Monthly Archives: September 2016

Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 9: Bottle drama

Without trying to sound too New Age and business buzz-wordy, I’m a believer in the idea that constraints can aid creativity. In writing, constraint exercises force an author to find innovative ways to abide by the constraint while still creating a compelling and interesting work for readers. When done well, the result is successful on two levels – if you can write a good story, that’s great, but if you can write a good story while being constrained, that’s even more impressive.

I think this is the reason I’ve always loved bottle drama – even before I’d heard that term (not knowing any better I’ve always called them chamber films). I watched films like Tape, Don’s Plum and Secret Honor in my teens and marvelled at the creativity required to make something dramatic and compelling out of a small number of locations and characters. Bottle drama privileges excellent writing above all else, and I have immense respect for excellent writers.

Characteristics of bottle drama:

  • Emerged from television, where budgetary constraints often forced producers to make episodes with restrictions on the number of sets and characters
  • Secondary source is minimalist theatre, which by the nature of the form is restricted in the same way
  • Bottle drama is a clash of high and low culture (theatre vs. television)
  • Narrative is restricted to a single location – something (usually external) must contain characters in that location
  • Minimal cast – usually a two-hander or small ensemble
  • Focus on dialogue to establish character and carry the story – exposition needs to be metered out carefully to feel natural, story needs to keep moving and feel dynamic
  • Small space requires cinematography and editing to be on-point
  • Performances are crucially important, because so much focus is placed on the characters

Clearly, now, bottle drama has moved beyond being a budgetary necessity and has become a fully-fledged genre in its own right (at least with as much claim to being a genre as film noir). Breaking Bad and Community made bottle episodes not because they ran out of money but because they make for great TV. Films like Buried and Photo Booth used the tropes of bottle drama to heighten tension and achieve the concentrated emotional impact the genre is known for.

Coherence, the film we watched in class this week, and Rear Window are both outward-looking bottle dramas. Coherence is almost entirely set in a single lounge room, but the scope of the film encompasses multiple such lounge rooms across multiple dimensions of space-time, and characters are often walking to and between these different locations, making locations and actions outside of the location just as important as those inside it. The same can be said for Rear Window, where Jeff Jeffries (James Stewart) is confined to his bedroom but the “action” of the film actually all happens across the courtyard, and sometimes off-screen entirely. As Belton (1988) 1 points out, the focus of Rear Window alternates from story-space to story-space, switching between Jeff’s bedroom and his neighbours’ apartments constantly, which maximises the scope of the story world even though Jeff is physically confined to one place.

This is very different to films like Richard Linklater’s Tape or Hitchcock’s own Rope, which are mostly concerned with the actions and interactions of characters within the film’s main location. These are inward-looking bottle dramas.

I’m going to tackle bottle drama for my Project Brief 4, and I’m going to attempt to merge both inward- and outward-looking characteristics. I may be biting off more than I can chew, since it will be the first time I’ve written a screenplay in any form, but I figure life’s too short not to shoot for the moon.

  1. Belton, J. (1988), The space of Rear Window, MLN, 103(5), pp. 1121-1138. ↩
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 8: Film noir

One of the questions that came up in our discussion of film noir this week was: “is film noir a genre?”

It seems a simple question on its surface, but it gets at the heart of what defines genre as a general concept and what demarcates one particular genre from another. We discussed it briefly in class this week, and I mulled the question over in my head as I doing my readings, and I still don’t think I have a satisfactorily well-defined opinion on the matter.

Putting aside the “anything can be a genre” argument (which I’ve been fond of pushing in the past), if we say that a genre is only a genre if most reasonable observers would consider it to be one, I think film noir is clearly a genre.

Certain characteristics of the film noir back this up:

  • The visual style of noir is so unique and indelible that it’s clear on the surface whether a film is a noir or not.
  • Though not completely rigid, there are some narrative elements that recur in film noir: detective stories, flashbacks, narration, femmes fatale.
  • So many later works pastiche and parody noir as a genre — this says that most people would recognise it as a genre (and therefore be in on the joke). This is one of the stronger arguments in film noir’s favour for consideration as a genre in its own right.
  • Schrader (quoted in House 19861) says “Film noir is not a genre… it is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood.” But the same can be said about horror, which is defined by its emotional affect rather than any particular convention of narrative, setting or conflict, and no one denies that horror is a genre.

What about the counterpoint?

  • A film’s claims to being a noir are based primarily on visual style, and there are no particularly rigid narrative or emotive requirements like other genres.
  • Its mainstream popularity was restricted to a particular time (1940s and 50s), so it could be argued that film noir is really just how detective dramas and thrillers looked in the darkness of the post-war period. Summer camp movies have similar looks to each other and are associated with a particular time period (80s and 90s), but we don’t consider the summer camp movie a genre of its own on par with film noir. (Though maybe we should? Meatballs 4, it’s your time to shine!)

Like I say, I’m not entirely sure which side of this discussion I fall on, and I guess it just illustrates the elastic and difficult-to-define nature of film genre.

Our screening this week, The Killers (1946), was nothing short of incredible. I’ve seen most of the “key” noir films before, but nothing prepared me for the great joy of such a well plotted, tightly scripted and incredibly photographed masterpiece of procedural cinema. It conformed to most film noir genre expectations, but there were a few key areas in which it deviated/innovated, and the result was wonderful. Handing narrative flashbacks off from one character to another, like an athletics relay, gave the story great forward momentum and also helped elevate the exposition to more than just seeing a detective ask someone for information.

  1. House, R.R. (1986), “Night of the soul: American film noir”, Studies in Popular Culture, 9(1), pp. 61-83. ↩
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 7: Genre trajectory

This week we presented our Genre Trajectories to the class and a small group of leaders from other studios. Here’s mine:

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  • In my first sketch I was mostly interested in the functional aspects of genre — specifically, I looked into how a particular technique (in this case, silence) is used to achieve a particular effect (in this case, tension)
  • The result was OK, but not particularly successful — you all heard it in class, it was a pretty perfunctory interaction with genre and tension was marginal at best.
  • In terms of execution, I was happy with some things, but ultimately it was just too simple and surface-level. But I have learned a lot about sound design from it that I will be able to put into practice in future projects.

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  • Moving on from here I’m hoping to start looking deeper. I am now interested in figuring out the meaning signified by genre elements, and whether the meaning can be kept in tact when modifying those elements, or whether it’s possible to keep the elements the same but change the meaning.
  • For example, what makes a film noir a film noir, specifically? Can you transport those elements and the iconography of the film noir into other situations and have the film still be recognisable as a film noir?
  • As a result of this, I’ve started reading into syntactic and semantic inscriptions of genre, which distinguishes between the actual style or narrative elements that are the building blocks of a genre (semantic), versus the larger concepts around how those elements are arranged to create meaning (syntactic).

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  • For my next sketch I’ll be investigating the Spaghetti Western, and I’ll be modifying it in two ways — to essentially see if I can keep the essence of a Western film even through basically all of the hallmarks of the Western will be changed to something new in my film
  • The first thing I’ll be doing is gender flipping it, which has been happening lately with films like Ghostbusters and the upcoming remakes of Splash and Ocean’s Eleven. I’m very interested in readings of Western films as artefacts of the male gaze, and reflective of problematic ideas of the place of women in society that would never be acceptable in modern films
  • The second thing I’ll be doing is transporting the action of my Western to modern-day urban Melbourne. This is for practical reasons — I don’t have access to any horses — but also helps me investigate whether the iconography of the Western stands up to being changed so radically.
  • Sukiyaki Western Django is a good example of a film that in some instances uses the tropes of the Western without modification, and in other instances uses an equivalent trope from Japanese cinema, and sometimes it uses something completely new — but in each instance the element successfully contributes to the genre tapestry of the film.
  • So that’s what my next genre sketch will explore, and from there I’m hoping to explore either the bottle drama or the romantic comedy from a similar semantic or syntactic perspective. Across my first two sketches I still haven’t written a word of dialogue, so I’m really looking forward to writing a script, and I now know that I’m not a great director, but I think writing lies closer to my strengths.

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  • My goal for the final sketch is to find a way to write either a romantic comedy or bottle drama that doesn’t adhere to any of the specific cliches of those genres, but is still recognisably a romantic comedy or bottle drama. If I can achieve that, I think it’ll be a great way to deeply explore genre without confining myself to just replicating tropes.
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 6: Musical

Musicals exist in a privileged space, “a ‘place’ of transcendence where time stands still, where contingent concerns are stripped away to reveal the essence of things” (Altman 1987, as quoted in Grant 20121). The transcendence in question is often to do with limitations either emotional or physical — the ordinary rules of narrative fiction cinema are temporarily suspended and anything is possible. Characters break into song, music appears suddenly and interacts with characters in the story world, physical limitations can be overcome, etc. A film musical is, basically, a lie agreed upon.

Having read this piece by Grant, I think I now understand why I love Singin’ in the Rain so much. It’s one of the few musicals that acknowledges, embraces and celebrates the artificiality of the form so comprehensively. The reading examines the scene where this is most obviously foregrounded — “You Were Meant For Me”, in which Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood literally prepares a soundstage with fans and lights for the heartfelt musical number — but the entire film interacts with Hollywood artistry in the same way, from “Make ‘em Laugh” to “Broadway Melody”.

Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind is another film musical aware of the conventions of the form, but in that case the knowing quality is used more directly for comedy. In All That Jazz, it’s used for tragedy.

Do all films exist in a privileged space? Is that not one of the defining qualities of cinema — that anything is possible as long as the filmmaker can adequately suspend the audience’s disbelief? I think the difference is that while all films can break the rules of immersive narrative construction, it is by definition a necessity of the film musical to operate outside the normal rules of cinematic form. A film musical must contain songs performed by characters in the film that, while they may ostensibly be part of the story world, are actually for the audience watching the film, which is a breach of the fourth wall.

This is one of the things I found most interesting about our screening, One Night the Moon. I’ve not seen too many musical dramas in my time, but the film felt constantly in tension between the social realism of what are ultimately pretty horrific themes, and the inherent artificiality of the musical. In the song “This Land is Mine/This Land is Me”, the lyrics and performance are so perfectly in tune with everything else happening in the film that it feels seamless on every level, but the other songs aren’t quite as well integrated, resulting in a somewhat disjointed and confusing film.

  1. Grant, B.K. (2012), ‘Introduction’ in The Hollywood Film Musical, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1-6. ↩
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