Even in the early days of
film history, the audience appetite for new
content was voracious. A film distributer would often have to deliver
to an exhibitor over a hundred films a year to keep the theaters fresh.
This constant demand for new material led to the necessity of
imitation. As stories were reworked and reshot, what began to emerge
by the end of the 1910s, and certainly was noticeably present by the mid
1920s, was the use of conventions as a kind of short-hand for the
information that was pushing a story along. The audience had seen
hundreds of Westerns and no longer needed the same extensive setup for
the showdown. The convention was created where, when two men face each
other on the street and menacingly look at one another, you can be sure
bullets will fly. These conventions included anything from the good guy
in a white hat and the bad guy in a black hat, to the actual edited
construction of a film sequence.
While western films are an easy example, many other genres developed equally complex sets of conventions. The eery music in slasher films, the loss of the girl due to dishonesty in the romantic comedy film, and the spontaneous burst into song in the musical film all are some of the more explicit conventions that we no longer consider.
As genres pass the point of maturity, they often go into a stage of deconstruction. With respect to the Western: [Little Big Man]? realigned the conventions in a politically correct way (or more to the point, reversed the cowboy and Indian relationship), Blazing Saddles turned the conventions into humor, and Unforgiven? reversed every convention for the sake of tragedy.
Much debate continues about what makes a genre and what doesn't, as well as the way genres are constructed or deconstructed.
(All of this barely touches the surface.)
This article doesn't concern genre film theory per se, does it? Doesn't it concern film genres--and in that case, should its content be on film genres? I would simply move the article myself, but I would like to give the author(s) a chance to reply.
I think it could go both here and the film history page, with different emphasis on each. But no, I'm not the original author; I merely moved it from an inconveniently titled page. Just out of curiosity, what would you put here, if not this? --KQ