Studio Description

Quotes

“[Genre films] remind me of jazz: they allowed for endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations. When these variations were played by the masters, they reflected the changing times; they gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.” (Martin Scorsese)

“Genre … became a critical term as well as a collection of popular categories, and it has since proved to be one of the most useful conceptual tools for understanding popular film as both art and artifact.”

(Barry Keith Grant)

Studio Prompt

How can the conventions in genre cinema, from iconography and character to visual and sonic elements, be used in a practical sense to make moving image work that builds on these cinematic principles without necessarily being central to the genre canon? Can an applied deconstruction/reconstruction of genre lead to creative revelations?

Description

This studio uses an analysis of film genres as its starting point to make moving image work that understands but works outside their confines. Research around this studio will be theoretical, conceptual and practical. Through readings, screenings and in class discussion, you will investigate the various elements of different film genres. This will include varying filmic techniques (lighting, framing, shot construction, editing, sound/music), characters, iconography, patterns, styles, themes and motifs, and also ideological factors such as reactions to socio-political contexts and figurations of gender.

Through practical in-class exercises you will reconstruct visual elements from specific cinematic genres in order to gain a better understanding of how scenes are created to look and feel a certain way. A focussed theoretical reading and a practical understanding of these components will contribute to a number of small film pieces, which utilise aspects of a genre of film in a conceptually rigorous way, while having

the option to flip it on its head. The ultimate goal is to communicate ideas relevant to your field of interests in a creative and considered way, using the language of cinema.

The aim of this studio is to give students a fully informed approach to the filmmaking process, which includes historical, ideological and psychological aspects of film criticism, as well as further development in the practical aspects of filmmaking.

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