In 2015, I made a ten minute short for a local festival entitled Blind. At the time, I didn’t intend to be playing around with visual style and narrative tropes from Film Noir but I very quickly found myself embedding very noir-esque (look it up, it’s sort of a real word) ideas into the film in the very short time I had to tell a story. I personally, think it’s a shocking film and that is mostly because it was a first attempt to really organise a fictional narrative and shoot it. I had done previous non-fiction short doco work and live production but this was an attempt to really get a group of people together and shoot something cool together.

The premise is a young man who basically sacrifices himself in order to save the girl he loves from being arrested for a murder she may (or may not) have committed in spite of the fact that she doesn’t share feelings for him any more and lives a very different lifestyle. The narrative arc of the character of Gina, even in the very short ten minutes, follows the archetypal femme fatale in many ways, especially in the way she pursues the character, Tony. Though I intentionally played with the genre in a few ways, she is not arrested, or even punished for her actions, she is saved by a man she doesn’t care about and is given a second chance, she only has to live with the internal consequences of her actions as opposed to the brute force of the law. Of course in a modern setting, those kinds of stories can be told, where in heavily coded Hollywood when Noir was at it’s prime, those kinds of stories where the culprit escapes justice (even the idea that the culprit is ambiguous) could not be told. The visual style is also very reflective of the genre.

All this to say, I love the style of film noir, especially the way scenes are lit. I love how well it translates in colour and I love playing the conventions off against each other because there is always a story there.

As I outlined at the beginning of the semester, my goal in exploring the film musical is to understand the genre conventions and how these fit together. This week a particular focus in class was in the different genres that musicals can inhabit which leads me to believe the idea of the film musical is more complex than the taxonomy of Hollywood marketing would suggest as the musical seems to be able to serve multiple styles and stories. In class we watched the Australian film musical, One Night the Moon and scenes from both Les Miserables and Rent. Lastly listening to a rap battle from the new American musical, Hamilton. It becomes incredibly obvious how different an Australian dramatic short musical is from the UK produced sung-through integrated musical. Yet the contrast is highlighted even further by the gritty, very broadway Rent and Hamilton.

These are all, not only different styles of musical but also different iconic locations. Les Mis is most certainly a West End production in it’s original form and the film version has a very European style (as well as it’s inherant French setting) which contrasts with Rent which is as Broadway as they come. Somehow all these musicals end up in Hollywood and these places find themselves encoded into the art. By including Hamilton in the mix, the discourse opens up to even the idea that stage musicals and film musicals tell stories in very similar ways. This would suggest that the musical is less of a film genre and more of an all-encompassing storytelling art form.