My Third Idea for a Film Genre
This article can also be viewed at https://medium.com/non-monetized-together/my-third-idea-for-a-film-genre-7217b8862b45
Just in case you’re wondering, here’s a link to my first idea and here’s a link to my second idea.
The video for the NZCA Lines and VIAA song For Your Love is one of the most emotionally powerful videos I’ve seen in a long time. It prompted feelings I may have never felt before when watching a movie. I asked myself, what is it about this video, directed by Florence Winter Hill, that allowed those feelings to develop?
And the answer I found was a strange one. What sets this video apart from most other films is that we don’t know anything about the characters.
The two “main characters” are depicted as silhouettes, so they could be anybody. The other characters all show up only once apiece and we don’t know anything about any of them. Rather, their purpose of being in the video is to symbolize emotions. Emotions such as excitement, passion, longing, and celebration.
How does this allow the music video to succeed? Because it heightens these emotions to the point where they come across as feeling different than they do in the real world. Filmmakers may put a lot of time and effort into making characters seem real and getting the audience to relate to the characters’ emotions, but let’s be honest, real-world emotions are a drag. They’re linked to the random chances of your life situation. They’re grounded and reasonable. They’re messy and sometimes confusing. They can ruin your day or even your life, but they will only satisfy the former.
This music video presents an escapist fantasy where none of that gets in the way. The people in this video do not come across as human beings with their own inner lives. They only exist to express the video’s themes and to coordinate the video to the music. And because of that, the video feels more emotionally intense than anything I experience in my own real life.
So how could this approach to filmmaking become its own genre?
My vision is of a movie that contains dramatic character interactions, but always at a distance from the characters. The audience is not to know anything about the characters. The film will also show the consequences of the characters’ actions. An example of this would be the film showing an announcement of a bill being passed, followed by a scene depicting an anonymous person’s everyday life under this new law, which would then lead to a shot from a moving vehicle capturing the law’s effect on the city.
Whose perspective would the film be shot from? Surely not from any of the characters. I’m envisioning the film instead being shot from the perspective of the land and of the space inhabited by the land. I think this will allow the films in this genre to feel like the music video I linked earlier.
So if you have writer’s block, why not try making a “distance drama?” By combining drama, symbolism, and escapism, your film can maximize its emotional power.