ABSTRACT
Genres like film noir, fantasy, and action are readily and reliably used by movie audiences and film scholars. Renting a DVD means navigating the genres, and genres belong in the tool kit of many film scholars. Genre criticism is a major mode of film studies, and it has spawned a rich literature that touches on theoretical questions of what movie genres are, how they function, and how they should best be studied (e.g., Grant 2003; see also Duff 2000). But although philosophers have written about specific movie genres like horror (Carroll 1990) and melodrama (Cavell 1996), they have paid little attention to the nature of film genre – or indeed of any art genre (the exception is Currie 2004). It is time to attempt a philosophy of movie genres that takes advantage of and potentially enriches related work in film studies.
