DELAPORTE Chloé, « What does Internet to film genres? », AVANCA│CINEMA International Conference Cinema, Art, Technology, Communication, Avanca (Portugal), 22-26 juillet 2015
New technologies are reconfiguring many aspects of film industries. Internet in particular seems to be playing a major role in current film distribution/exploitation, and audience reception. The purpose of this communication is to analyze a specific case: what Internet does to film genres. The categorization of films by « genres » is not far to be as old as the cinema itself, but generic mediation is now widely redefined. Indeed, Internet not only influences creation of new film forms (as “web documentaries” or “web series”), but also of new labels. In particular, the dynamic of web “2.0” offers the possibility of the self-categorization due to the “tag” principle, which allows anybody to pigeonhole the huge number of web videos. In result, the stock of available labels is much more substantial: movie industries and audiences no longer work with the few traditional denominations (as comedy, romance, western, musical, etc.), but with hundreds of indigenous genres. This communication wants to discuss this emergence of new generic labels, closely tied to what seems to be an “audience empowerment”.
Chloé Delaporte 