Film Noir: Characteristics, History, and Influence
Unit 8: Film Noir
What is Film Noir?
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood’s classical film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key, black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Great Depression.
Origins of the Term
The term film noir, French for “black film” (literal) or “dark film” (closer meaning), was first applied to Hollywood films by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, but was unrecognized by most American film industry professionals of that era. Cinema historians and critics defined the category retrospectively. Before the notion was widely adopted in the 1970s, many of the classic film noirs were referred to as “melodramas”. Whether film noir qualifies as a distinct genre is a matter of ongoing debate among scholars.
Characteristics and Themes
Film noir encompasses a range of plots: the central figure may be a private investigator (The Big Sleep), a plainclothes policeman (The Big Heat), an aging boxer (The Set-Up), a hapless grifter (Night and the City), a law-abiding citizen lured into a life of crime (Gun Crazy), or simply a victim of circumstance (D.O.A.). Although film noir was originally associated with American productions, the term has been used to describe films from around the world. Many films released from the 1960s onward share attributes with film noirs of the classical period, and often treat its conventions self-referentially. Some refer to such latter-day works as neo-noir. The clichés of film noir have inspired parody since the mid-1940s.
The Impact of World War II
With the advent of the Second World War, a new mood was discernible in film drama – an atmosphere of disillusion and a sense of foreboding, a dark quality that derived as much from the characters depicted as from the cinematographer’s art. These films, among them such classics as Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window, Touch of Evil, and Sunset Boulevard, emerged retrospectively as a genre in themselves when a French film critic referred to them collectively as film noir.
Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror
This, from the blurb on the back of Bruce Crowther’s book Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror (1988), is as good a summary as any of what film noir is generally taken to be – and as good an example as any of some of the problems associated with noir, especially insofar as these problems center on issues of genre. Crowther’s book is just one of many essays, articles, and books on film noir to have appeared in English over the last 25 years.
The Problematic Nature of Film Noir
A key feature of nearly all these essays, articles, chapters, and books is an acknowledgment of the heterogeneity of the films, and hence the potentially problematic nature of the ‘phenomenon’ the term ‘film noir’ has been used to label, coupled with an insistence, nevertheless, that there is a phenomenon, that it can be described and accounted for, and that it is one way or another – aesthetically, culturally, ideologically, or historically – important. As Michael Walker points out in Walker 1992: “The cycle of forties and fifties Hollywood films that retrospectively became known as films noirs, seem at first sight to be rather too diverse a group to be constituted with any precision as a generic category. Nevertheless, various critics have sought different unifying features: motif and tone, social background and…”