WHERE'S THE DRAMA?

9 EXT GENRE NIGHT

LIFE ISN'T A SENTENCE; IT'S A GENRE

From the screenwriter’s perspective, genre is the acknowledgement of the pre-eminence of both tribal affiliation and the presence in one’s audience of a tribal consciousness.

In terms of dramatic, screen storytelling, tribe is identifiable by what it does.

Genre, in turn, is an expression of those defining social processes through which particular tribal entities manifest their being, both inside and outside the script.

Genre is the tribal storyteller's manner of portraying or dramatising the guiding themes and symbols inherent in both the storyteller’s tribe and audience. The underlying values, emotions and ideas by which the storyteller and his/her audience identify themselves are major considerations (or influences) in the choice of genre.

Consider the words: "Once upon a time ..." They will have a very different meaning for an audience whose cultural initiation has included fairy tales. An initiated audience will expect an anecdote or narrative, probably of a fanciful nature, involving unexpected events and characters, some of whom may be larger than life.

Genre invokes tribe and tribe evokes genre.

Dramatic scripts, if approached tribally, from the perspective of character-based experiences, evolve into structures that are purposeful; and, like the actions of the characters that inhabit them, are goal oriented. Genre implies purpose.

A screen story exists for a purpose; it possesses its own objective, some times quite different from the objectives of the characters, insofar as it conveys an emotional meaning that the storyteller wants to leave with his or her audience.

The character, structure and movement of the emotional energy of a film, when grounded in a dramatic grammar and guided by tribal sensitivities, produce a singular coherence, which we refer to as genre.

Every genre produces its own, special kind of energy that derives from the actions of ALL of the story’s characters. Such actions appear real, legitimate and seamless so long as they maintain coherence amongst all of the story’s constituent parts, most of which – if the film is successful – will go unnoticed by the audience.

Only when it breaks down, when the style is inexplicably altered or changes in some way, do we become aware of the species of the emotional energy we have been experiencing, and if that happens we are invariably thrown out of the story.

Genre is the dress code of character and plot – not a physical dress code, but an emotional one, for it tells the audience that has been invited to the feast what kind of emotional investment is required and what sort of party they can expect.

So long as the story remains the story in which the emotional investment has been made one reads the emotional codes of the characters with alacrity and, hopefully, some degree of empathy. But break the code and you will find that it is difficult if not impossible to transcend or constructively transform the confusion thus produced.

A screen story makes a pact with its characters, and these include not only the characters IN the script, but also the characters outside of it, namely the AUDIENCE and the TRIBE. Taken together this configuration determines the screenwriter’s relationship to the subject matter.

The most successful film storytellers frequently tell stories about themselves, or the people to whom they are tribally connected. It is difficult to imagine how a filmmaker could create the kind of emotional energy required to make an emotional impact on an audience without working from his or her origins. Indeed it is these origins that have brought him or her into the ambit of the audiences to whom the stories might be addressed. In this way, genre waits on audience, or at least the storyteller’s realisation of audience, imaginatively, in the process of finding the story.

The means by which one communicates a story – in this case, film or video – is another factor in the encoding process that is genre. Choices concerning the way in which the story is shot, lit, designed, edited or organised, are all elements in the creation of genre, and are themselves grounded in the writer’s, director’s producer’s et al, relationships with the characters, the audience and the tribe.

Purpose, or genre, is determined by a nexus of identities involving characters in the script (and their given circumstances) and characters outside the script - namely the storyteller/s, the audience and the tribe (and their tribal circumstances).

The sympathetic and coherent alignment of all the circumstances of ALL the characters in the story-finding enterprise produce the CHARACTER of the story itself, which is its genre.

LOOKING AT FILM NOIR

Film noir, or "black cinema", reached its apex in the decade after the Second World War. Typified by low key lighting, dark interiors, night exteriors (shot night-for-night), wet streets, a brooding mood, a hard-boiled and independent hero with an ambivalence towards or dislike of authority, cynical dialogue, villains who prefer greed and lust, and a smouldering suggestion of illicit sexuality, personified by a sexually agressive femme fatale, whose deceit threatens to undo the best hopes and fortunes of the male lead, it graphically captured the spirit of the times, though it antecedents are traceable back to the mass electrification of the cities - around 1910 - and the rise of German Expressionism, a painting movement that came to the fore duing the 30s Depression.

Its emergence as a dramatic form was disarmingly articulated in the gritty pulp fiction that followed World War II, especially in the work of writers like Hammett, Chandler and Horace McCoy among others, and the vision of several leading German and Austrian film directors who emigrated to America after Hitler came to power.

The insecurities and confusion of the post-war period wedded to a series of profound technological developments in both lighting and film stocks, were major contributing factors to the popularity of the genre.

Essentially, there are two types of dramatic plots that characterise the form.

In the first type, a detective, or representative of the law, descends into an unstable unpredictable corrupt universe as he searches for the truth. In the second, a decent "Everyman" gets drawn into a corrupt environment which poisons him until he, too, ends up corrupt (e.g.: Quinlan in Touch of Evil).

The visual style of a classic Noir film, emphasises a dark and hostile universe. The hero's moral confusion is usually externalized in the use of low-key lighting and extreme, nightmarish shadows. Harsh lighting contrasts, jagged shapes, weird camera angles, all contribute to the unease and sense of threat. Often there are scenes at night in which pools of darkness are broken up by pockets of light. Dark streets, alleys, tunnels, subways, elevators, and train cars (which function as motifs of entrapment) create alien and often claustrophobic environments, depersonalised by flashing neon signs and dense fog. Clouds of cigarette smoke swirling in dimly lit cocktail lounges mix with symbols of fragility, such as window panes, sheer clothing, glasses and mirrors.

Noir characters are invariably "imprisoned" behind ornate lattices, grillwork, drifting fog and smoke.

There is also a sense of temporariness - as if the entire world is in flux, moving towards an uncertain future - hence, the use of transient settings : grubby rented rooms, bus terminals, piers, railroad yards, and the like.

The tone is usually paranoid and fatalistic. The focus, on human depravity, violence, lust, greed and betrayal.

Some Examples of Film Noir

Detectives searching for the truth in an alien, corrupt universe
• John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, 1941
• Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet, 1944
• Otto Preminger's Laura, 1944
• Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, 1958

A decent man is slowly poisoned by a corrupt environment films include:
• Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, 1944
• Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, 1945
• Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour, 1945
• Jacques Tourneur's Out Of The Past, 1947
• Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai, 1948

For a more graphic exploration of the form,
visit the website, Ten Shades of Noir, which
you can access at

http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue02/infocus.htm

TRAGEDY vs COMEDY

Tragedy presents a dramatic examination of human morals. It asserts that a person’s morality may make it impossible for him to keep living. It is concerned with situations in which a character’s “higher nature” forces him/her to take action, even when such action must end in that characters demise or death. The action must be taken otherwise the character becomes less than what he/she could or should be.

Comedy, on the other hand, presents a message of hope – it tells us that no matter how bad things might get we can make it through another day. Comedy’s basic message is that the human race will survive; it is about SURVIVAL, and how survival is possible, and under what conditions.

WHERE'S THE DRAMA?

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9 EXT GENRE NIGHT

TRAGEDY vs COMEDY

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