While researching all these films and openings, you begin to see a certain pattern with certain directors and what they really like to do with their films. So, with a list of director’s and finding some of their quirks in their films I thought would be a good idea for our film and be able to take inspiration from those little things they implement to create that much more meaning to their films.
straight to the point and no deep underlying meanings
Seeing the different techniques between these directors and how they conveyed certain genre conventions of mystery and certain meanings provided a good amount of inspiration for how our film is going to play out. Some information seemed a little difficult to dig up, but a little digging never hurt anyone.
Through my research today on gender representation, I found that no movies exist that follow the sort of narrative I want with a female lead detective. Fun. Although, I did find a few movies within the mystery genre with aspects of thriller with a female lead, but not necessarily a detective as the main character. A good example of this is Kahaani, directed by Sujoy Ghosh. The main plot line of the movie follows a pregnant women attempting to find her husband while being pregnant at the same time. The movie portrays the main character, Vidya Bagchi, as a strong, courageous women who can conquer all of these obstacles to be able to finally find her husband. Although, this allows for Vidya to be shown as women typically are as emotional and weak/vulnerable. In multiple scenes throughout the movie, we see Vidya losing her composure and breaking down crying from the stress and hardships she encounters. This can be considered a good mix of representation for women in mystery movies as they can often be portrayed differently, as I will go into now.
Gender Feature Mean in Many Different Genres
Starting with the general idea of how gender is represented, according to a study conducted by the University of Southern California, women are either shown less, or given less meaningful lines in a film depending on the genre. (Ramakrishna, 1996) Looking into the “psycholinguistic normatives” (Ramakrishna, 1996) between the two genders, these representations come more easily into play.
Chart showing gender difference in movies and the industry
For movies overall, the dialogue shared between females and males can be seen as unequal and more focused towards the male leads or male characters in those movies. The chart here describes it and shows that male characters have over two times more dialogue pieces than females in movies overall.
Women in Mysteries
The first Sherlock Holmes film debut
In many mystery genre films, especially in the early 1900s when those movies were prominent, the women were portrayed as helpless, or even the victim in certain murder mysteries. In rare cases, such as Murder At the Gallop, it’ll show the women as the lead detective or helpful to the case. This stigma of women being helpless/the victim most likely stemmed from the first detective film adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, called Sherlock Holmes Baffled, in 1900-1903 directed by Arthur Marvin. This first showed the best detective as a male who was successful, so the idea of a female detective being good or the best would be compared to Sherlock, and not seen as good either.
The first The Thin Man
In the 1930s, the Thin Man series came out with a woman, a “carefree wife” named Nora, was portrayed in the way earlier described. She was the wife to the detective, not even helpful to the detective himself. Throughout the series, we see Nora appear more carefree, and get less screen time than the main detective which is understandable. This could’ve set the stage for women’s appearances in mystery film for decades later until more progressive ideals could’ve come about.
In the 40s-50s, there were more cynical films, reflecting the tone and mood from the World War and the aftermaths of the Great Depression of the 30s. Detectives became more ruthless and leaned towards more crime and violent genres of mystery. Many movies were made starring all male leads. To list a few examples, Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, Lloyd Nolan is Time To Kill, and Robert Montgomery in Lady In the Lake. In Lady In the Lake, the beginning of the movie starts with the wife of the main character taking advantage of him/divorcing him and marrying another man for his money. This portrays women in a negative light and simply materialistic. In Time to Kill, Heather Angel played as a “leading lady”. This meant that she simply acted as a love interest in the movie for the lead role of the detective.
Films with female detectives didn’t fair as well as others with the typical male detectives did. In 1991, V.I. Warshawski debuted in theaters and was meant to continue on as a series. The main character was Victoria Iphigenia, play by Kathleen Turner, as a private eye, solving the mystery of the murder of Boom-Boom Grafalk. It didn’t perform well at box offices, whether it was the fault of the casting or the time or the plot itself is up to interpretation.
In recent years, more TV shows have come out with female leads as detectives and show them as strong, individual women, such as Murder, She Wrote, Castle, and The Fall. Although, some of these TV shows can be considered more Standard Private Eye or even police procedural, more gender representation in a positive light for women being a lead detective and defying the odds is what we aim to achieve in our title sequence as well. By challenging the typical representation of women in mystery films, we are giving ourselves a challenge, but also painting women in a positive light.
Going off of the research I’ve conducted over the last few days, I’ve also come across the different types of mystery and thriller films and how easily other genres may overlap in doing so. Covering most to all of these types and blends will lead to us having a better understanding of what to do for our specific narrative following the struggles of a detective. I will also address movies that are categorized in these blends as well.
The standard private eye type of mystery film mostly follows the plot line of a detective film, but with a more official approach to it. More psychology is involved in these types of films, so more psychological attacks rather than physical and more mental mind games rather than the typical mystery here and there. (Libguides, 1) The “Private Eye” part comes in as an actual private eye instead of being named a detective. These films typically overlap with the crime genre, which is what Sitara is covering in her research. A great example of this is Zero Effect, directed by Jake Kasdan. While this film also has elements of comedy in it, the narrative of a “Private Eye” mystery film is kept throughout the film through its main characters being Daryl Zero and Steve Arlo. They’re both the “private eye” in this instance and they deal with blackmailing and complex crimes throughout the film and different mind games the villain is playing on them. The plot of this film is that they are two of the best detectives in the world who have to Our film isn’t typically following this sort of story formula, so while it’s good to differentiate between the types of movies, this type is not too useful to us right now.
Cozy mysteries are typically movies that don’t involve a lot of violence or action in many ways, but in just a simple small, closed off town and can be solved through simple intuition and problem solving. Police and CSI procedures are typically left out of these sort of films. These types of films can easily overlap with classic detective films. (Libguides, 1) A good example of this sort of film is Murder At the Gallop, directed by George Polluck. Miss Marple figures out the murder with her skills as a detective and being able to deduce who would’ve done something like that easily. Not a whole lot of violence is seen throughout the film as Miss Marple would probably be easily hurt from said violence. This film will also be useful for the representation of women is mystery films, as our main character is meant to be female and could add to the struggles of that detective. This genre and the next genre I’m going over is sure to be a good idea of what we want our film to end up like.
Classic detectives movies are exactly what they sound like: a classic detective investigating a mysterious murder with a close-knit circle of suspects that all have a well developed motive to kill the victim. The difference between this and the Cozy mystery is that there could involve violence or different mind games to go with the detective’s investigation. Though, they are still very easily overlappabe in creating a mystery film. A movie that follows this formula nearly perfectly is Murder On the Orient Express, directed by Kenneth Branagh. The main character, Hercule Poirot, is stuck on a train and left to investigate the murder of Cassetti that occurred on that train with a pool of suspects who all had a connection to the victim. This is truly the type of mystery title sequence we want to go for in our project. Other obvious examples would be Sherlock Holmes and Ace Adventura.
In order to truly find out what kind of conventions and narrative structure I would need to follow for this specific detective movie, Sitara and I analyzed a scene from the movie in order to do this. Compiling all the information we gathered, we put it all into one video, which can be seen from here.
The full video, blocked by Fox on YouTube so I’m unable to have it embedded, can be seen here through Google Drive.
This subgenre of mystery is a little different from the typical formulas mentioned earlier. The detective takes on the role of the police officer. (Libguides, 1) A familiar narrative in this genre would be the idea that the police are not doing enough to solve the crime, so the detective will take things into their own hands in order to solve the crime once and for all. Another things that makes this genre more different is the amount of mistakes the detectives could make which allowed room for error and development of their character as well. A prime example of this genre is M, directed by Fritz Lang. Following the outline that I stated, the plot of this movie follows the true police being unable to catch a child-murderer, but instead of “detectives” finding the criminal, other criminals join in to find out who’s committing the crime. It’s different than a typical police procedural film, but the conventions follow that sort of mystery very well.
Since thrillers are not a genre we are really focused on, I only researched the relevant topic of thriller mysteries rather than many different types of thrillers. Thriller mysteries are narratives with the idea of a corrupt social construct, perception of mystery, and more psychological ideas of solving mysteries, so a lot more deduction and logical flow of solving the murder/crime is invovled. (Libguides, 1) A movie that follows this narrative structure is A Simple Favor, directed by Paul Feig. A Simple Favor follows the narrative of one of the main characters, Emily, disappearing and the “detective figure”, Stephanie, to figure out where she is. Though, it’s considered a thriller of sorts because of the tricks and mind games and obstacles that Emily put in place for her. Having these sort of narrative strategies in the back of our minds, it may be able to spice up our title sequence that much more.
Concluding my research, this has really helped my narrow down my options to the sort of plot I want to establish for our title sequence, so our original skeleton is definitely bound to change.
Since our narrative falls under a total of four genres, researching all of them will take a lot of time, and then implementing aspects of all of those genres into will be a challenge. Although, having more information will give us more opportunity to create the best title sequence we can.
I researched the two genres mystery and thriller, having mystery being the main focus of the research.
Mystery
Scooby dooby doo, where are you…
Mystery is defined as a “subgenre of narrative fiction”. (Scholastic Professional, 1) The narrative story involves a murder that is unsolved or happened mysteriously. The main character (detective) solves the mystery through “logical deduction” (Scholastic Professional, 1) from the clues and information they find from their investigation. That’s the basic narrative aspect of the genre, they can take many different turns, but the skeleton of mystery films go along the guidelines of this. In tomorrow’s research when I address movies that fall under mystery, I’ll also go over the different types of mystery films that might benefit me in this project.
Through watching different mystery films (which will be addressed in another post), there are certain mise-en-scene, cinematographic, editing, and sound techniques that are typically followed.
Mise en scene-
Setting- countryside home, isolated, big cities, police stations
Costuming- 90’s get-up , protag in most recognizable get up
Lighting- mostly naturalistic, usually lowkey to obstruct the viewers view of the killer
Fonts used in mystery movies are typically simple fonts, or curly looking fonts. The colors are usually white or possibly gray-ish within mystery movies, for example Afterschool and Mystic River.
Thriller
Cause this is (a) thrilerrrrr!
The narrative of a thriller is to mainly build suspense and make the audience anticipate what’s going to happen next. Throughout the movie either a killer or some sort of violence is involved all throughout the film. An equilibrium is typically kept throughout the film and is left disrupted by the killer or the violence towards the victim soon enough. A big part of thrillers is the suspense and anticipation growing in the audience as they watch that part of the movie. This suspense is typically built through the other conventions listed below. (Filmsite, 1) In tomorrow’s research, I’ll go over different types of thrillers along with which movies they might correspond to.
Mise-en-scene-
Setting- isolated areas, dark alleys, house in the middle of nowhere
Costuming- villain in black, victim in white, detectives in uniform
Lighting- lowkey lighting, maybe some natural
Props- murder weapon (gun, knife, etc.), obstacles in house, object victim uses for defense
Cinematography-
Distance- close-ups to show fear, midshots to show the actual killing/violence, long shots to show isolation
Angles- high and low to demonstrate power between killer and victim
Movement- tracking shots and handheld to show chase or getting away from the killer
Editing-
Speed- fast to build tension, slow paced to build suspense (this also applies for sound)
Flashbacks- there may often be flashbacks if the victim and killer have some sort of connection
Sound-
Ambient sound- may have little sound if killing sequence is occurring or to build suspense
Sound Motif- if the killer or someone important to the killing comes onscreen, a motif may play
Diegetic sounds- heightened to build fear since the victim would only focus on that sound
Themes-
Reality, good vs. evil, perception, guilt, obsession
Fonts
The fonts used in thriller movies and in the titles are typically bold or have special little effects within them, as seen in The 5th Wave and Jason Bourne.
us mixing our genre conventions together
With all of these aspects coming into play and shaping our title sequence, I’m sure we can figure out what should go where and what shouldn’t. Plus, with Sitara researching drama and crime, it will show us the blend that would be best to set up our film.
Starting my research today, I already have an idea of what I want our title sequence to be like. The skeleton follows a female (possibly male if we face complications) detective struggling at the beginning of their investigation of a murder. For our proposal of this project, we challenged ourselves to set the sequence in the 90’s, so 1) the female detective would have more of a struggle since gender equality is still making its way to completely equal, and 2) so we would give ourselves a good challenge to find the right setting and the right decor and costuming and props so it will fit in the setting that we wanted it to be like. This will give us a good idea of how real set designers can set the scene of an event with the best use of mise-en-scene they can get. This sequence will most likely fall under three main genres, crime, mystery and drama, and possibly go under the one subgenre of thriller. The main events for each scene are listed next to this block of text of how our title sequence is going to play out which is definitely subject to change with more research to come, but our basic idea follows the detective struggling to find the truth to the murder. Our idea for the title sequence didn’t particularly start anywhere, but our interests stemmed from the same ideas of wanting our sequence to resemble a mystery and someone solving it. This allowed for us to bounce ideas off one another to come up with the idea of Into the Truth. The title came to us almost naturally once we established the mystery aspect of our film, finding the truth is one main aspect of solving said mystery, so it flowed well with our idea. Our research should be done around our schedule we have set in place, so by February 3rd we should have all the research we need and then we can really shape our title sequence into the specific genre conventions it needs.
Schedule
Our schedule for completing our title sequence is as follows.
Into The Truth 