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The Film Noir File. A Dossier of Challenges to the Film Noir Hardboiled Paradigm. What Explains the Visual Style of Film Noir? Introduction. A common tenet of the hardboiled paradigm is that the “personal” adequately explains American film noir’s visual style.
- The Verdict
The Film Noir Private Eye: Debunking the Myth. The Film Noir...
- Between Midnight and Dawn
The Film Noir Private Eye: Debunking the Myth. The Film Noir...
- Spy Noirs & The Origins of Film Noir
In Eyes in the Night, a blind man, “Mac” Maclain (Edward...
- No Man of Her Own
Addendum II: No Man of Her Own as both Romantic Melodrama...
- High Tide
But in the typical detective film noir, like High Tide, he...
- A Place in The Sun
The huge close-ups continue while Alice is alive. However,...
- Daisy Kenyon
The only other film noir reference book that includes Daisy...
- Published Sources: Women's Noirs
Sources for film noirs and published sources: Robert...
- Significance of The Woman in Distress
The “New Edition” of Women in Film Noir (British Film...
- Ivy
The first femme fatale in a gaslight film noir is Joan...
- The Verdict
Nov 7, 2023 · Film Noir is a type of thriller film that focuses on psychological dimensions of crime and uses heightened, stylized mise-en-scène. That is the simple definition, but things are not so straightforward.
Sep 22, 2018 · From lighting and shadows to crime dramas and femme fatales, there are several elements that come together to shape a film noir. The term itself, French for “dark film,” was first coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946 to refer to the distinctive black and white aesthetic.
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- 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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Classic Closing Lines
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.”
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The art world has been captivated by the distinctiveness of noir and dark art styles, which delve into the depths of the human mind and explore the shadowy facets of existence. Starting from the very beginnings of dark cinema to the modern creations of skilled individuals, the genre of film noir never fails to mesmerize audiences with its ...
Oct 27, 2023 · Like Film Noir characters, portrait subjects can convey complex emotions and back stories. The art of storytelling in portrait photography can involve encouraging subjects to inhabit a character or persona, using props, costumes, and facial expressions to hint at a narrative.
Jun 27, 2021 · Femme fatale. Tight, concise dialogue. High-contrast lighting. Post-war disillusionment. Noir Genre. Film noir originated in a time of angst. This style of filmmaking was characterized by a painful time in history. Cynicism and pessimism from the Great Depression were ingrained in the American psyche.
