Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is considered (mostly outside the academic world) to be a masterpiece of franchise filmmaking, three films with a common story arc that takes place in the same universe with the same cast, yet three distinctly different films from a genre perspective. The first film, Batman Begins attempts to ground the trilogy in a common thread of realism, the entire first act of the film takes place outside of Gotham city for this exact purpose. The film is pitched at Batman fans as a Batman film, almost a genre all its own, however, its first hour is glaringly devoid of Batman. This is where Nolan plays with the genre, the film is an action, franchise movie riding (partially) on the success of previous Batman films but instead of delivering a Michael Bay action-franchise movie, its a subtle, considered, slow-paced build that develops the character of Bruce Wayne. Movie Pilot claims Nolan “let the audience know this was a real world Batman and the events in Gotham effected the entire world.” by spending the first hour in the mind of the character of Bruce Wayne. The character of Batman is in fact a completely different character in the original screenplay of the film and he doesn’t enter the film until the second act. Breaking genre conventions is one of Nolan’s strongpoints, one only has to look at the way he manipulates genre conventions in Inception to understand why many claim that he has his own genre. Inception’s arc is the antithesis of Begins, as it skilfully manipulates the audience into believing they are watching a quasi sci-fi heist film before revealing that the story is actually a broken love story and the protagonist’s need is to let go of his late wife in order to restore his relationship with his children. It’s only at the end of the film that you realise that you in fact care about Cobb as a character. In many ways Batman Begins does this for Batman, a character that has rarely been portrayed with substance or even remotely sympathetic but by tricking you into caring about Bruce Wayne, the stakes when the film actually reaches it’s action packed third act are dramatically raised.

What would I like to get out of Exploding Genre? I would absolutely love to walk away with a better understanding of directorial as a practise. I have always loved musical theatre but have never really been into the movie musical because movie musicals are always trying to wrap something slightly absurd in a medium we almost exclusively associate with realism. This Semester in Exploding Genre, I have decided to study the movie musical. I think movie musicals are extremely complex from a technical perspective but also have the ability to be profoundly moving.

I would really love to hone my skills in colour. Really nailing the construction of colour within the frame and I think colour is a really important aspect of the musical genre. I know that colour is probably one of the easiest elements of filmmaking to overlook, and I know I have definitely overlooked it’s significance in my own work. I would love to keep studying the effect that different colour looks have on the final film and even how using coloured light can influence the emotional undercurrent of a scene. I’m not sure how I would form an exegesis around a musical film because it would require original source material, but I’m kind of excited to tackle that, assuming the musical is the genre I get to study for the semester.

As for the technical, I would love the opportunity to use “real” lights in a film environment. I’ve spent a lot of time around cheap fluorescent bulbs packed into floodlight assembly from a bunnings somewhere but I’d really love to use some real lighting kit this semester.