Tag Archives: western

Assessments, Exploding Genre

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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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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