Monthly Archives: October 2016

Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 12: Wrapping up

Quicker than I ever would have expected I’ve come to the end of my first year at RMIT. My PB4 film is coming along nicely, though I haven’t shot anything yet, but it’s the most ambitious project I’ve ever done and I will be ridiculously stoked if I manage to pull it off and produce something at least halfway decent.

Being in this studio has galvanised a lot of the disconnected thoughts I’ve had about cinema over the past few years. Though genre is not generally a lens through which I have ever analysed films, I think having a fundamental understanding of what they are, how they work and how they interact can only be a good thing. If you’d asked me for my opinion at the start of this semester I would have said that genres are so fluid and ever-changing that they don’t actually exist (at least, not in any way that could be given a concrete definition). But through reading and experimentation I’ve found that there are some low-level, essential differences in the ways films operate which confirms that, at least on some level, genre theory is a rich avenue for continued exploration.

I’ve had a pretty great time in the studio, too. In my first weekly update I said I wasn’t expecting to be able to make a Western this year due to a lack of resources, but as it turned out not only did I make a Western with no resources, the way I explored that particular genre helped my understanding of genre theory better than anything I’ve ever read or done before. I think that’s a pretty good summation of the studio as a whole — what at first seems too complex to take anything away from is in fact a deeply layered and engaging learning experience, if you can find a way inside.

I used the Project Briefs to progressively drill further and further down into genre theory, stripping away the high-level semantic inscriptions and focusing more on the syntactic — basically, I’ve tried to find out if a genre is still recognisable even when you strip away most of its accepted tropes and hallmarks. The answer — at least in my rudimentary experience — is that it’s mostly possible, but someone with more skill could probably take the concept even further and boil each genre down to its bare nucleus.

Finally, one of my lasting takeaways from Exploding Genre will be a newfound (or re-confirmed) appreciation for filmmakers like Drew Goddard, Joss Whedon, Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino, all of whom manage to make sophisticated meta-commentaries about a genre or genres, while completely satisfying all of the requirements of those genres. To create a film that both deconstructs horror tropes and is also a perfect expression of those tropes is an amazing achievement.

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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 11: Homage and hybridity

Our last week brings everything we’ve learned in this semester so far into focus, stepping outside the characteristics of a single genre and instead looking at films that play with genre itself.

This is a nice full-circle connection to my first post for Exploding Genre, in which I analysed A Mighty Wind (2003) as an example of a metatextual film. Such films simultaneously adhere to and deconstruct genre tropes and conventions, laying bare the underlying structure of a genre while also acting as a successful expression of it. It’s remarkable when it’s done well, such as in A Mighty Wind, the television show Community, or this week’s screening, The Cabin in the Woods (2012). That film was a revelation to me when I first saw it, so sophisticated in playing with the inherent absurdity of so many horror conventions but still reverent of those conventions. And actually scary! Even the cheap jump scares that are present in The Cabin in the Woods are handled in such a way that even though you expect them to come, and you know exactly what the filmmakers are trying to do, they’re still scary.

Jackson (2013)1 contends that audiences of such metanarratives sit in an “in-between space” that lies between the reality of the film and reality reality, which adds a completely new layer of experience to the film. The five main characters in The Cabin in the Woods are manipulated by technicians aware of horror cliches, and those cliches are made “real” in the story world, but it falls upon the audience to try to figure out what’s just “real” and what’s actually real. So the act of watching the film really hits audiences on three levels: the basic narrative and its fictional/visceral/corporeal response, the meta acknowledgement and manipulation of horror tropes, and then the “in-between space” that blurs both of the above into a third level of reality. It’s all quite sophisticated and I’ve developed an even deeper respect for Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon (and Edgar Wright, whose films operate in much the same way).

It’s a shame I didn’t get to experiment with intertextuality in my own work this semester, but I feel that homage and hybridity is advanced level filmmaking and I’m not quite at the stage where I would be able to pull it off successfully. Maybe next year.

  1. Jackson, K. (2013), “Metahorror and simulation in the Scream series and The Cabin in the Woods” in Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Horror, pp. 11-30. ↩
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 10: Action

It seems obvious when you see it written like this, but “the action sequence is one of the defining elements of action cinema”. But what actually is an action sequence? When you really think about the term it’s actually quite nebulous. Purse (2011)1 defines the action sequence as “dramatic physical action with a dynamism and intensity that marks it out from other sequences”, but even that definition leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The hockey sequences in The Mighty Ducks satisfy those criteria, but I don’t think anyone would describe that film as an action movie, or those scenes as action sequences.

While all action films must necessarily have action sequences, does the presence of action sequences necessarily make a film an action film?

Surprisingly, I’ve had more trouble pinning down a concrete definition of the action genre than any other this semester. Clearly, some films are self-evidently action films, like this week’s screening Ronin (1998), which is about 120% car chases. (Surprising fact: John Frankenheimer directed French Connection II.) But the sheer number of films considered action films is so vast, and there are so many variations in content and style between them, that I find it difficult to consider what the “canonical” action film might be — that is, the one that demonstrates all the hallmarks of the action genre. Perhaps one doesn’t exist.

I love this quote from Purse (2011): “Rather than assuming the action sequence’s aesthetics are somehow obvious, we should analyse each sequence with an open mind, eye and ear; and that understanding the impulses behind the content and presentation of the action sequence is important, as is an alertness to the often surprisingly nuanced ways in which such sequences can be communicative in narrative and representational terms.”

What I extract from this quote is that the action sequence is a multivalent concept, which shifts meaning depending on its application — much like any genre trope, or indeed genre itself.

  1. Purse, L. (2011), “The Action Sequence” in Contemporary Action Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 56-75. ↩
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