- 2-3 minute presentation due in-class Week 7 (5%, pass/fail); tell us what you’re exploring, try to identify where you’ll head for later projects; what really interests you about genre? What’s inspired you? This presentation should indicate your ‘Genre Trajectory’, which will be important for Project Brief 4.
Brief Intro
- In Project Brief 2 I explored the difference between neo-traditional romantic comedies (films like Annie Hall and Sleepless in Seattle) and Hollywood Romantic comedies (the example I wrote about was the far-fetched love story in Singing in the Rain). A major difference between these two sub-genres is that the neo-traditional comedy is rooted in realism whereas the Traditional Hollywood ones aren’t. This makes these Neo-Traditional comedies much more relatable and in turn the audience can identify and empathise with the characters on a more significant and intimate basis.
- I then began to explore identification and empathy within genre. A theorist called Berys Gauts suggested that there are two categories of emotions in cinema. The first is artificial emotions (which are emotions purely drawn from film technique such as a beautiful shot, music, fantastic editing). In this case the audience doesn’t need to know anything about character-its all film (so like an opening shot of a movie that evokes a certain feeling). The other type of emotion is Representational Emotions where emotion is not drawn from any film techniques but from the Story Events in the film. This type has everything to do with story, narrative and character.
- I’ve Currently shifted away from that. I’ve been looking at the Western Genre. In particular Revisionist Westerns and how revisionist westerns exploit genre traditions. I watched ‘Unforgiven’ and ‘Once upon a time in the West’. Unforgiven is by Clint Eastwood, written on my DVD of the film was a quote that Eastwood told the Daily Telegraph. He said that it was everything he had to say about the Western Genre. It questioned the authenticity of Western storytelling by suggesting that the stories that spawn from the frontier are hyperbolised to the point of fiction-they are not grounded in reality at all (in the film there is a writer who does this). Eastwood is saying that the reality of the west and the depiction of the West is very different. He also depicted Violence in a unique way. Traditional Westerns romanticise violence to a point where the significance of death becomes numbed and people die everywhere and the audience doesn’t feel anything however in Unforgiven a young gunslinger quits his life as a cowboy after killing one criminal because he took absolutely everything away from the man-he understood the significance of it. Once Upon a time in the west is significant because it isn’t clear cut, Leone doesn’t offer a world of good vs bad like in normal westerns, instead he offers an ultra-capitalist world where everyone operates at random in order to benefit themselves. These films and the relevant essays I’ve read on them and the genre lead me to my contention that The Western is at its most significant when operating outside of genre tradition.
- I think in my next project I’m continue exploring genre films subverting and operating outside of genre traditions.