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Dec 16, 2019 · The term “film noir” is typically credited to French critic Nino Frank, who apparently coined it in a 1946 essay published in the magazine L’Écran français to describe four American crime ...
Tech noir. Film noir ( / nwɑːr /; French: [film nwaʁ]) is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylized Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and motivations. The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir.
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Apr 29, 2024 · Defining Film Noir. Noir means black in French. Beyond the color, black also signifies darkness. Darkness has synonyms that include: Noir is a French word that represents the antithesis of light, cheery, and fun. But it is the French part where this all started.
- 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.
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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
Oct 6, 2019 · In 1946, French critics came up with the term "film noir" to describe the dark mood of these new films, and the name stuck, even though it didn't become widely used until years later. Film noir became one of the most popular genres in the 1940s, and this continued into the 1950s. The 1940s and 1950s are still regarded as the high point of film ...
Jan 15, 2024 · Film noir is a term used to describe a genre of films that emerged in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. The term "film noir" is a French term meaning "black film" or "dark film," which refers to the dark and moody themes and visual style of these films. Film noir films often feature morally ambiguous characters, cynical and ...
May 29, 2018 · The term film noir, meaning "dark cinema," was coined by French film critics to describe the American films that arrived in Europe in the years after World War II (1939–45). Emerging in the 1940s as an alternative to "classical" Hollywood cinema, film noir is a curious blend of violent crime, national identity crisis, and budget moviemaking.
