Codes and Conventions of the Mystery Genre

The Modern City

Mystery films are oftenest in modern urban cities going back to the time of film noirs, when these films reflected the fears and insecurities of a post war world. Too this day mystery films play are worries about the modern films, whether they be in the politic world or in our very own lives, mystery films play our sneaking suspicion that just under the surface there’s something dark and evil lurking there. The cities themselves often feel like dystopias which with a film like Blade Runner is very much the case; the dark and dirty, the glittering lights of billboards and skyscrapers contrasting with the griminess of the world the people below live in. For my film I want to create the same sense of mood of gloom that films like Enemy and Mulholland Drive by filming the modern industrial city as if it were a desolate dystopia.

Questionable Protagonist

Despite almost always being from the perspective of one main character mystery films often feature main protagonists who we struggle to understand and often suspect to be up to something. This reflects the feeling within us not only of mis-trust of others but even of ourselves and our own memories and actions. In a film like Enemy the main protagonist finds a doppelganger of himself, making us question if this is really happening or it’s just an expressionist point of view of the main character losing his sense of reality. In my film the main protagonist will be of questionable mind-set

Technical Codes

Close up shots or ECU shots are used to show people’s fear when they discover something, which in my film will used when they main protagonist's finds the disembodied finger. High and low angles to either show a potential murder victim as vulnerable and weak or to show the killer as strong an in control. Fast paced music and moving camera shots are used when the Hero is chasing a suspect. This creates tension as the audience doesn’t know if he will get away or not. In my film I will use a mixture of Jazz to reflect the old-fashioned mood of the genre, with modern classical music such as Phillip Glass in order to create a building tension throughout the film as well as atmospheric Synth moodscapes to capture the feelings of the character

Lighting

Lighting in Mystery films is often stylised, with muted colours reflecting the gloomy tone of the films. In Enemy, the whole film is dipped in a sepia tone filter giving an almost apocalyptic quality, reflecting the un-ease felt by both the audience and the main character. In my film I will a similar tone to Enemy, in order to invoke a sense of suspense and dread in the audience. Other more traditional films such as The Third Man, and The Big Sleep use there B&W cameras, to the advantage as naturally with B&W you deep dark shadows. In my film in certain shots I will use B&W in order to surrealistic tone to the film as well as using it in an expressionist way like in 1920’s film like Dr Cabaret of Caligula and Metropolis. In these films the actual colour of the film would change from Sepia, to Bluish hue to B&W all in order to reflect the mood of the film and the characters. With my film I want to page homage to this.

Themes (Part I)Thematically mystery films have throughout there historyalways subverted the common trends of there day. For example in the earliest mystery films in the 1920’s and 30’s directors such as Fritz Lang pushed cinema into far darker and more complex terroites such as in the film “M” which was censored heavily for decades after it released being outright banned by the UK and the USA when they passed censorship laws for cinema, as well as in Lang’s country of birth Germany, when the Nazis took over as they found the film to subversive and possibly dangerous to society. The influence of this film was evident almost immediately in the dark, expressionistic film noir of the post-war American era, which peered behind the surface of the new society, showing a hideous dark underbelly. Currently in the time we live in now a similar kinds of ruptures in the fabric of society seem to be happening with things like Brexit and Donald Trump, reflecting a lack of trust, or even an active belief in the bad intentions of the standard political narratives, told to us by our leaders.

Themes (Part II)With the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the mystery genre which had previously danced around the psychoanalytic issues of the modern world, plunged deep into them. Vertigo, considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made, places the protagonist's psychosis and phobias right into the centre of the narrative, making the audience both question the character’s motives, but now also his mental state. This sense of suspicion from the audience is something I want to capture in my film, so that audience never really has a full grasp on the main character so a sense of looming threat hangs over the whole film. Vertigo features something else that he pioneered in mystery films, the protagonists questionable morality; he isn’t a simplistic hero, his character is more relatable as he seems motivated not by the narrative thrust of the narrative but by his emotions and thoughts.

Themes (Part III)