Edward Buscombe - The idea of genre in American Cinema

The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema, written by Edward Buscombe starts to look at what the term 'Genre' actually means. Buscombe produces three important question in the beginning paragraph of the article "Do genres in cinema really exist, and if so, can they be identified?", "What are the functions they fulfill?" and "How do specific genres originate or what causes them?" These three questions open the start to a detailed article, which looks at genres in American cinema, the idea around them and how you identify each film to fit in a specific genre. 

Looking at the History of genre criticism, Buscombe, started identifying genre in literature, which was first developed by Aristotle when looking at different techniques and subjects. Aristotle examined how he could find ways to separate out poetry "into a number of categories, such as tragedy, epic, lyric, etc." Aristotle's purpose was how each of these categories can then create ways to identify literature to fit, "what were the distinctive qualities of each distinctive kind", as a way to 'establish their relative importance.' From the idea Aristotle created, systems of rules were put in place, to distinguish each subject and analyse the 'precise styles and forms'. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth century, more and more theorists, extended on Aristotle's idea to find more categories to divide literature.  Each new category, had its own tone, form and subject-matter, which could link similar literature together to produce a "species" as it was known back then.

As Buscombe develops the article, he begins to look at 'platonic ideal' - forms meeting with the idea/ perfect ideas of what an object, subject or being was to be. He does this to look at different elements of the definition. He uses the Western movie genre as an example of American cinema. Using the theory of Wellek and Warren, Buscombe, quotes the two "Genre should be conceived, we think, as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (Structure) and inner form (purpose, subject, audience, etc.)".

Linking with what I know as 'Mise-en-scene', Buscombe notifies the criteria needed to identify the genre with what is presented on screen, such as the setting, the clothes, how male and female are presented and the various tools we see on stage. The noticed criteria we see on screen, can identify the subject of the movie and identify what the audience know it to be, to place it in a specific form.

Continuously throughout the Article, Buscombe, quotes and uses theories from other theorist, who have focused on the similar subject he is referring to. Throughout the article, with my understanding, I feel Buscombe is saying that without knowing the history of a film and the usual criteria used within the film, we would not know the genre, without being told. Through the years of Cinema, the audience is able to identify what a specific film has to meet to be fitted with a genre.