‘Dude, get a shot of this’: The performance of violence in the school shooting film Excursion

One of the persistent aspects of the media and general public response to campus shooting tragedies is an obsessive fascination with the motives of the killers. Our short drama Excursion attempts to intervene in this interest in the perpetrators of school shootings by displacing the emphasis from th...

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Main Authors: Bender, Stuart, Broderick, M.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Australasian Association of Writing Programs 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/31035
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author Bender, Stuart
Broderick, M.
author_facet Bender, Stuart
Broderick, M.
author_sort Bender, Stuart
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description One of the persistent aspects of the media and general public response to campus shooting tragedies is an obsessive fascination with the motives of the killers. Our short drama Excursion attempts to intervene in this interest in the perpetrators of school shootings by displacing the emphasis from the killers to the victims and survivors. A central technique to achieve this was the profilmic performance of the actors portraying the killers: two characters who were designed as ciphers from the initial scripting stage and throughout rehearsal and filming. Where these acts of mass violence in real life can be regarded as performative in nature (Muschert & Ragnedda 2010) it is significant to consider the performance techniques employed by the actors themselves. In this article, we discuss the rehearsal and performance choices of the actors as well as the commentary by actors portraying victims and survivors of the shooting. In particular, we discuss our empirical research into the audience reaction to the two alternate endings which emphasize the performance of violence in different ways.
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-310352017-01-30T13:22:58Z ‘Dude, get a shot of this’: The performance of violence in the school shooting film Excursion Bender, Stuart Broderick, M. One of the persistent aspects of the media and general public response to campus shooting tragedies is an obsessive fascination with the motives of the killers. Our short drama Excursion attempts to intervene in this interest in the perpetrators of school shootings by displacing the emphasis from the killers to the victims and survivors. A central technique to achieve this was the profilmic performance of the actors portraying the killers: two characters who were designed as ciphers from the initial scripting stage and throughout rehearsal and filming. Where these acts of mass violence in real life can be regarded as performative in nature (Muschert & Ragnedda 2010) it is significant to consider the performance techniques employed by the actors themselves. In this article, we discuss the rehearsal and performance choices of the actors as well as the commentary by actors portraying victims and survivors of the shooting. In particular, we discuss our empirical research into the audience reaction to the two alternate endings which emphasize the performance of violence in different ways. 2016 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/31035 Australasian Association of Writing Programs fulltext
spellingShingle Bender, Stuart
Broderick, M.
‘Dude, get a shot of this’: The performance of violence in the school shooting film Excursion
title ‘Dude, get a shot of this’: The performance of violence in the school shooting film Excursion
title_full ‘Dude, get a shot of this’: The performance of violence in the school shooting film Excursion
title_fullStr ‘Dude, get a shot of this’: The performance of violence in the school shooting film Excursion
title_full_unstemmed ‘Dude, get a shot of this’: The performance of violence in the school shooting film Excursion
title_short ‘Dude, get a shot of this’: The performance of violence in the school shooting film Excursion
title_sort ‘dude, get a shot of this’: the performance of violence in the school shooting film excursion
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/31035