Tag Archives: style

Cinema Studies

Genre and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Broadly speaking, genres are part of a system for collating and categorising films of a similar type. Films belonging to a particular genre are linked by their use of one or more conventional elements associated with that genre, also called tropes. These tropes can take a number of different forms:

  • Subject matter or theme, e.g. westerns are often concerned with good vs evil
  • Plot patterns, e.g. romantic comedies often contain a “meet cute”, police thrillers often end with a standoff or shootout
  • Manner of presentation, e.g. detective films are often structured around the process of investigation
  • Emotional effect, e.g. comedies attempt to elicit humour, horror films attempt to shock or frighten the audience
  • Iconography, e.g. Roman costumes are central to sword-and-sandal epics

The utility of genres rely on wider cultural acknowledgement and understanding of these shared elements – an understanding which is developed by audiences seeing many films sharing particular tropes.

Marketing and promotion have a significant effect on genre expectations, because how a film is marketed (including the poster, synopsis and title) usually signposts what genre the film belongs to. This, in turn, governs our experience of the film because we view it with genre associations already in mind.

Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) predominantly takes the form of a vampire horror film, and was generally marketed as such. This genre is evident in the film’s subject matter (the central character is a vampire who preys on several victims), emotional effect (gruesome attacks are a hallmark or horror films), and in some of the film’s style and iconography (e.g. extensive use of dark shadows and high-key lighting, the vampire’s sharp canine teeth, etc.).

However, it also mixes in various tropes from other genres, notably the spaghetti western (e.g. widescreen composition with significant characters/objects at the extreme left or right of frame, tight close-ups of faces, sharp and dramatic shifts in focal plane, etc.) and some additional elements generally associated with Iranian cinema (e.g. traditional Iranian forms of dress, the central significance of cars and driving, etc.). Through its combination, conformance and contradiction of these tropes, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is both an excellent example of particular genre tropes as well as an example of a film that significantly rejects and remixes those tropes in a unique way.

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Cinema Studies

Style and The Age of Innocence

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

“Style”, when applied to filmmaking, is the unique pattern and use of stylistic choices common to a particular director or group of directors. Style can be identified in several dimensions:

  • Single director, that is, the stylistic signature of a director’s work across their career (e.g. Edgar Wright’s style involves techniques of visual comedy and frame matching, fast-cutting mundane actions, a mobile camera using plenty of zooms, etc.)
  • Genre or a collection of directors, such as film noir, or the unadorned style associated with the Dogme 95 movement
  • A country’s national cinema, for example German expressionism’s heavy reliance on angular compositions and high-contrast lighting to create a distinctive visual character

Although the costume melodrama is not a genre that Scorsese worked in often, several elements of the director’s personal style shine through in The Age of Innocence (1993).

Prominent narration from the point of view of the film’s protagonists or major characters is a device that Scorsese often uses to provide exposition and clarify his character’s mental state. The Age of Innocence utilises narration heavily, but it is spoken from the point of view of an omniscient outsider, who provides the audience with a wider range of knowledge than the characters on screen.

The Age of Innocence also contains a beautiful long take, which follows Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) walking through several crowded, ornate drawing rooms upon entering a party. Long takes, with the camera moving between and shifting focus on several small details in the scene while following behind a main character’s movements, are another Scorsese trademark.

Less obvious stylistic elements are also common to much of Scorsese’s work, such as the use of darkness and colour to express a character’s moods, and timing editing with musical cues to create a fluid, romantic pacing. These and many other elements combine in a unique, identifiable way to make up the signature style of Martin Scorsese.

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