A thriller is a broad genre of literature, film, television and gaming that includes numerous and often sub genres. Thrillers are characterized by fast pacing frequent action and resourceful heroes who must out think and make plans to better and out smart the villain.
The film makers have been putting these elements together for almost as long as cinema itself has been around . With the first audiences quickly tiring of the technical marvels of the new fangled marvels, directors where looking for more creative ways to thrill their viewers. Borrowing a few things from the hugely popular serial writing, producers began to creat weekly installments of long running series, each ending with a cliff hanger end that would see the hero in deadly danger to intise the audience to tune in next time. The most famous of these was the 1914 series “Perils of Pauling” famous for featuring a villianous “cad” tieing a helpless women to train tracks as a train was approching.
Film series were still popular as films began to incorparate sound , in what was called the ‘talkies’ films became more complex in dialog and plot lines.
Originally a novel written by john Butchan and published in 1915 was then made into a black and white film in 1935 by Alfred Hitchcock This was the first Hitchcock film based upon the idea of an "innocent man on the run," such as “saboteur” and “north by north west”.
The car chases, the acrobatic fights sequences and the set piece pursuits in foreign locations. It is a rounded character study you want and then you look elsewhere. That is way the finest thriller film-makers tend to be master at telling stories with griping story lines that captivates you from start to end and who give up showy displays of acting. . A few like Hitchcock, John Frankenheimer and Michael Mann being prominent examples.
Thrillers must not always necessarily depend for its excitement on overstated action scenes. In the late 1940s the field toughened up and dressed down with a string of magnificently bleak urban crime stories that the French critics would later label film noirs. The movies like “The Big Sleep”, “Out of the Past” and “Double Indemnity” Fedora wearing trench coated figures would stalk city streets at night solving mysteries that were as impenetrable as their obscure surroundings. The plots were intense and complex, and the mood was suspicious and hard-bitten, perfectly in step to the weary post-war mood.
The film noir awareness resurfaces intermittently, mostly notably in 70s gritty crime thrillers like “The French Connection”, “Chinatown” and “The Long Goodbye” which survives in the work of independent minded Directors like the Cohen brothers (whose latest movie “No Country for Old Men” is a rare mixture of thriller with western.
It is in its glossy high concept form that the thriller dominates today. For film-makers fascinations with explosive action sequence, cool new technology and dazzlingly twisty plotting, especially after the popularity of clever –layered espionage TV shows like “24”. The essence of these tendencies is probably the latest “Mission Impossible” installment and the fact that this bloated, insanely expensive Tom Cruise movie did not live up to its expectations may suggest the thriller must go back to basics it is to prosper in the film industry.
No comments:
Post a Comment