Identifying which is film Noir

Film Noir

We’re not sure, but we know it when we see it.

“In general, film noir refers to those Hollywood films of the forties and early fifties that portrayed the world of dark, slick, city streets, crime, and corruption” (Paul Schrader)

“The best noir technicians simply made all the world a sound stage, directing unnatural and expressionistic lighting onto realistic settings” (Paul Schrader)

“Nearly every attempt to define film noir has agreed that visual style is the consistent thread that unites the very diverse films that together comprise this phenomenon . . . The characteristic film noir moods of claustrophobia, paranoia, despair, and nihilism constitute a world view that is expressed not through the films’ terse, elliptical dialogue, nor though their confusing, often insoluble plots, but ultimately through their remarkable style” (Place & Peterson).

“Noir is not a visual style, although as a way of seeing the world, it expresses itself through certain recurring visual motifs (e.g., the tilted camera to show a world out of joint, the use of shadows to show encroaching metaphysical darkness). Certainly the black-and-white noirs of the ’40s are among the most visually beautiful films ever made. . . . Difficult as it is to categorize, the noir vision has certain defining characteristics: the divided — often obsessed — protagonist, the morbid fascination with sex and death, the sense of malignant Fate, and the lurking threat of the unseen. Most important, the noir world is a fallen world, haunted by a sense of original sin, desperately in search of redemption” (C. Jerry Kutner)

“‘Film noir’ remains a somewhat contested concept. Everyone agrees as to its literal meaning, which is ‘black film.’ But film historians disagree as to its status as a cinematic phenomenon. Critics such as James Damico and Foster Hirsch consider it a genre with conventional plots involving murder, crime, and detection, and character types such as hard-boiled heroes and femmes fatales. (Damico and Hirsch) Raymond Durgnat and Robert Porfirio map film noir into a family tree of thematic concerns, including sexual pathology (the Clytemnestra plot), psychopathic behavior, alienation and loneliness, existential choice, meaninglessness, purposelessness, the absurd, infernal urban landscapes, and other “unhealthy” subjects. (Durgnat). Janey Place and Nick Peterson define it in largely stylistic terms, such as low-key lighting, off-angle compositions, deep-focus cinematography, wide-angle shots, and framing devices. (Place and Peterson) Paul Schrader views it as an aesthetic movement, similar to German expressionism or Italian neorealism, that is identified with a specific time (1941-1958) and place (Hollywood). (Schrader).” (John Belton)

“Noir can be read an aestheticized protest against the concepts of industrialization, capitalism, and progress, created by (mostly) American and German/Austrian writers and filmmakers who were simply recording the inevitable decline of American capitalism that began in earnest between the two world wars. Even as it shows the manifold seductions of the city, with its simultaneous capacity to yank an individual out of the crowd into instant wealth (identity via consumerism), and to submerge the troubled personality in the sea of humanity, noir exposes the bruised, bleeding underbelly of industrial culture. . . . This theory helps explain some of noir’s hallmark aspects: the country/city schism . . . in which the memory of the pastoral ideal (Nature) drives so much of the action; visual motifs that show a ruptured world — literally skewed angles, forced perspectives, dominant darkness; the intoxicating lure of crime, which subverts the faceless cooperation and conformity that drives a capitalist society by having a character attack the state’s piled-up treasures of money and property, the ill-gotten gains of its exploitation of the worker; and the collapse of predictable and necessary firm gender roles, with the sexualized woman increasingly a source of paranoia for the disempowered postwar male and frequently his downfall. This is not to say that noir created the femme fatale. This character exists as an archetype throughout myth and history, but noir situates her specifically in its anticapitalist schema, as a typically “twisted” growth in an inhuman culture.” (Gary Morris)

“The most compelling definition of film noir comes from Borde and Chaumeton, who regard it as a purely affective phenomenon — that is, it disturbs viewers; it disorients them; it produces a profound uneasiness in audiences. And it does this by whatever means possible. The historical nature of film noir derives, in large part, from its attempts to disturb. Film noir succeeded in creating a malaise in its audiences by refusing the stylistic and thematic conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. That is, noir arose in the 1940s as a response to and rejection of 1930s Hollywood cinema. . . . In other words, film noir is, as Schrader contended, not a genre but a mode of filmmaking practice that belonged to a specific time and place.” (John Belton)

“In film noir, women serve to express these films' skepticism toward the family and the values that it supports. With few variations, noir films divide women into three categories: the femme fatale, an independent, ambitious woman who feels confined within a marriage or a close male-female relationship and attempts to break free, usually with violent results; the nurturing woman, who is often depicted as dull, featureless, and, in the end, unattainable — a chance at conventional marriage that is denied to the hero; and the "marrying type," a woman who threatens the hero by insisting that he marry her and accept his conventional role as husband and father. Each type of film noir woman functions in a way that undermines society's image of the traditional family.” (John Blaser)