Corrigan and White discuss the utility of breaking down how genres came to be a staple of the film experience by identifying commonalities between films of similar subject matter, collecting them into groupings called genres.  One can find that movies with similar narratives are usually under the same genre because they follow the same “blueprints” as to how characters, settings, etc., are used within the context of the film.  In relation to auteur theory, it is through genres I think that those who are Auteurs can better  define themselves because of the certain privileges and limitations that genres provide.  A movie can fall into any genre, but it is because of that principle that, in reverse, when using the syntax and semantics of a genre as building blocks to a film, an auteur has already been provided the seeds needed to try and stand out from the generic exemplary films of a genre.

I thought Aristotle’s point about the construction of a tragedy added an alternative perspective to how we determine a genre.  He said that a tragedy was a full action that delivered a message and that if not for the correct positioning of events, then the tragedy wasn’t pure.  I find that genre based on construction of a movie is like another filter added to a Netflix search and that, as time has moved on, how genres are perceived have changed as such.  Now instead of looking at the order of events in a tragedy, we look at if a movie has the correct semantics (and loose syntax) to be labeled a tragedy.

It is with this change in distinction of how we determine what genre a movie fits into that I believe we can find an auteur.  Because we know from Aristotle that the order of events of an action are important, and from C&W that there must be some familiar semantics involved to dictate a genre, the combination of both is how I find that an auteur can develop him/herself.  Just as a cook can be distinguished by the order of ingredients s/he uses to what degrees, an auteur can become distinguished in the same way, but instead of using a recipe and eggs and milk, the auteur has Aristotle’s model and Rick Altman’s Semantic/Syntactic approach.