The notion of entertainment has its own legacy going back to the eighteenth century. In contradiction to an older form of thinking which saw the purpose of art (including popular art) as moral tract, entertainment was a more secular notion that emphasised an art devoid of serious moral or didactic purpose, and given over instead to allowing the audience a pleasurable, even escapist, engagement with the opera, play or novel. Entertainment has extended its range of meanings so that as it has become synonymous with such centres of show business as Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood. "It implies a notion of

In establishing a corpus of a genre, two alternate groups of texts are established, each corresponding to a different notion of the corpus. On the one hand, there exists unwieldy lists of texts corresponding to a simple tautological definition of genre (eg. musical is film with diagetic music). This inclusive list is of the variety that is consecrated by generic encyclopedias. On the other hand, we find critics, theoreticians, and other arbiters of taste sticking to a familiar canon which has little to do with the broad tautological definition. Here the same films are mentioned again and again, not only because they are well known or particularly well made, but because they somehow seem to represent the genre more fully and faithfully than other apparently more tangential films. This exclusive list of films generally occurs not in a dictionary context, but instead in connection with attempts to arrive at the overall meaning or structure of a genre. The relative status of these alternate approaches to the constitution of a generic corpus appear not only as an uncertainty on behalf of the critical community, but as a contradiction (Altman ibid.).

'No single interpretive procedure can ensure proper analysis of every individual work throughout an entire genre. Unless we have a general sense of a genre's characteristic configurations, we are likely to misconstrue the structure and meaning of individual texts' (Altman The American Film Musical 1987). Altman goes on to discuss 'a set of four propositions that…serve not only to define the components and relationships characteristic of the American film musical, but also implicitly to describe a four-step interpretive procedure' (Altman ibid.). They are as follows - i) the film progresses through a series of paired segments matching the male and female leads; ii) each separate part of the film recapitulates the film's overall duality; iii) the basic sexual duality overlays a secondary dichotomy; and iv) the marriage which resolves the primary (sexual) dichotomy also mediates between the tow terms of the secondary (thematic) opposition.

Taking into account not only the formal and aesthetic aspects of feature filmmaking, but various other cultural aspects as well, the genre approach treats film production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its audience. This process, embodied in the Hollywood studio system, has been sustained primarily through genres, those popular narrative formulas such as the Western, musical, and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts throughout this century (Schatz, 1981). From 1914, nearly all American film production had relocated from the East to the West Coast of United States, principally to Hollywood. The 'move' can be chiefly associated with cheaper production costs (amongst others, costs associated with securing studio space in the expensive New York real estate market) and geographical location (Hollywood's proximity to sea, sand and snow) are amongst many driving factors that lead to the relocation from New York. It is necessary to note!

There is no single defining feature that 'makes' a genre. Genre is not only a category of film related by common conventions of subject, style and plot. 'Genres are not simply bodies of work or groups of films, however classified, labeled and defined. Genres do not consist only of films: they consist also, and equally of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis that spectators bring with them to the cinema and that interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process' (Neale ibid.). Here Neale suggests t

Some topics in this essay:
Wagon Genre, Astaire Rogers', Jazz Singer's, Band Wagon, Thompson Steiger, Crook French, Charisse Astaire, Film Musical, Coast United, Minnelli Vincente, band wagon, genre films, singin' rain, barkleys broadway, musical genre, film production, feuer ibid, genre film, american film, astaire kelly, rain band wagon, broadway singin' rain, charisse band wagon, barkleys broadway singin', singin' rain band,