· Planes
· Coffins
· Under Water
· Boot of a Car
· Elevator/Lift
· Walk In Freezer
· Tube Trains
· White Vans
· Small Room
· Car
· Prison Cell
· Narrow Alleyway
· Multi Storey Car Park
And there are many sub genres of thriller that are responsible for film gold like
James Bond- Spy Thriller
The Godfather- Crime Thriller
Earthquake- Disaster Thriller
The Manchurian Candidate- Political Thriller
The Talented Mr Ripley- Psychological Thriller
Theoretical approaches to the thriller genre
GK Chesterton - The Transformed City
The British author Chesterton wrote a series of crime detective stories in the early 1900's. As a modern genre, he liked the idea of the 'poetry of modern life'. In doing this, he protected the thriller genre fiercely from critics by describing reality as drab and mundane, and a thriller is an attempt to find possibilities for excitement and adventure within the boring world of reality.
Northrop Frye - The Heroic Romance
Frye agrees with Chesterton's take on the genre, and pioneered the theory that the hero could be 'one of us' . We, as the audience agree with these strange circumstances as we do with the romance genre - as in romance ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended and completely skewed. This ends up as the the thriller exchanging the romantic setting of the 'enchanted forest' for a more urbanized setting in the 'modern city'
John Cawelti - The Exotic
Cawelti agrees with Frye and Chesterton, and thinks that the setting transforms the city 'from a modern centre of commerce, industry and science into a place of enchantment and mystery'. The exotic doesn't necessarily mean as in a tropical island; it is simply something other to the audience or foreign to the viewer. Many thrillers use artefacts from the middle east or the orient e.g Japanese style props in Blade Runner or the african artefacts in Jumanji.
WH Matthews - Mazes and Labyrinths
This theme comes from Greek Mythology, related to Theseus and the Minotaur. The hero has to overcome a variety of challenges through a maze of twists to defeat the villain. It is a definitive formula for a lot of thrillers. Labyrinths and mazes show the twists and turns in which a story goes. The journey of the story is a theoretical maze. For example, in the Da Vinci Code it is a system by system story in which deduction and strategy works along with the hero to puzzle through, and involves the audience - will they find the answer before the hero does?
Pascal Bonitzer - Partial Vision
Bonitzer argues that we, as an audience, can only see so much, and what we cannot see is as, if not more important than what we can see. As if there is a hidden truth within the movie, that could be the 'last piece of the puzzle'. 'The answers may lie just around the next turn in the labyrinth'.
Lars Ole Saurberg - Concealment and Protraction
Concealment is the deliberate hiding of something from the audience. This links to Bonitzer's idea of 'partial vision'. It could be the hiding of an identity or a vital clue to the mystery of the film. Protraction is the intentional delaying of a suspected outcome e.g Bomb Countdowns. This encourages dramatic irony - the character doesn't know what is coming next, but the viewer does.
Noel Carroll - The Question-Answer Model
The audience wait for the answers to the questions that thrillers bring up - suspense is brought to the answers. The questions simply develops the thoughts of the audience - what? where? who why? The probability factor plays a part in the thriller genre - if something is more likely to happen, it is less exciting and suspenseful than something that is half chance, or almost impossible. The moral factor is important within thrillers - if we consider the outcome to be morally right we feel more secure with the story and it sharpens the suspense. This is evident in films such as the Bourne Supremacy - we want Bourne to get his true identity back; even though he is not living by the conventional ideas of right and wrong, he is right within the character profile.
No comments:
Post a Comment