Monthly Archives: July 2016

Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 2: Ur-genres, the war film and the western

Watching Sukiyaki Western Django, which I hadn’t seen before this week’s screening, I was struck by the similarities between samurai films and westerns. Thematically they often explore similar ground — technological advancement, urban expansion at the expense of the “traditional”, good versus evil. They share iconography, though in place of the guns and lassos samurai carry swords. They often share character types, such as strong male warriors and lawmakers, and submissive minor female characters like wives, prostitutes and damsels in distress.

I was aware of the fact that Yojimbo (which was heavily influenced by classical Hollywood westerns) was essentially remade into Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, but I wonder if there are any more direct links between the samurai film and the western?

In terms of its place in the history of the western genre, Sukiyaki Western Django is undoubtedly an outlier. It fits into no wave or movement of western films, and it’s too much of a pastiche to even really be considered a serious western. I struggled with westerns for most of my younger years, and it wasn’t until I watched the HBO television series Deadwood that I started to appreciate its depth of possibilities. I then went back and rewatched a bunch of spaghetti westerns (Leone, Corbucci, films from the Django series) and earlier classical Hollywood westerns, and gained a real appreciation for the form. It strikes me as a particularly difficult genre to explore on a small scale and with no budget for sets, costumes and props, so I doubt I’ll get to explore it much in my own work this semester, but it’s one of the more fascinating genres to read about and dissect intellectually.

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Assessments, Exploding Genre

Exploding Genre: Case Study – A Mighty Wind

As a folk musical comedy mockumentary, Christopher Guest’s 2003 film A Mighty Wind  interacts with film genre in a number of interesting ways.

On the surface, the most obvious genre association that can be made is the musical film, or, more specifically, the backstage musical (one of the earlier codified genres, which came out of Hollywood in the 1920s1). A Mighty Wind follows a group of folk musicians and performers as they come together to stage a tribute concert, and the process of bringing these musicians together, their reunions and rehearsals, and finally the concert itself, all feature prominently in the film. The music, though occasionally comedic in subject matter or lyrical content, is generally treated with the reverence that a genuine musical would afford its performances: the concert features full-scale productions, including elaborate set dressings, costumes and camera set ups, for each of the three groups performing. As is the case with most parody films, Guest carefully adheres to the conventions of the genre his film parodies, despite occasional jokes at the expense of the absurd nature of musicals.

A Mighty Wind is also a mockumentary, which is a genre that holds many of its own idiosyncratic conventions (most of which Guest himself helped to popularise and codify with This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and the films that followed it). Mockumentary owes much of its own character to the rules and conventions of the documentary — like talking heads interviews, vérité-style camera work, etc. — and indeed A Mighty Wind generally utilises these techniques and rules faithfully. But, importantly, it also deviates from many of these tropes when comedy calls for it, such as showing action that would never realistically be captured in a genuine documentary.

  1. Rubin, M. (2001) ‘Busby Berkeley and the Backstage Musical’, in Cohan, S. (ed.), Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis. ↩
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

Exploding Genre: Statement of Intent

From the beginning, this studio appealed to me because the name “Exploding Genre” implies that we will be breaking genres down to their elemental form, analysing those pieces and how they interact, and then piecing them back together in our own work. This is, basically, what I hope to achieve from my participation in the studio — a broad understanding of what genres are, their essence, why they endure (or not) and how they are made. I don’t have any genre in particular that I’m interested in; I’m more interested in the birds-eye view. But having said that, I’ll be operating with an open mind and may come out at the end of this semester with a newfound obsession with a genre I’d never considered before.

I’ve always been fascinated by the people for whom one genre is cinema. I know people who very rarely watch a film that isn’t a slasher horror flick, and who spend unreasonable amounts of time searching for the worst quality VHS rip of a 1980s Canadian B-movie they can find. I’d like to figure out if there’s a way to reckon with this kind of single-minded genre obsession by looking at the genre itself, or, if not, whether there’s another way to understand this phenomenon.

In terms of technical skill, I hope that replicating certain genre techniques in class exercises will help me continue to develop my proficiency with filmmaking, an area in which I’m still definitely a novice.

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