A Reddit Response: the Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Genre

I came upon a post on r/TrueFilm today regarding a subgenre called “Girls with Guns,” making a common argument about genre—that X definitively is or is not an example of genre Y—that is a pastime of many a film fan. I wrote a didactic but hopefully not completely unwanted response about one of my favorite ways to explain genre, reprinted here:

To me, this is one of the things that makes genre so interesting—that these kinds of arguments break out about what does and what doesn't count as an example of a particular genre. One explanation that I've found helpful is the "semantic/syntactic" approach to genre studies, developed by Rick Altman in the early 1980s. (See "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre," by Rick Altman, Cinema Journal, Spring 1984.)

"...we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions which depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like—thus stressing the semantic elements which make up the genre—and definitions which play up instead certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders—relationships which might be called the genre's fundamental syntax. The semantic approach thus stresses the genre's building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged."

In a nutshell, the semantic approach is what you're taking with your explanation of the parameters of the Girls with Guns subgenre. Altman does not emphasize one approach over the other; instead, he investigates each and writes about how they are both useful approaches.

A syntactic approach would extend the genre potentially well beyond the fundamentals that you mention, allowing us to discuss Aliens, for example, in generic terms, as a Girls with Guns movie, even though it may lack a number of aspects typical in a semantic interpretation.

A different example: Westerns

A semantic approach to the Western would identify the genre as taking place in the American West during the late 19th century, and featuring such elements as horses, trains, guns, outlaws, sheriffs, saloons, brothels, shootouts, cattle drives and more. This description is what we tend to mean when we say a movie is a Western.

However, syntactically, we could talk about the idea of the frontier, the place where organized society and "the wild" come together, issues of individuality and collectivism, the struggles of the law and the meaning of justice, and the concept of civilization itself. This approach allows us to talk about the ways in which, for example, The Mandalorian can be thought of as Western (or as a Samurai story, etc.) in spite of the lack of some of the literal trappings of the Western.

Just to emphasize the point—both approaches are valuable. To me, though, allowing for both helps create a bunch of interesting insights and connections between different types of movies that can be very useful when analyzing how they work and what they mean.