Maisy - Genre

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to genre.

The coursework production in which genre played a crucial part was my AS thriller film opening Dead by Alliance. The audience reaction to the film was my main focus when working to the standard of the thriller genre and with Rick Altman’s theory of genre causing particular types of pleasurable feelings, my film aimed to create a particular reaction of the audience and a feeling in them. There’s a certain emotional pleasure as the twist of a main character goes from a good guy to the enemy, I aimed to evoke a feeling of general shock and interest in the audience as a body, in which they could mentally involve themselves in. There’s also an intellectual puzzle and therefore pleasure in the drastic discovery of the good to bad guy character which invites the audience into developing an interest in the outcome of the film, urging them to continue watching. This is a popular technique used in the genre of thriller as it creates a mystery and a mentally stimulating and visual challenge in the film itself for the audience to enjoy. Daniel Chandler argues that the way in which we define genre depend on our purpose. My purpose was to create a film opening that really followed the strict conventions of the thriller genre and I did this by using visual conventions such as a mysterious figure at the beginning, taking inspiration from the film Seven as well as the dim blue tones of colouring and filtering to give it the intense look of the thriller genre and also I created a soundtrack and foley to really support the film and to intensify the atmospheric feeling as the story progressed. Whilst Nicholas Abercrombie argues that ‘the boundaries between genres are shifting and becoming more permeable’, my thriller opening conflicts and rejects this as the genre of psychological thriller which my film was of, is of a more niche area in terms of film genres. There were many conventions I had to follow as I have mentioned to be able to entitle the film as a thriller so whilst other genres may be confused and form bricolage of genres; thriller is one that my film opening attempted to portray that genre only. Contradictory to genre theory, my film opening also rejects John Hartley’s theory that ‘the same text can belong to different genres in different countries or times’ again because thriller films directly rely on the support of the genre’s conventions, this argument is void in my case. I needed to portray the fixed genre of thriller and I did this through using stereotypical archetypal characters such as the ‘hero’ and the ‘victim’ and the enigmatic narrative which I did. If I did not follow the thriller genre conventions very carefully, I would not have fulfilled the genre’s purpose – it could have turned into a horror very easily had I not of kept to conventions of the thriller genre. Jonathan Culler’s theory supports my use of sticking to thriller genre conventions as he argues that the ‘generic conventions’ of any genre allow a form of contract between the producers/directors of the film and the audience viewing it which basically invites the viewers to expect certain things from the film, such as structured thriller narrative and all the conventions which come with a film of that genre.