Gijón Film Festival

The times of the genre: transforming rules into experiences

Sergio Wolf, director of BAFICI, in the book El cine y los géneros: conceptos mutantes. 13th edition, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Film.

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Although we are aware that genres are capable of transversally and not diachronically crossing culture, when mention is made of genres in films, reference is rather made to the films of the so-called “classic era” and, transitively, the idea of genre is associated with the idea of classicism (was it Calvino or Pound who said a classic is something beautiful that we conserve?). If so, we could talk of “classic genres” as systems created to group films made during the “classic era” of North American films.
But just when the theory seems to spread a light of guidance, dark areas paradoxically appear because it is the same handful of films that is almost always mentioned –Casablanca, Bringing up Baby, The Maltese Falcon, Frankenstein, Stagecoach– although none of these condenses the degree of generic purity that is intended by selecting them as examples. They all show a transition of elements that is often specified as “genre traits”. We may venture further and ask ourselves for the inconvenience that almost all great films of that period suffer or must have suffered when attempts were made to define them in terms of genre, as happens with most films by Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles himself.
If we accept that, then we can take one more step and say that it is very difficult to categorize the great films of the classic era into classic genres, because –in the words of Raoul Ruiz– they broke the synchronicity between art theory and the political system of a nation, which brings us to another question: which films may, therefore, define a cinematographic genre? And the answer will take us back to these same films…

The complete text can be found at the 49FICXixón catalogue