Film Noir- so what is it?

[Steve-O]

clip from the 1992 documentary "Visions of Light" produced by the American Film Institute


The history of film noir criticism has seen fundamental questions become matters of controversy unusually intense for such a field. Where aesthetic debates tend to concentrate on the quality and meaning of specific artworks and the intentions and influences of their creators, in film noir, the debates are regularly much broader. Four large questions may be identified, two of them addressed at the beginning of this article:

* What defines film noir?
* What sort of category is it?

A third question applies at a more specific level, but is sweeping:

* What movies qualify as film noirs?

This article refers to movies from the classic period as "film noir" if there is a critical consensus supporting that designation. That consensus is almost never complete and is in many cases provisional: The Lost Weekend and The Night of the Hunter, for instance, were seldom considered as film noirs a quarter-century ago; today, a growing number of critics refer to Suspicion (1941), directed by Hitchcock, and Casablanca (1942), directed by Curtiz, as film noirs. Outside of the classic period, consensus is much rarer—movies are considered as noir herein if a substantial number of critics have discussed them as such. In order to decide which films are noir (and which are not), many critics refer to a set of elements they see as marking examples of the mode. This leads to a fourth major point of controversy in the field, one that overlaps with all those noted above:

* What are the identifying characteristics of film noirs?

For instance, some critics insist that a film noir, to be authentic, must have a bleak conclusion (e.g., Criss Cross or D.O.A.), but many acknowledged classics of the genre have clearly happy endings (e.g., Stranger on the Third Floor, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and The Dark Corner), while the tone of many other noir denouements is ambivalent, in a variety of ways. The ambition of this section, then, can be no more than modest: it is an attempt to survey those characteristics most often cited by critics as representative of classic film noirs. As diverse as that set of movies is, the diversity of films from outside the classic period that have been discussed as noir is so great that any similar survey would be impractical; however, those classic noir identifying marks often referenced in neo-noirs—however frequently or seldom they actually appeared in the original films—are noted as are certain signal trends of the latter-day mode.

[Steve-O]

Forget it, Jake. It's...the blinds. Private eye Jake Gittes, performed by Jack Nicholson, undergoes some old-school shadowcasting in Chinatown (1974).

Film noirs tended to use low-key lighting schemes producing stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterning. The shadows of Venetian blinds, cast upon an actor, a wall, or an entire set, are an iconic visual in film noir and had already become a cliché well before the neo-noir era. While black-and-white cinematography is considered by many to be one of the essential attributes of classic noir, color films such as Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Niagara (1953), Slightly Scarlet, and Vertigo (1958) are regarded as noir by varying numbers of critics.

Film noir is also known for its use of Dutch angles, low-angle shots, and wide-angle lenses. Other devices of disorientation relatively common in film noir include shots of people reflected in one or more mirrors, shots through curved or frosted glass or other distorting objects (such as during the strangulation scene in Strangers on a Train), and special effects sequences of a sometimes bizarre nature. Beginning in the late 1940s, location shooting—often involving night-for-night sequences—became increasingly frequent in noir.
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Structure and narrational devices

Film noirs tend to have unusually convoluted story lines, frequently involving flashbacks, flashforwards, and other techniques that interrupt and sometimes obscure the narrative sequence. Voiceover narration—most characteristically by the protagonist, less frequently by a secondary character or by an unseen, omniscient narrator—is sometimes used as a structuring device. Both flashbacks and voiceover narration are today often used in movies looking to quickly establish their neo-noir bona fides. Relative to other Hollywood films, film noirs are seen as more likely to feature the protagonist in virtually every scene. Bold experiments in cinematic storytelling were sometimes attempted in noir: Lady in the Lake, for example, is shot entirely from the point of view of protagonist Philip Marlowe; the face of star (and director) Robert Montgomery is seen only in mirrors. The Chase (1946) takes oneirism and fatalism as the basis for its fantastical narrative system, redolent of certain horror stories, but with little precedent in the context of a putatively realistic genre. Latter-day noir has been in the forefront of structural experimentation in popular cinema, as exemplified by such films as Pulp Fiction and Memento.
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Plots, characters, and settings

Crime, usually murder, is an element of almost all film noirs; in addition to standard-issue greed, jealousy is frequently the criminal motivation. A crime investigation—by a private eye, a police detective (sometimes acting alone), or a concerned amateur—is the most prevalent, but far from dominant, basic plot. In other common plots the protagonists are implicated in heists or con games, or in murderous conspiracies often involving adulterous affairs. False suspicions and accusations of crime are frequent plot elements, as are betrayals and double-crosses. Amnesia is far more common in film noir than in real life, and cigarette smoking can seem virtually mandatory.

Film noirs tend to revolve around heroes who are more flawed and morally questionable than the norm, often fall guys of one sort or another. The characteristic heroes of noir are described by many critics as "alienated"; in the words of Silver and Ward, "filled with existential bitterness." Certain archetypal characters appear in many film noirs—hardboiled detectives, femmes fatales, corrupt policemen, jealous husbands, intrepid claims adjusters, and down-and-out writers. As can be observed in many movies of an overtly neo-noir nature, the private eye and the femme fatale are the character types with which film noir has come to be most identified, but a minority of movies now regarded as classic noir feature either. As an indication, of the "Thirty-five notable American films noir of the classic period" listed above, in only four does the star play a private eye—The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly. Just five others readily qualify as "detective stories"—Laura, The Killers, The Stranger, The Big Heat, and Touch of Evil.

Film noir is often associated with an urban setting, and a few cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, in particular—are the location of many of the classic films. In the eyes of many critics, the city is presented in noir as a "labyrinth" or "maze." Bars, lounges, nightclubs, and gambling dens are frequently the scene of action. The climaxes of a substantial number of film noirs take place in visually complex, often industrial settings, such as refineries, factories, trainyards, power plants—most famously the explosive conclusion of White Heat. In the popular (and, frequently enough, critical) imagination, in noir it is always night and it always rains. A susbtantial trend within latter-day noir—dubbed "film soleil" by critic M. K. Holm—heads in precisely the opposite direction, with tales of deception, seduction, and corruption exploiting bright, sun-baked settings, stereotypically the desert or open water, to caustic effect. Significant predecessors from the classic and early post-classic eras include The Lady from Shanghai; the Robert Ryan vehicle Inferno (1953); the French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, Plein soleil (Purple Noon in the U.S., better rendered elsewhere as Blazing Sun or Full Sun; 1960); and director Don Siegel's version of The Killers (1964). The tendency was at its peak during the late 1980s and 1990s, with films such as Dead Calm (1989); After Dark, My Sweet; The Hot Spot; Delusion (1991); and Red Rock West, and TV's Miami Vice, which premiered in 1984 and turned increasingly mordant over its five-year run.
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Worldview, morality, and tone

Film noir is often described as essentially pessimistic. The noir stories that are regarded as most characteristic tell of people trapped in unwanted situations (which, in general, they did not cause but are responsible for exacerbating), striving against random, uncaring fate, and frequently doomed. The movies are seen as depicting a world that is inherently corrupt. Classic film noir has been associated by many critics with the American social landscape of the era—in particular, with a sense of heightened anxiety and alienation that is said to have followed World War II. Nicholas Christopher's opinion is representative: "it is as if the war, and the social eruptions in its aftermath, unleashed demons that had been bottled up in the national psyche." Film noirs, especially those of the 1950s and the height of the Red Scare, are often said to reflect cultural paranoia; Kiss Me Deadly is the noir most frequently marshaled as evidence for this claim.

"You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go." "A lot depends on who's in the saddle." Bogey. Bacall. The Big Sleep.

Rather than focusing on simple "black and white" decisions, film noirs tend to pose moral quandaries that are unusually ambiguous and relative—at least within the context of Hollywood cinema. Characters that do pursue goals based on clear-cut moral standards may be more than willing to let the "ends justify the means." For example, the investigator hero of The Stranger, obsessed with tracking down a Nazi war criminal, places other people in mortal danger in order to capture his target. Whereas the Production Code obliged almost all classic noirs to see that steadfast virtue was ultimately rewarded and vice, in the absence of shame and redemption, severely punished (however dramatically incredible the final rendering of mandatory justice might be), a substantial number of latter-day noirs flout such conventions; consider, in their very different ways, the conclusions of Chinatown and The Hot Spot.

The tone of film noir is generally regarded as downbeat; some critics experience it as darker still—"overwhelmingly black," according to Robert Ottoson. Influential critic (and filmmaker) Paul Schrader wrote in a seminal 1972 essay that "film noir is defined by tone," a tone he seems to perceive as "hopeless." In describing the adaptation of Double Indemnity, leading noir analyst Foster Hirsch describes the "requisite hopeless tone" achieved by the filmmakers, which appears to characterize his view of noir as a whole. On the other hand, definitive film noirs such as The Big Sleep, The Lady from Shanghai, and Double Indemnity itself are famed for their hardboiled repartee, often imbued with sexual innuendo and self-reflexive humor—notes of another tone.

[Steve-O]

Roger Ebert / January 30, 1995
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/.../11010314/1023

Film noir is . . .

1. A French term meaning "black film," or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.

2. A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.

3. Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.

4. Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, "On top of everything else, I've been assigned to get through three packs today." The best smoking movie of all time is "Out of the Past," in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke furiously at each other. At one point, Mitchum enters a room, Douglas extends a pack and says, "Cigarette?" and Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, "Smoking."

5. Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.

6. For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs, calling the doorman by his first name, high heels, red dresses, elbowlength gloves, mixing drinks, having gangsters as boyfriends, having soft spots for alcoholic private eyes, wanting a lot of someone else's women, sprawling dead on the floor with every limb meticulously arranged and every hair in place.

7. For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, all-night diners, protecting kids who shouldn't be playing with the big guys, being on first-name terms with homicide cops, knowing a lot of people whose descriptions end in "ies," such as bookies, newsies, junkies, alkys, jockeys and cabbies.

8. Movies either shot in black and white, or feeling like they were.

9. Relationships in which love is only the final flop card in the poker game of death.

10. The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.

[Steve-O]

http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/filmnoir.html

Film Noir is one of Hollywood’s only organic artistic movements. Beginning in the early 1940s, numerous screenplays inspired by hardboiled American crime fiction were brought to the screen, primarily by European émigré directors who shared a certain storytelling sensibility: highly stylized, overtly theatrical, with imagery often drawn from an earlier era of German “expressionist” cinema. Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger, among others, were among this Hollywood vanguard.

During and immediately following World War II, movie audiences responded to this fresh, vivid, adult-oriented type of film — as did many writers, directors, cameramen and actors eager to bring a more mature world-view to Hollywood product. Largely fueled by the financial and artistic success of Billy Wilder’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s novella Double Indemnity (1944), the studios began cranking out crime thrillers and murder dramas with a particularly dark and venomous view of existence.

In 1946 a Paris retrospective of American films embargoed during the war clearly revealed this trend toward visibly darker, more cynical crime melodramas. It was noted by several Gallic critics who christened this new type of Hollywood product “film noir,” or black film, in literal translation.

Few, if any of the artists in Hollywood who made these films called them “noir” at the time. But the vivid co-mingling of lost innocence, doomed romanticism, hard-edged cynicism, desperate desire, and shadowy sexuality that was unleashed in those immediate post-war years proved hugely influential, both among industry peers in the original era, and to future generation of storytellers, both literary and cinematic.

To this day the debate goes on as to whether “noir” is a film genre, circumscribed by its content, or a style of storytelling, identified by its visual attributes. The debate — in which there is no right answer — is only one of the things that keeps noir fresh for succeessive generations of movie lovers.

[noirguru]

Steve-O, or anyone else who wants to comment on this! When do you think the classic film noir period began and when do you think it ended? Also, when do you think the neo-noir period began?

[Christina Delassalle]

There were numerous noirs in the 30's, M, Fury, You Only Live Twice, The Glass Key, the one with George Raft, The Thin Man, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang , I know I am missing alot here. Fritz Lang was sure instrumental in the on-set of noir films!

But for me the "classic film noir period" started with Rebecca in 1940 and ended in 1958 with Vertigo and Touch of Evil .

If I had to pick my 20 favorite noirs just off the top of my head, ones I can watch over and over and over again, most of these my husband and I could just turn the sound off and recite the dialogue ourselves, it would be these.

Film noir is a feeling brought about by cheesy snappy dialogue, spiffy clothes, dark demented characters, black humor, intentional and unintentional humor, a dark world inhabited with people with black souls, but sometimes they act the way we wish we could in certain situations. I can't really describe the feeling a good noir instills me with, a good part of it is nostalgia I rather imagine. As a child of the 1950's it is like seeing all the grown ups I remember behaving badly. Back when men wore suits and Fedoras, women dressed up more and wore hats and everybody smoked. These movies, despite their grim subject matter still have an innocence about them. Nobody is swearing and we have to imagine what goes on behind closed doors and bad men and rotten women almost always get whats coming to them. There is always atonement in one form or another.

Murder My Sweet
Born to Kill
Double Indemnity
Laura
The Third Man
The Maltese Falcon
Sunset Blvd.
The Narrow Margin
The Dark Corner
Road House
The Furies
The Lady From Shanghai
Pickup on South Street
Night and The City
Too Late for Tears
Detour
Clash by Night
Gun Crazy
Touch of Evil
Vertigo
Kiss of Death

[Eldorado Slim]

For what its worth, I think Paul Schrader comes close to a definition of noir in his claim that it's more about mood than anything else. But I think, you need to throw some Freudian psychology into the mix as well. And there's something to be said about Aristotelian idea of hubris as well. Just out of curiosity has anyone written a Poetics of Noir?

[kanmar]

To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart: I can't define film noir, but I know it when I see it.

[mark11]

Dirty Ugliness in all of us and life of death.
As in a line from my first digi-movie...

" Cause...well, hell, we all gotta die"

It's that simple.

Write on, right on.

MARK11

[Movie Memories]

As a new member I have been spending a lot of time "catching up" on many of the threads, and this sticky thread is great. Solid information to help define what may be almost an undefinable film genre.

Steve-O - a great job of putting together information on many of the segmented definations of Film Noir. There is so much that contributes to what the genre offers; lighting, mood, dialogue, desperation, the femme fatale, catastrophic events that seem to snowball, etc., It may be impossible to nail it down.

Christina - I would tend to agree with you when answering NoirGuru's question. For me it began in the late thirties. Although the earlier part of the decade provided films that would later be considered as Noir, I don't, at the time of their production, think they realized just what they were providing the groundwork for. A new sub-genre to the crime/gangster genre was being created and grew more than strong enough to stand on its own two feet.

And that's a great list you have there!

[Al Roberts]

So what is it?
Film Noir is Paradise to me.
I've never been to paradise, wherever it is.
I just know that's where I belong.