RESEARCH INTO FILM NOIR

Film Noir refers to a cycle of unusually nasty, cynical, pessimistic, even paranoid Hollywood movies, most of which were made between the middle 1940s and the late 1950s.  Film noir is a stylistic blend of expressionism and realism, intense psychological examination, and shocking physical violence. Taken from the French language, the term film noir translates literally as “black film.” Putting aside the problematic racial ideology implicit in the link between blackness and evil, the term film noir is a signal that the world depicted onscreen is literally dark and shadowy. In noir films, such darkness is often downright fatal, its dense shadows suggesting the endless night of death.

Double Indemnity, Crossfire, Out of the Past, In a Lonely Place, Touch of Evil— these are all classic noir films with great titles. Some are set in seedy bars and back alleys while others take place in a world of sleek, heartless glamour. But they all share a sense of moral compromise—of growing corruption, fatalism, and doom. Heroes are led astray, often by heroines; characters’ motives are generally less than pure; and nobody comes out clean in the end. In short, noir films show us how easily the everyday world can turn nightmarish. For example, take a look at the opening sequence to Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946). ‘Feel’ how the mood of the piece changes as the dialogue turns nasty, the narrative unfolds and the tension builds.

Film noir brings together several strains in cinema, literature, and world history. In Europe and Hollywood, the artistic movement known as German Expressionism had taken hold in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when European directors and technicians such as Fritz Lang (the director of the German Expressionist film Metropolis and the noir films Scarlet Street and The Big Heat, among others) and Karl Freund (who photographed Metropolis, the noir film Key Largo, and others) brought to the American film industry techniques in cinematography, composition, set design, and camera placement meant to render characters’ internal psychological states in an external way. These methods included low-key lighting, sets built in distorted perspective, and exaggerated high- and low-angle shots.
In 1941, Orson Welles employed these techniques, together with unusually self-conscious deep-focus photography, in the filming of Citizen Kane, a key influence on film noir. Citizen Kane points the way to film noir not only in its moody visuals but also in its complex narrative structure, which employs flashbacks to evoke multiple points of view. Citizen Kane 'Rosebud' sequence

Also in this period, the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema were beginning to be challenged by filmmakers who wanted to violate the codes of what might be called “high Hollywood”—the glossy studio sets, high-key lighting, glamorous costumes, and linear narrative structures that had come to define the American cinema in the 1930s.  Gone With the Wind is an excellent example of ‘high Hollywood’. Crime films had been popular in the 1930s, but their heroes tended to be gentlemen, their villains flashy gangsters. Film noir was born out of the desire for grittier crime movies filmed with conventions thought to be more realistic—lower-key lighting, pettier criminals, more cynical detectives, and the grainier look of newsreel documentaries. As filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin admiringly puts it, film noir is a kind of “disreputable filmmaking.”

Film noir’s crime stories themselves grew out of literature. In the 1930s, authors such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain wrote a series of highly successful “hard-boiled” crime novels—The Maltese Falcon, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, and others—which were brought to the screen in the 1940s. The protagonists of these books are tough and streetwise, and they tend to use American vernacular language in a witty, stylized way. One example is this punchy turn of phrase near the end of Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which the doomed protagonist tries to understand how he got into trouble: “When I start to figure, it all goes blooey.” John Belton quotes another example of self-consciously stylized, clever language from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. The film is full of verbal cut and thrust, wordplay and inventive banter between bright, witty characters. Wilder wants us to enjoy this interchange as movie dialogue—a better, more entertaining way of talking than we use in everyday life. Even in language, film noir is largely about style.

Because film noir is obsessed with murderous femmes fatales—evil, hateful women who seem to devote their lives to the destruction of men—some women may find these films offensive. As you will see, however, feminist critics often find film noir fascinating precisely for this reason. Like the rest of the film noir world, these killer blondes can be seen as representations of raging male paranoia. In this light, the contempt with which film noir tends to view women may really be a cover for a more profound and widespread psychosexual terror.

Beyond its cinematic and literary heritage, film noir developed out of World War II and the brutal nuclear legacy it spawned. It’s not purely coincidental that the film noir cycle began at a time when millions of men and women were dying on the battlefield, in bombed out cities, and in concentration camp gas chambers. Many film noir heroes are themselves war veterans who return from the nightmare of global carnage to find that the seemingly innocent world back home has become dirty and corrupt. Given the threat of nuclear destruction that gripped the world after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s not surprising that film noir is pervaded with a striking, almost cosmic paranoia. (This omnipresent anxiety is tied directly to the nuclear threat in the great 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly.)

Noir characters may often be returning soldiers for whom the trauma continues back home, but in the widest sense, it is really noir’s mass audience and not simply a handful of film characters who tend to see the world as having become sullied and debased. Still, World War II only influenced the rise of film noir; it didn’t produce film noir on its own. In fact, in addition to being a confluence of stylistic, literary, and historical trends, film noir is also a phenomenological effect—a product of the experience of watching films. Pursuing this line of thought, some critics have argued that film noir is not a genre at all but rather a mood—the anxious, fatalistic state of mind that certain films induce in audiences. These critics cite the fact that, generally speaking, Hollywood filmmakers didn’t say to themselves, “Let’s make a film noir” in the same deliberate way in which they set out to make Westerns, comedies, and combat films. According to these film historians, it is audience reactions—not social, historical, or artistic agendas—which define the cycle.

One way of defining film noir, then, is to see it as a collection of stylistic devices employed in a set of crime films made during and after World War II; in this case there can be no more noir films made today. A contrary approach is to see film noir as those films which produce a certain anxious affect, or emotional state, in audiences; in this sense, Body Heat and Blue Velvet, both made in the 1980s, and L.A. Confidential and Red Rock West, made in the 1990s, might be considered noir films even though they are both in colour. John Belton calls these more recent films “pseudo-noirs”. A more positive term is Neo-Noir – new noirs that might include films such as Dark Knight, Bladerunner, Sin City, 2046 and Drive; films that are the C21 reworking of those classic noir themes, moods, lighting schemes, conventions, representations and narratives. Chris Nolan’s Inception  and Scorsese’s Shutter Island also stand as great Neo-Noir examples.

In addition, there have been several straight remakes of old noir films as well as looser reworkings of classics. In the former category, the 1947 film Out of the Past was remade in 1984 as Against All Odds. The 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice was remade in 1981; 1962’s Cape Fear—a very late film in the original film noir cycle—was remade by Martin Scorsese in 1991; and the 1949 film D.O.A. was remade in 1988, also under its original title. In the category of reworked noir films, the best example is probably Body Heat, an update of the 1944 film Double Indemnity. And finally, there are a number of films which aren’t remakes in any sense but which nevertheless draw heavily upon film noir’s style and sense of moral ambiguity. L.A. Confidential, Blue Velvet, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and even Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Each employ images of urban corruption, restlessness, and despair in ways that consciously seek to remind audiences of the great noir films of the past. In Britain, the musician, artist and filmmaker Barry Adamson released a short film Therapist in 2010 – a neo-noir short that delved deep into London’s sordid underbelly of people trafficking, crime and sexual violence.

In this way, the murkiness of the film noir world extends also to their study. Like the great noir detectives, students of film noir must first figure out what they’re looking at because the evidence itself isn’t crystal clear.  

a) What does the term ‘Film Noir’ refer to?
The films at the time had low-key lighting due to the lack of resources around WWII, making most of the screen black (Noir is from the French view of the films) as well as the dark themes of crime, etc. & the characters themselves have “blackened” background
b) Where did the term come from?
Reviews & categories defined by French critics i.e. Nino Frank
c) What is the repertoire of elements in Film Noir?
Dark characters (E.G. DETECTIVES, ANTI-HEROES) with corrupt backgrounds, weapons (e.g. guns), neon signs
d) Name three films noir.
The Thief (US 1952)*
Quai des Orf`evres (FR 1947)
Stray Dog (JP 1949)
e) To what extent is film noir a ‘phenomenological effect’?
The film’s themes reflect especially the viewers’s previous experiences at the time, with post-war trauma and disturbances in the characters. The tone and lighting is realistic as opposed to other films which had high-key lighting & unnatural characters. The endings of the examples of the genre would usually be anything but the “new equilibrium” only getting worse or ending on a “cliffhanger”, which is the opposite of previous films.