RESEARCH INTO THE GENRE:

AS MEDIA CBSC GROUP 1 – TASK 1:

RESEARCH INTO THE GENRE:

The theme’s we have chosen all link in together very well, using war films, period drama and family love to conclude the ideas of our story.

War films are one of the most individual genres. Where they mainly focus on warfare, usually about air or land battles, or sometimes even people imprisoned in the war or the military training at the war camps. We have chosen to use some of this focus, but not go with the most obvious and look into evacuation and the life of people that experienced the war and went onto surviving it. Within the wartime genre the stories can consist of being fictional, docudrama, or even alternate history fiction. The term anti-war film is sometimes used to describe films, which bring to the viewer the pain and horror of war that emphasizes the horror and human costs of armed conflict. The main WW2 wartime film’s, were made from the 1940’s up until the 1950’s where they reflected back on the turmoil of the war.

Romance/Love on the other hand is one of the most popular genres. It started of being shown very traditionally through films e.g. Romance or chivalric romance which is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with ironic, satiric or burlesque intent, also being influenced by the medieval genre, and the standard image of medieval invokes knights, distressed damsels, dragons, and other romantic tropes. Originally, romance literature was written in Old French, Anglo-Norman and Occitan, later, in English and German. In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love, such as faithfulness and commitment in adversity. From ca. 1800 the connotations of "romance" moved from the magical and fantastic to somewhat eerie "Gothic" adventure narratives. We decided to look at the Modern day romance genre, which shows how themes that include the characters making decisions based on a newly found romantic attraction. The questions, "What am I living for?" or "Why am I with my current partner?" often are shown. They relate back to the traditional style drama of a fairy tale, where romance was shown intensely, with the ‘happy ever after’ effect, which is still commonly used today. We have looked more the family side of romance, and how love can bring families together as a unit, in hard times like the war.

By Lucy Hyner