Genre and narrative theory

1. Brandon Hanlon

2. There are a lot of narrative theories that share their input on what is usually in a
film. For our film Crook, I think the quote from Jean Luc Goddard is very
important as it is something we have implemented into our own film, “A story
should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”.
This quote links to Crook as the end of our film is actually the beginning when the
detective is making his choice whether or not to kill the Gripwell Killer, the man
who killed his family, this is to create even more suspense and to build up the
drama in the film, making it more enjoyable for the audience. Another narrative
theory that links to Crook is by Claude-Levi-Strauss, his theory is that there are
binary opposites, in our film this will be shown as good versus evil, good being
detective George Foster while evil is shown in the Gripwell Killer. This is
important as the whole film is revolved around the conflict between these two
characters.

3. There are a lot of different genres, to decide on a genre depends on what you are
showing to the audience and the message you want to show. There is a theorist
called Steve Neale who has said that there is “difference in repetition”. This quote
shows that although films from the same genre have similar conventions, it is
important for the directors to make the film its own by doing something unique
and different. Me and group member Charlie are hoping that our film Crook is
unique and just because we are implementing conventions from other crime films
does not mean that it is not unique and different. Another genre theory is by Rick
Altman who says that genres always have two different elements: Semantic and
Syntactical elements. Semantic elements are things that signify something to the
audience, for example red may induce thoughts of violence. We are using this in
Crook as the colour of the Gripwell Killer’s clothing is all black, signifying that the
character’s personality is dark and violent. Syntactic elements are esentially
themes, for example in our film the big theme is around revenge as detective
George Foster’s family was killed by the Gripwell Killer.