinema, that is, on what the medium of film has done to shape the origins, contours, and patterns of film genres.

The concept of the cine-genre, first elaborated by Adrian Piotrovsky in 1927, attempts to grapple with just these interrelations of genre and medium. In consonance with theories of film specificity emerging at that time, his ‘Towards a Theory of Cine-genres’ distinguished films whose form and effects were wrought directly from the material and technical possibilities of the medium from films which attempted to transplant techniques and concerns from other arts. Within the terms of the essay, this means separating genres that dynamically exploit the possibilities of photogeny and montage—American comedy and adventure films, French Impressionism, Soviet montage—from the psychologically and expositionally contrived ‘cine-drama’. Does this theory have legs? Can it be extended beyond the necessities of its original context? Robert Bird’s essay in this special issue shows that Piotrovsky’s other writings on cinema indicate a profound ambivalence about genre, leading him to positively speculate on the possibility of a Soviet cinema sui generis. Indeed, ambivalence is perhaps the most appropriate response to film genre, particularly when we consider how it is inextricably bound to a commodity form in which exchange value and use value are perennially locked in conflict. But while Piotrovsky may have ultimately thought that genre was to be overcome (in a future we still await), he left us with the idea that within the seemingly closed industrial circuits of repetition and novelty there existed a ‘catalogue of genres’, a catalogue filled with films that organized themselves in different ways around all the things that could be done with cinema.

Perhaps because of Piotrovsky’s ambivalence, or perhaps because his writings have been overlooked in some circles, very little has been done to understand the place of the cine-genre as a theoretical concept in film and media studies. Taking this neglect as an opportunity, this special issue explores how the concept can help us think anew about a wide range of film genres, including the city symphony, comedy, popular science, and action, among others. Our goal, however, is not to simply revive and expound on Piotrovsky’s ideas; contributors respond to those ideas while considering the ways that questions about the medium open new lines of inquiry into questions about film genre’s relationship with everything from race and capital to 3D and video animation. Together they affirm that a medium-specific orientation provides a valuable way of talking about the durability and enduring (and international) appeal of particular genres (and even generic sequences within texts) beyond strictly structuralist-inflected descriptions of narrative form, however useful those descriptions may be.

But why return to the cine-genre, and why now? As work by Tom Gunning (1984) on early film genres, Robert Spadoni (2007) on horror, and, more recently, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky (2020) on the process genre (see accompanying interview on the NRFTS blog) has shown, the cine-genre concept is useful for highlighting innate tendencies across history and film practices. Just as classical genre theory argued that the content of film genres gravitated toward collective social problems, it could be said that cine-genres tend to address collective understandings of the problems and possibilities of a medium. In the context of contemporary research into the diverse transmedial and intermedial aspects of cinema’s development, the historically contingent features of the film medium, and the movements of genre across media forms, a return to cine-genre may appear as a conservative gesture of re-essentialization. But a consideration of the relation between genre and medium need not rely on a proscriptive reinstatement of boundaries and essence. In fact, cinema’s mutability and relations to other media provide the ground for the renewal and extension of the cine-genre concept. Cine-genres need also not be understood as primary or genetic forms; the contingency of cinema as a medium simply means that entries into the catalogue of cine-genres are shifting and variable. The persistence, recession, and emergence of cine-genres indexes both the specificity and protean nature of cinema, and the creative possibilities therein.

During the development of this special issue, and not too long after sending us his contribution, Robert Bird passed away. In addition to being a scholar of profound importance to the study of Russian cinema and culture, Robert was our teacher, colleague, and friend. We are happy to be able to commemorate his life by presenting his illuminating study of Adrian Piotrovsky here. The editors wish to express their deep gratitude to Christina Kiaer for her assistance in preparing Robert’s essay for publication.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathan Holmes

Nathan Holmes is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Purchase College, SUNY. He is the author of Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination (2018) and numerous essays and articles on cinema, architecture, and urban space.

Colin Williamson

Colin Williamson is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Cinema Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He serves on the Executive Committee of Domitor, and as Reviews Editor for Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal (ANM). He is the author of Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (2015) and has published widely on animation, special effects, film theory, and nontheatrical film.