Category Archives: Exploding Genre

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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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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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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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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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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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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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EG Week 5: Horror

This week we moved on to discussing a genre I consider one of my least favourite: horror. There are a small number of truly exceptional examples throughout film history, and some of my favourite films are horrors, but the general strike rate of the genre is incredibly poor. For every good horror film there seems to be ten bad ones.

Berberian Sound Studio, this week’s screening, is one of the good ones. I wish I had watched it ahead of time and didn’t wait to see it in class — it’s essentially one long exploration of the visceral effect of sound design and construction in the horror film, which is what I based my Project Brief 2 sketch on. I wanted to reckon with the function and effect of silence in horror, and at first I tried experimenting with literal silence, but quickly learned that that is actually just confusing and would cause an audience to wonder if my piece had finished early. So I kept building it up more and more with sound effects — atmospheric noise, crickets, twigs, a low hum — and, surprisingly, even though I kept adding more sound to the mix it still felt like “silence” in the context of the sketch.

Berberian Sound Studio does the same thing (but, obviously, on a much more sophisticated level) by showing Gilderoy (Toby Jones) at work as a sound mixer in a giallo horror studio. He laboriously and intricately layers a cacophony of seemingly unrelated sounds — knives going into cabbages, lightbulbs rubbing against metal springs, water frying in a pan — to construct a final product that an audience would accept as a suite of genuine live sound effects without batting an eyelid.

I’ve often thought about the effect sound has on horror, and suspected that sound is the element through which mainstream modern horror films most often cause fear and surprise in their audience. Jump scares, which reached the zenith/nadir of their use in the 2000s, are rendered almost completely ineffectual with the sound turned down. I first noticed this when watching the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at home late at night. I had seen the film at the cinema earlier, and experienced a high number of significant scares, but at home with the sound turned down relatively low the effect had been completely lost. Play a really loud, really abrupt sound and people will jump.

This is a subject discussed in this week’s reading1, in which film scholar Rick Altman is quoted as saying “the construction of a uniform-level soundtrack, eschewing any attempt at matching sound scale to image scale, thus takes its place alongside the thirties’ numerous invisible image editing devices within the overall strategy of hiding the apparatus itself”. This suggests that, traditionally, sound was supposed to be invisible, just accepted by the audience as an inherent accompaniment to whatever is being presented visually. Clearly this is no longer the case, and dramatic changes in the characteristics of sound (loudness, timbre, perspective, etc.) are often exploited to achieve a particular effect — and this is especially true in horror.

  1. Sarkhar, B. (1997). Sound bites: Fragments on cinema, sound, and subjectivity. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, 17(2). ↩
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EG Week 4: Gender, genre and sci-fi

This week’s Thursday workshop began with a debate on the topic “Aliens is more than just a sci-fi film”. I arrived late and was assigned to the negative, meaning I had very little time to do any research and gather my thoughts. Luckily, my team had done some great work in getting the main points of our argument together:

  • Aliens is full of stereotypical science-fiction tropes (e.g. aliens) and in fact influenced the shape of sci-fi for the next two decades, particularly through its dark, Gigerian production
  • Science fiction necessarily incorporates elements of related genres like the thriller, war film, etc.
  • Genre is significantly tied into marketing, and based on the film’s poster and trailer you can’t argue that Aliens is anything but science fiction

I thought I came up with a relatively successful argument in retort to something the affirmative said: that Aliens is tied into wider cultural factors active at the time of its making and is therefore more than “just” a sci-fi movie. My response was that thinly-veiled social commentary is actually one of the core features of science fiction, so if anything that argument actually helped the negative side more than the affirmative.

As it happens, my personal opinion actually lies on the side of the affirmative — if genre is a construct that is not inherently sublimated into the fabric of a film itself, but is applied to a film from the outside, then every film is more than just a [whatever genre it belongs to] film. People can come along way after the fact and group/categorise films based on criteria that may not have even existed at the time the film was made. Maybe I’ll get to make that argument in a future project.

The reading1 draws some interesting parallels between Aliens and motherhood, discussing the alien queen as vagina and womb, entered by an army of “ineffectual male gametes”. It takes Ripley, a maternal presence (yet still a hardened warrior) to break through and reckon with the alien mother-to-mother — all in protection of her “daughter”, Newt. The depiction and treatment of women in cinema is something I’m particularly interested in, and something I’m considering exploring in my sketches later this semester. Aliens is an interesting example of gender-flipping a traditionally male genre, though in this case the character of Ripley conforms to many of the traditionally male characteristics a character in this genre would have, at least superficially. Femininity is deeply ingrained in the character in many ways (as Brown illustrates) but I wonder if it would be possible to completely remove the character from any traditionally male expressions.

  1. Brown, Jeffrey A. (1996). ‘Gender and the action heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return’. Cinema Journal, 35(3), pp. 52-71. ↩
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EG Week 3: Romantic comedy

I have a real soft spot for romantic comedies — I am incurably vulnerable to their emotionally manipulative ways. While watching Sleepless in Seattle in class we were prompted to think about feelings and manipulation: what, specifically, is cueing you to feel a certain way at various points?

Sentimentality is one of the film’s greatest emotional touchpoints, and this is visible from the opening shot. In a graveyard, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) talks to his son about his deceased mommy, while plaintive piano music rises in the background. Every element of this scene, from the cinematography to the sound design, is working to put the audience immediately in a particular frame of mind — and to identify closely with Sam while also initiating the plot. Positioning much of the film in the point of view of a child is another way that the film manipulates its audience.

Interestingly, and perhaps even uniquely, for a romantic comedy is the fact that the romantic couple at the centre of the film don’t even meet until well after the half way mark. There is no “meet cute”. They live parallel lives of unhappiness, the film switching between them, before the two stories come together for their eventual meeting toward the end of the film.

This week’s reading1 is exceedingly foundational, beginning with a literal dictionary definition of comedy and then going very deep on what exactly makes things funny (e.g. surprise, incongruity, implausibility, exaggeration and displacement). Nevertheless, it’s important to know exactly how the romantic comedy is differentiated from other genres (or from general, non-romatic comedy) and I did find especially interesting the contention that comedy about “childish energies that can no longer be contained by the adult frameworks”. I’m not sure it adequately describes all — or even most — comedies, but it’s an interesting thought.

  1. Mortimer, Claire (2010). ‘The comedy of romance’ in Romantic comedy. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 69-83. ↩
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