The Macro Elements Of Film Making Donnie Darko
Uploaded by Appleman on Dec 27, 2007
Macro Essay
Discuss how Genre and Narrative create meaning and response in the audience
Every film has at least one identifiable genre. The genre is the type of film you are watching, for example Frankenstein is of the horror genre, Star Wars is in the Sci-Fi genre etc. Some films have two or more genres, like Titanic, which is a love story and a dramatic tragedy, so it fits into these genres. Genre is used so that the audience can more easily identify what type of film a particular film is, and so helping them to decide if they are going to watch it at the cinema or rent it. For example, I may have seen a trailer of a sinking ship and thought it was an action/ adventure movie and then turned up at the cinema and seen some soppy love tragedy and been hugely disappointed, but the trailers made the genre easily identifiable and so I did not go and see it; I just had to suffer it several hundred times when my sister bought on VHS.
All films also have a narrative. Narrative is basically the story and the way it is shown to us the audience. Some films have a simple Linear Structure (where the story is shown in a logical order, from start to finish, like Lord of the Rings for example) whilst others have a more complicated Non-Linear Structure (where the story is shown in an illogical order, perhaps starting at the finish and ending at the start, an good example of this would be Memento). Narrative is hugely important because it is what we see. A director doesn’t want his/ her film to be too predictable because no one will watch it, so he/ she may start you in the middle of the story to pose a question like “How did that happen?” to keep people watching.
I'm going to analyse a sequence from Richard Kelly’s 2001 film Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko is a schizophrenic teenager who has an imaginary friend called Frank. Frank is a giant rabbit, who in his human form is Elizabeth (Donnie’s sister)’s boyfriend. The film is a psychological thriller that features some science fiction themes. The film is now a cult classic, but it flopped on its release in the US as pieces of a plane falling into a building was not a popular subject just a month after September 11th…
The sequence...