Generic attractions de María del Mar Azcona and Celestino Deleyto

From its beginnings in the 1960s and 70s genre criticism has been one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of enquiry in Film Studies, surviving and morphing into the various tendencies and schools of criticism that have succeeded one another in the course of the still short life of the discipline. Generic Attractions offers a fresh look at the topic and, through a series of original essays, maps out the complex panorama of approaches existing at the beginning of the 21st century. Although theoretical speculation abounds in many of the essays, the emphasis overall in this volume is on practical criticism: traditional genres are revisited, new genres are described, specific periods of individual genres are reappraised and various combinations of generic conventions are used to look at individual directors and individual movies.
The four parts into which the volume is divided attempt to suggest the variety of the field and the multiplicity of perspectives from which it can be explored. Part 1 focuses on individual genres, some of them well established within the genre system, others newcomers to it, advocating the flexibility and constant fluidity of generic categories. Part 2 sees genres as historical phenomena and looks at particular moments in the history of genres. Part 3 analyses specific cases of auteurs that have contributed or continue to contribute in interesting ways to the individual genres that they have worked with. Finally, the essays in part 4 examine the ways in which generic conventions are used by individual films or groups of films and the impact they have in our interpretations of the texts.

In its variety and the dialogue that it allows between various schools of thought, Generic Attractions reenacts once again the vibrancy and continued relevance of film genre criticism.