Yet that's what Maren Ade's extraordinary, genre-bending revolution of a movie is.
More than a decade after his death (he was just 57), hindsight suggests that his extraordinary, genre-bending "method", that's so bewitching and hypnotic, is fully in tune with the spirit of an age that likes to mash up words and music, video clips and archival documents.
He said that although reality TV programmes such as Castaway and I'm A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! thrived on putting "ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances", the genre could also be profoundly educational.
Yet it is still extraordinary that a genre which has provided some of the highest rating shows in the history of British TV, Only Fools and Horses and To The Manor Born to name just two, should be the object of such perceived nervousness.
Leviathan is an extraordinary collision of genres: an art film made by a pair of British and French anthropologists that works as a stupendous cinematic spectacle.
Genre fiction -- and both incarnations of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" are certainly genre fiction -- is most powerful when its conventions are used as a way of talking about something else, as metaphor or reification.
Judges called Dotter of Her Father's Eyes "a beautifully crafted" work "which crosses the boundaries between literature and the graphic genre with extraordinary effect".
"There's a return to a satisfyingly broad perception of our creative chops," says Kay. "We've always made diverse content, but, for a while, these romcoms became synonymous with the cultural identity of British cinema because the brilliant minds at Working Title found extraordinary success with the genre and knew better than anyone else in the UK how to get their movies seen by a global audience".
An extraordinary chart, "British novelistic genres, 1740-1900," showhathat Moretti calls "a rather regular changing of the guard," as once vital genres — the "conversion novel," the "ramble novel," the "silver-fork novel" — flourish and then disappear.
In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy, from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent of Shakespeare.
Kirsty Dunseath, publishing director at Weidenfeld and Nicolson Fiction, said: "In many ways Paul Torday invented his own genre - his extraordinary fiction was filled with warmth and a wry, humane wit.
