For Cinema studies this week, we looked at the topic of genre. The genre of a film is basically what classifies the style or kind of a film. It usually relies on social conventions to separate distinctions between the different styles of film, some of which are subject matter, iconography, and emotion/feeling.

The feeling of the movie is one of the most important aspects of defining genre. Films could have similar subject matters, yet one could be an action movie, and the other could be a horror. On a similar note, one thing I heard in my Short Story Writing class a few weeks ago was about the way that American stories deal with themes differently to Japanese stories. A superhero story, like Spiderman, and a monster horror story, like Godzilla, both deal with the topic of radioactive enhancement, but the way that Godzilla was initially portrayed by the Japanese was much darker and morbid, for reasons I need not explain.

The film we watched in our screening was a Persian-American film, called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, by director Ana Lily Amirpour. It is a horror-drama that follows the story of Arash, a young man who looks after his heroine-addicted father, while a mysterious vampire roams the streets hunting men who disrespect women.

Like Vivre Sa Vie, I did find this film quite interesting, but it still had its moments in which I found myself struggling to stay awake. The mise-en-scene and the music was used in such a way that they both reflected off the individual genres of horror and drama. For example, the way that the Girl (the vampire) was portrayed shows her as a mysterious and ominous character, but also shows that she has a human-like side. The music also evokes a feeling of connection between the Girl and Arash, but also evokes a feeling of discomfort.