Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago

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This video explains Rick Altman's landmark essay "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre." The video begins with an explanation of the meaning of the terms semantic and syntactic from linguistics, then discusses how these terms apply to two distinct ways of understanding genre, using Altman's examples of westerns, but also adding examples such as Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979), and then explains the three contradictions in genre studies that Altman seeks to rectify with this semantic/syntactic approach.