Film Noir: Unveiling the Dark Side of Cinema
Key Elements of Film Noir
Film noir is characterized by several elements, including artistic and cultural influences, iconography, mood and characterization, visual style, the ‘hard-boiled’ tradition, narrative and iconography, a master plot paradigm, conditions of production, paranoia, and patterns of narration. Despite these difficulties and differences, Walker notes that noir ‘continues to fascinate’. This element of fascination has also been noted by Cowie, who reiterates the problematic nature of noir as a category and the talismanic nature of the term.
Is Film Noir a Genre?
The noir canon, particularly its core films, has often been used as the primary basis for establishing the key features, antecedents, and contextual factors of a phenomenon whose unity and coherence are assumed rather than demonstrated through systematic, empirical analysis. This problem stems largely from the fact that film noir was not a genre in the conventional sense.
Many proponents of film noir have struggled to define the phenomenon. As Frank Krutnik points out, ‘Higham and Greenberg and Paul Kerr refer to film noir as a genre, Raymond Durgnat and Paul Schrader see it as defined more by ‘mood’ and ‘tone’, and a lot of theories more.
They have tended to derive their criteria from a small group of films – those initially identified or labeled as noirs – while trying to privilege the genres with which those films were associated and to extend the corpus numerically and chronologically in order to substantiate noir’s existence and significance. The result has been considerable disagreement about basic criteria, the overall contours of the larger noir canon, and some of the antecedents, roots, and causes of noir. Most importantly, noir critics have been unable to define film noir, even though there is considerable agreement as to the films that constitute noir’s basic canon.
The Initial Proponents of Noir
The term film noir—or, more precisely, films “noirs”—was first applied to a group of American films by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946 (Frank 1946:14). Due to the war and occupation, American films had not been screened in France for several years. Many of these films were released in great numbers in France once the war ended. Several films made in Hollywood in the early 1940s were first shown in Paris in the summer of 1946, alongside more recent films. Frank discusses four of them: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944).
Visual and Aural Expressionism
In their highly influential article, ‘Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir’, Janey Place and Lowell Peterson argue that ‘Nearly every attempt to define film noir has agreed that visual style is the consistent thread that united the very diverse films that together comprise this phenomenon’ ([1974] 1996:65). As we have seen, this is not strictly true. Other features and factors have been cited as definitive of noir. Moreover, among the original proponents of noir, neither Frank nor Rey nor Chartier even mention visual style. Nevertheless, Place and Peterson discuss visual motifs such as portraits and mirror reflections, choker close-ups, the use of wide-angle lenses and visual distortion, cutting from extreme close-up to high-angle long shot, and what they call the ‘archetypal’ noir composition: ‘the extreme high-angle long shot, an oppressive and fatalistic angle that looks down on its helpless victim to make it look like a rat in a maze.’