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Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night (1997) While many critics refer to film noir as a genre itself, others argue that it can be no such thing. Foster Hirsch defines a genre as determined by "conventions of narrative structure, characterization, theme, and visual design." Hirsch, as one who has taken the position that film noir is a genre, argues that these elements are present "in ...
2. Armand Thirard. Cinematographer. Actor. Camera and Electrical Department. The Wages of Fear (1953) Armand Thirard was born on 25 October 1899 in Mantes-sur-Seine, Seine-et-Oise [now Mantes-la-Jolie, Yvelines], France. He was a cinematographer and actor, known for The Wages of Fear (1953), Diabolique (1955) and Remorques (1941).
May 10, 2011 · Unlike most films of the time, noirs favored low-key lighting which accentuated shadows on actors and sets. Noirs are literally dark films, and noir cinematographers tended to be artists who liked working in the dark. Take the most preeminent noir cinematographer, Hungarian-born John Alton. He is best known for his collaborations with director ...
- Overview
- The cinema of the disenchanted
- Defining the genre
film noir, (French: “dark film”) style of filmmaking characterized by such elements as cynical heroes, stark lighting effects, frequent use of flashbacks, intricate plots, and an underlying existentialist philosophy. The genre was prevalent mostly in American crime dramas of the post-World War II era.
Early examples of the noir style include dark, stylized detective films such as John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (1942), Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), and Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944). Banned in occupied countries during the war, these films became available throughout Europe beginning in 1946. French cineastes admired them for their cold, cynical characters and dark, brooding style, and they afforded the films effusive praise in French journals such as Cahiers du cinéma. French critics coined the term film noir in reference to the low-keyed lighting used to enhance these dramas stylistically—although the term would not become commonplace in international critical circles until the publication of the book Panorama du film noir americain (1955) by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
The darkness of these films reflected the disenchantment of the times. Pessimism and disillusionment became increasingly present in the American psyche during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the world war that followed. After the war, factors such as an unstable peacetime economy, McCarthyism, and the looming threat of atomic warfare manifested themselves in a collective sense of uncertainty. The corrupt and claustrophobic world of film noir embodied these fears. Several examples of film noir, such as Dmytryk’s Cornered (1945), George Marshall’s The Blue Dahlia (1946), Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse (1947), and John Cromwell’s Dead Reckoning (1947), share the common story line of a war veteran who returns home to find that the way of life for which he has been fighting no longer exists. In its place is the America of film noir: modernized, heartless, coldly efficient, and blasé about matters such as political corruption and organized crime.
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Many of the major directors of film noir—such as Huston, Dmytryk, Cromwell, Orson Welles, and others—were American. However, other Hollywood directors renowned for a film noir style hailed from Europe, including Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Tourneur, and Fritz Lang. It is said that the themes of noir attracted European directors, who often felt like outsiders within the Hollywood studio system. Such directors had been trained to emphasize cinematic style as much as acting and narrative in order to convey thought and emotion.
Controversy exists as to whether film noir can be classified as a genre or subgenre, or if the term merely refers to stylistic elements common to various genres. Film noir does not have a thematic coherence: the term is most often applied to crime dramas, but certain westerns and comedies have been cited as examples of film noir by some critics. Even such sentimental comedy-dramas as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) have been cited as “noir-ish” by critics who find in its suicidal hero and bleak depiction of small-town life a tone suitably dismal for film noir. Such films are also sometimes designated as “semi-noir,” or film gris (“gray film”), to indicate their hybrid status.
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Other critics argue that film noir is but an arbitrary designation for a multitude of dissimilar black-and-white dramas of the late 1940s and early ’50s. Film scholar Chris Fujiwara contends that the makers of such films “didn’t think of them as ‘films noir’; they thought they were making crime films, thrillers, mysteries, and romantic melodramas. The nonexistence of ‘noir’ as a production category during the supposed heyday of noir obviously problematizes the history of the genre.” Yet it cannot be questioned that film noir connotes specific visual images and an aura of postwar cynicism in the minds of most film buffs. Indeed, several common characteristics connect most films defined as “noir.”
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Aug 18, 2020 · The Petrified Forrest (Archie Mayo, 1936) I. The Look of Noir. The traditional history of film noir’s visual style holds that it replaced the classical high key (low contrast) three point lighting, use of day-for-night, shallow focus and normal length lenses, with low key and imbalanced lighting, deep focus and use of wide lenses, as well as the use of extreme angles and ‘dissymmetrical ...
Dec 22, 2021 · Film Noir’s Early Days: How Studios Resisted, Then Embraced, the Genre ... “Triumph in Low Key,” American Cinematographer, May 1947: 167-168, 182. “Anonymous But Important,” Motion ...
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Jan 17, 2020 · By Gary Gach. At top, John Ireland and Marsha Hunt in the crime drama Raw Deal (1948), shot by John Alton. In the summer of 1923, five lads drove across the country full of optimism, joie de vivre, and the excitement of all things new. Upon arriving in California, they parked on Hollywood Boulevard, in front of the Egyptian movie palace.
