concept

Formula

The plot shape a genre's audience arrives already knowing, and the argument over whether repetition is commerce, ritual or both.

genre conventions
reference
genre-convention

A formula is a genre's recurring plot: the beats an audience can hum in advance. The western's showdown, the romantic comedy's cute meet and big misunderstanding, the gangster's rise and fall. Students use the word as an insult, and the books partly agree. But formula is also what makes variation legible: you cannot notice a film refusing a beat unless you were expecting it. The disagreement in the library is not whether formula exists but what the repetition is for, and there are two answers that do not reduce to each other.

Repetition sells, or repetition means

The industrial answer is plainest in Barsam and Monahan (Looking at Movies). Genres hand the studio "a blueprint for creating and marketing a type of film that has proven successful in the past", and the principle underneath is "give people what they want, and they will buy it" (lam 80). Adherence driven purely by economics "often yields derivative and formulaic results" (lam 80). Steve Neale's version, reported in The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies, is colder: genres "offer the industry a means of controlling demand" (sgh 437).

The ritual answer is Giannetti's (Understanding Movies). Genre conventions and archetypal plots "encourage viewers to participate ritualistically in the basic beliefs, fears, and anxieties of their age" (um 354). Repetition is what myth does. The test is not whether a film repeats but how: "Incompetent artists merely repeat. Serious artists reinterpret" (um 354).

Hayward (Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts) holds the two together rather than choosing. Genres are "simultaneously conservative and innovative" because they answer to two sets of expectations, the industry's and the audience's; the industry repeats formulas that work and the audience wants familiarity and change at once (ckc 197). Her sharper point is about who owns the formula: genres have conventions "with which the audience is as familiar as the director (if not more so)" (ckc 199), which is why a film can fail for following them too closely and become a cult for breaking them. Barsam sees a sales device, Giannetti a rite, Hayward a negotiation. All three agree that the audience's foreknowledge is the material.

On the bench

Psycho (1960) runs a crime-and-flight formula for 47 minutes, complete with a heroine, a theft and a road, then swaps genres by killing the person carrying the plot (Killing the protagonist at minute 47). The first formula is a decoy for the second, and the audience's foreknowledge is exactly what the film spends (The money dies with Marion).

Taxi Driver (1976) runs a neo-noir formula, the returned veteran, the corrupt city, the doomed rescue, through a character the film refuses to explain; opening-night audiences took the rescue as a payoff the director had built to be recoiled from (Taxi Driver — the shoot-out). Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) crosses the woman's picture with the road movie and opens by staging the older formula as a soundstage pastiche (Alice — the prologue); its ending was argued over as an ending for 1974 (The women's picture, 1974). The Craft inherits a 1990s teen skeleton, outsider arrives, is adopted, is corrupted, must renounce, and puts a story about female anger and class inside it. The two do not fit (The Craft turns on its own coven).

What to look for

Which beats arrive on schedule, and which are delayed, inverted or refused? What does the refusal say?
Whose expectation does a given beat serve: the studio's need to presell, or the audience's need to recognise?
Where the film departs from formula, does it reinterpret (Giannetti's test) or only decorate?
Which of Giannetti's phases is the film in: primitive, classical, revisionist or parodic (um 356)?

In the books

give people what they want, and they will buy it.

— Barsam & Monahan, lam 80

The stylized conventions and archetypal story patterns of genres encourage viewers to participate ritualistically in the basic beliefs, fears, and anxieties of their age.

— Giannetti, um 354

Genres have codes and conventions with which the audience is as familiar as the director (if not more so).

— Hayward, ckc 199

Films are most commonly grouped into genres by virtue of similar plot patterns, similar thematic implications, characteristic filmic techniques, and recognizable iconography.

— Film Art, fa 351

Go on, then

concept Iconography The objects, costumes and spaces a genre reuses until they carry its memory, and what that memory is worth.
concept Themes The questions a genre keeps asking across decades, and whether its answers are a ritual the audience performs or a settlement it is sold.
source Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art The standard textbook. Where this wiki's definitions default to when nothing fancier is needed.
context Commerce The money context: who pays, what they expect back, and how both shape the text — in production and in reception.
context Control The institutional context: censorship, classification, editorial power, gatekeeping — who may say what, to whom.
source Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema The standard one-volume history. Where to go when a film needs its industry, its movement or its decade.