I agree with John Matturis point about genre not being merely
after-the-fact. Any film is also experienced after-the-genre. Audiences use
generic customs to make inferences from a narrative argument just as
filmmakers use generic expectations, for instance, to imply information
without explicitly showing it. One of the things films often show is generic
convention as such. To apply Bakhtin to film - cinamatic narrative shows
images of cinematic narrative.

Aristotle was not always as Aristotelean as anti-Aristotelean poetics imply.
Anyway, he said some interesting things about narrative. One was to draw
attention to the value of plots that go against expectation but from which
the viewers infer a new consequentiality.

One of the particular symptoms of this narrative experience - in comedy - is
laughter. Comedy - from little plots like jokes to whole films - seems to be
a super genre in which the shared cognitive and emotional insight of the
audience elicits this bodily spasm - so familiar yet so curious. I suspect
that one of the historical pressures on the social evolution of typologies
of genres is a weakly corresponding typology of such spasms - thrill,
shudder, tears, revulsion, frisson, etc. I also suspect that in film and
other art such emotions are elicited for the sake of making the emotions
themselves objects of reflection - even if we only respond emotionally to
the objectified emotion. It follows from what I said earlier that one of the
things an audience may know about its emotions is whether they are shared.

Which brings me to questions of nervous laughter.  So time-bound or context
bound are generic expectations that when a film flouts those expectations
and seems to do so unknowingly - because it was made according to the
expectations of another time or culture, or because the audience just dont
get it - members of an audience have an emotional experience of knowing in
which what is not known is precisely who shares it, or whether it is
appropriate to share it, or whether the experience is aesthetically or
ethically knowing at all . Nervous laughter is a symptom of this vacillation
in an audience members representation of  self and others (both the others
of the audience and the film). It also a question expressed to others.
Laughter, including the nervous kind, is perhaps always expression and
communication.

Of course many films anticipate the knowing laughter of reception by
objectifying their generic conventions. For example Sergio Leone's westerns
are generic spoofs of what had been a specifically American kind of
historical romance. They are also among the best works in the genre. I would
have thought that Hitchcock does this with generic conventions in his films,
although Vertigo, I suspect, is  a bit less comically knowing than most of
his work. Hamlet was always designed to be comic - because of which Voltaire
complained that it was a monstrous farce and not properly tragic. This kind
of reflexive process has been a driver of innovation in cinematic and  other
narrative art. This makes it, along with things like developments in
narrative technology and distribution, a pressure in the social evolution of
genre.

Ross Macleay