Dystopi och jordens undergång : En genreanalys av dystopiska inslag i fiktiv film

This study is a research on how dystopian features are expressed within different genres. The purpose is to discuss films that contain dystopian features in relation to genre and to examine if there are shared conventions in the films that can make dystopia a film genre on its own. The theoretical base includes genre theory and Rick Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach to film genre. Five films from different genres, all produced within the time period of 2000-2010, are analyzed with a semantic/syntactic approach to genre and then discussed in relation to dystopia and prior research. By using a semantic/syntactic approach to film genre it is possible to identify shared conventions. Only by using a co-ordinate semantic/syntactic approach is it possible to fully understand the interaction between conventions within a genre. The result shows that there are conventions that are characteristic for dystopia and dystopia can thus be considered a subgenre. The films analyzed in this essay share conventions characteristic for dystopia but also offer variation in form of, for example, theme. The subgenre dystopia therefore offers something familiar but also variation which is central in film genre. The analysis also shows that there are symbols that carry meaning within these films which implies that they have a common iconography