Genre Troubles

Hi! I’m writing this after the first ever FaceTime call I’ve had with my teammate. It was very productive and successful (well up until the point that my phone died that is). But we were able to discuss a general idea of what the film opening is going to be.



I opened a Google Doc to help me keep track of what Faye was saying and the ideas she had so that later I could do more research and come to definitive conclusions about the choices we want to implement. This is what I’ve compiled thus far:

Our film opening is a drama. As Faye described her initial ideas for striking and carefully crafted shots, as well as a tense and violent relationship between the two main characters, I realized that the genre that would best suit our endeavor is dramatic. However, this led me down a road into researching what exactly a drama is, and I began to become hyper-concerned over defining the genre. I read an article that referenced “The Screenwriters Taxonomy” which says

“All film descriptions should contain their type (comedy or drama) combined with one (or more) of the eleven super-genres.”

However, when I read out a list of these super genres (crime drama, horror drama, romantic drama, science fiction drama, sports drama, etc.) none of them applied to the story we were imagining of telling. So I texted Faye about this issue and did some research.

Going back to our phone call, Faye had spoken about how she was inspired by an excerpt from Raging Bull, the opening scene that we had reviewed in class towards the beginning of the year.

This opening shot became very famous because, while the camera was still, the slow-motion movements of Robert DeNiro captivated the viewer, while the opening credits rolled by slowly, setting a dramatic tone for the film. The idea of using movement to create visually engaging shots is something we want to prioritize for our shots in our own film opening, and therefore when I realized Martin Scorsese directed this film, I decided to cross-reference his works, since we were so drawn to this one.

This brings me back to figuring out the genre, as I searched “Scorsese drama films”, more results than I could handle popped up, and I started scouring the IMBD page of each one to see what genres and subgenres they fell under. This is where I found that Raging Bull was a biography sport drama, Killers of the Flower Moon is a crime historical drama, The Aviator is a historical drama, Casino is a crime drama, Taxi Driver is a crime drama and many more fall under dramas with their super-genre that helps define the story of the film. If these were the types of films we were inspired by, as well as non-Scorsese films such as Society of the Snow (adventure biography drama), Joker 2019 (crime thriller drama), and Oppenheimer (historical biography drama) then I felt that we needed to incorporate elements into our opening and change our ideas of what we believe the film was and how the introduction of it would be, in order to better compliment a more specific genre. I believe our storytelling would come out stronger because of it, if we make sharper more defined moves early on in pre-production.

Reference:
Williams, Eric R. (2017) The Screenwriters Taxonomy: A Roadmap to Creative Storytelling. New York, NY: Routledge Press, Studies in Media Theory and Practice. ISBN 978-1-315-10864-3.