One thing about studying Film Studies on ones own is that you do not benefit from either the partnership of working together on the course exercises, or the class discussion after the exercises are performed. This means that I miss out on a lot of ideas and points of view about the tasks that just don't occur to me working in isolation.

I do, however, have time to mull over the exercises after completing them, and I would like to keep a record of some of the things that come to me after particular tasks are complete. I also wanted to keep these thoughts as separate items from my task answers, as I have a tendency to ramble and may divert from the point of the course exercise.

The following thoughts go beyond the scope of the questions posed in Exercise 3 of the A Level course book that I am studying, but are just the sort of issues that would probably have been raised in the post-exercise classroom discussion.

Hybrid and sub-genre confusion

Exercise 3 of the course book asked the student to decide - from the evidence of two film stills - which of the sample films could be categorized as being of the hybrid genre and which was a sub genre movie. However, having completed the primary aim of the task it did become apparent that this exercise was perhaps not as clear cut as it first appeared.

For example, while 'Day of the Dead' is obviously a sub-archetype of the Horror genre (a 'Zombie' movie), it could also be described as a 'Hybrid' movie as it includes element of Action and Science Fiction conventions. Likewise, 'The Lord of the Rings' is, on the face of it, a Hybrid film - including as it does aspects of several different genres - but it could as easily be categorized as a sub-type of the Fantasy genre, having many attributes which would identify it as 'Sword and Sorcery'. 

So, categorizing films into specific classifications within the genre system isn't straight forward, although it is apparent that there is usually some sort of pecking order into which a film's genre classifications can be arranged. I have decided to call this process GENRE PROMINENCE (there is probably a correct term for it).

'The Lord of the Rings', for example, can be given the following genre prominence:-

> FANTASY (Principle genre)
- > SWORD & SORCERY (Sub-genre)
-- > ACTION
-- > HORROR
-- > ROMANCE -- (Hybrid genre attributes)