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.