Rick Altman- Genre Theory

Rick Altman is a theorist for film who wrote a book titled Film/Genre. He proposed the SEMANTIC/SYNTACTIC APPROACH.

With this approach, genre is considered in two ways:

1. SEMANTIC

These are the conventions of genre that communicate to the audience, such as the cast & characters, props, music, camerawork, and others. It is to show that these examples link clearly to the audience to identify the genre. An example of this is in a Historical film; the audience would expect everything to match up with the time period the film is set in in an obvious and clear way.

2. SYNTACTIC

This focusses on the structure of the narrative and how it follows a typical storyline. For example in a romance you would expect the plot to follow along the lines of: meet - dislike - like - love

This approach enables us to read any genre in a more sophisticated but simpler way.