essay film noir

The Concept of Film Noir Essay

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One of the most praised and seen movie genres, “Film noir” is considered as a remarkable and classic movie form by the audience. Film noir is that movie form in which dark and criminal events are showed to the audiences.

This form serves as a revolutionary genre in Hollywood movies as it played a vital role in changing the tradition of sunny, optimistic and commercial movies after World War II. The term “Film Noir” was coined by the French critics in order to criticize and evaluate those movies which are dark, pessimistic, negative, and serious i.e. different from the usual commercialized cinema.

There are some of the apparent characteristics of film genre. In particular, film noir has some of its distinctive features as well. In this paper, we shall discuss two silent features of film noir namely style and narrative structure. We shall elaborate such features through the analysis of movie LA Confidential that is categorized in film noir genre.

This was authenticated by Foster Hirsch who is known for his brilliant work as an analyst who used to analyze the most original genre of American cinema ‘Film Noir’ in his classic way. He evaluated that: “ Noir deals with criminal activity, from a variety of perspectives, in a general mood of dislocation and bleakness which earned the style its name.

Unified by a dominant tone and sensibility, the noir canon constitutes a distinct style of film-making; but it also conforms to gender requirements since it operates within a set of narrative and visual conventions…. Noir tells its stories in a particular way, and in a particular visual style. The repeated use of narrative and visual structures….certainly qualifies noir as a genre, one that is in fact as heavily coded as the western” (Conard & Porfirio, 2007, pp. 9-10).

The inventers and those who supported the genre and write many movies on this were strongly opposed by the government in the post war period as there were lots of reasons behind this.

Cain, the writer of Double Indemnity was terribly criticized by the Production Code Administration (PCA) which was against the depiction of lawlessness and acts of demoralization to the audiences. So, in this way the genre of Film Noir was greatly opposed as it was injecting a negative thought in people that one can do anything for the sake of self indulgence and material satisfaction (Staudler, 2005).

The most prominent feature of film noir genre is its style that is influenced by social change in American society in post war era. The stylistic feature portrays doomed heroes, manipulating people, personal and political agendas of characters. Moreover, the stylistic feature projects dark light sets which create long and wide shadows, disturbed and uncomfortable atmosphere and are usually dragged.

Other than this a prominent quality of this genre is the development of negative behaviors in heroes or ant-heroes usually generated by Femme Fatale which is the depiction of Women in Film Noirs in a way which has never seen by the audience previously. This kind of women is different, thrilling and serve as an illicit desire for Men.

Conclusively, these features of Style in Film Noir can be precisely considered as the salient feature used in the story projection of this genre. Stylistic feature is greatly visible in various Film Noirs in the past. One of the most notable examples include “L.A. Confidential” (1997) directed by Curtis Hanson show these features in order to present the original idea of Film Noir.

L.A. Confidential shows the evil and personal desires of different people related to different backgrounds. It bears the characters of a typical film noir which includes criminal activities and lethal women engagements within criminal groups. The city shown in the movie serves as the combating zone of human insights.

The story is about some cops, their crimes and the guilt which they are carrying in their hearts. The style of the film is like a typical film noir i.e. dull and slow but interesting. The cinematographers have done every possible effort in order to bring originality in the movie. The movie atmosphere is dim with fewer colors and the characters have usually awkward gestures and style of clothing. (Arthur, 2008).

Another feature of film noir is the narrative structure which means a lot to a film noir genre. The characterizations are done in such a way that the people who play those characters become the source of story narration.

The narrative structures are different in different movies. Sometimes the screenplay’s voice-over adds a special essence in storytelling which also acts as a source of putting intensity and quality to the movie. Also, sometimes the film’s voice-over addresses are done by a specific person who narrates the story throughout the film. This narration is spoken in a deadpan way by which the story seems more interesting to the audience (Staudler, 2005).

The narrative style used in L.A. Confidential is descriptive and mind captivating. For example, the entry of Ed Exley, an ambitious and concerned cop in a crime scene shows the descriptive narrative structure when the camera focuses on each and every details of the entire grimy objects from ashtrays to the torn register.

Means, the cinematographers have paid attention to every character and even to the minor things which are although not related to the main story theme but they do play an important part in the narration of story. This means that narration in L.A. Confidential is done usually through the visuals of a scene.

By giving importance to the minor things the director has tried to give the whole explanation which is commendable. Another style of narration used in other film noirs is the narration through any of the character. For example in Double Indemnity the voice-over of the story is not the camera but a character from the film. An insurance investigator, Barton Keyes, narrates the whole plot of the story throughout the film (Staudler, 2005).

L.A. Confidential although depicts the confused moods of fifties but it also updates its theme by showing all possible contemporary cultural obsession. It presents government, law enforcement and organized crime as the three interlinked forms. According to the creator of the story these three forms are interconnected with each other and each has common goals and brutal business tactics. They can do anything to victimize the city’s underclass (Arthur, 2008).

The movie L.A. Confidential has all the features of a film noir and presents briefly a clear idea about the style and narrative structure used in the film. The story is quite different from the usual film noirs but it has many variations which and mind captivating characteristics which attract the audience. L.A. confidential has provided information about this genre to the audience by showing them the original features.

The new thing in this movie was the depiction of a brief account of crimes by the government officials not the common people. Other than this, the movie makers like the other film noirs have again incorporated their suggestions about the evil desires of human and their devilish plots in this movie which clarifies the fact that man can descend to any level in order to achieve his goals (Arthur, 2008).

Although this genre of film making was opposed to a high extent but originally it is a way of depicting real life incidents. The stories and characters are made on the basis of real life happenings. Writer Cain (Double Indemnity) has also taken example from his own life and clarified that although this genre seems controversial and is something which is showing things which can have a demoralizing impact on people but in actual these are the hard realities of life which the Hollywood movies are trying to show to the people.

Arthur, P. (2008). L.A. Confidential. New York: Cineaste Publishers.

Conard, M., & Porfirio, R. (2007). The Philosophy of Film Noir. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.

Staudler, G. (2005). Doble Indemnity, Hard-Boil Film Noir. New York, London.: W.W.Norton&Company.

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“Film Noir”: The Elusive Genre

There are two terrific film-noir series taking place in New York right now, one at Film Forum , “Femmes Noir,” the other, at the Museum of Modern Art , “Lady in the Dark: Crime Films from Columbia Pictures, 1932-1957.” But only the Film Forum series uses the word “noir,” and MOMA ’s avoidance of the term makes perfect sense.

Film noir is a peculiar genre. A Western is identifiable by people on horseback in the West; a musical involves singing and dancing; a war movie shows war. Even the so-called women’s picture was a movie that featured women prominently. But the directors who worked in film noir didn’t use that term to describe their work. One searches in vain for the term in the interviews with some of the genre’s crucial creators—Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Fritz Lang, Robert Aldrich, and Edgar G. Ulmer—by Peter Bogdanovich in his great collection “ Who the Devil Made It .” The first appearance of the term “film noir” in this magazine is from 1971 ; the first in the New York Times is from 1973.

For that matter, the term wasn’t even endemic in French cinephilic circles. When François Truffaut discussed his film “Shoot the Piano Player” soon after its release, he spoke of it in terms of “B movies” and “gangster films”; when Jean-Luc Godard talked about “Breathless,” he said that he wanted to make a “gangster film” and also referred to “films policiers.”

The documentation on the subject is ample and fascinating, as provided in a richly detailed historical post by M. E. Holmes at a Web site devoted to the French critic Nino Frank , who coined the term in 1946. Holmes’s meticulous discussion of the use and rise of the term cites Frank’s work liberally, and highlights what he found so remarkable in the films in question:

Thus these “noir” films no longer have anything in common with the usual kind of police reel. They are essentially psychological narratives with the action—however violent or fast-paced—less significant than faces, gestures, words—than the truth of the characters, this “third dimension” I discussed a short while ago.

The movies in question, Frank argued, aren’t procedurals or whodunits, they’re character studies and sociological investigations. Holmes traces the fascination with these Hollywood crime dramas of the forties through the work of other French critics of the postwar years:

It is clear that one of the key elements in the welcome given by the French critics to the American “films noirs” was the feeling that serious European influence lay behind their modern American settings and panache. Later commentators have pointed to stylistic influences from prewar German films, but for the 1946 critics the primary consideration was not one of style. It was rather that they believed in cinema’s twofold function: as an absorbing entertainment and as a potential force for good, not through reinforcing conventional morality but through its ability to expose corruption and injustice. They had seen at first hand the prewar struggles of European filmmakers to speak out against evil in their films, and felt that the new American crime films could represent the opportunity for a surreptitious continuation of that work within unashamedly entertainment films.

In other words, Frank and the critics who joined him in his praise of the newly dubbed genre were interested in exactly the sorts of things that the young enthusiasts of Cahiers du Cinéma —Truffaut, Godard, and company—didn’t care about at all: the politics and sociology of cinema, the cinema of social criticism. The big French book on the subject of film noir was written, in 1955, by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton—two critics associated with the magazine Positif , Cahiers ’ s bitter rival. French Wikipedia sums up the opposition well, if tendentiously;

Raymond Borde was a member of the editorial board of Positif from 1954 to 1967. A member of the Communist Party until 1958, he was a partisan of [politically] engaged cinema and took a stand against Cahiers du Cinéma and the filmmakers of the New Wave, whose politique des auteurs and rightist tendencies he denounced.

The term “film noir” has come down to us as a product of a subordinate strain of French criticism, different from the one that came to dominate cinematic discourse with the concept of auteurism, as well as to dominate filmmaking itself through the innovations of the New Wave. It had no currency among Hollywood filmmakers of the forties and fifties, for the simple reason that French criticism over-all had little influence in the U.S. until the rise of the New Wave. (Though it would be interesting to try to trace the term in Cahiers through the years—a concordance is needed.) And, even as film noir has become firmly entrenched in the cultural vocabulary, its strangeness remains. That’s why I’m partial to the choice of MOMA ’s curators to cite the simplest unifying factor in their series—the element of crime—that both predates the rise of film-noir style and, above all, that survives it.

I wrote here a few years ago about the genre, and I cited four factors that contributed to its rise: “the influence of German Expressionism, the liberating innovations of Orson Welles, the new importance of independent producers, and the probing of wartime traumas.” German filmmakers fleeing the Nazi regime, such as Lang, Preminger, Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Max Ophuls, and Billy Wilder brought their shadowy, fragmented aesthetic to Hollywood. Welles (who was also a director of film-noir classics, including “The Lady from Shanghai”) gave directors, including his venerable elders, a sense that anything was possible, even in Hollywood. The sudden weakening of studio control over production (the result of court battles) gave independent producers, many of whom were very sympathetic to artistically original directors, a much freer hand. And then there’s the war, with its terrors and disruptions.

The four movies that Nino Frank cites in his primordial 1946 essay are “The Maltese Falcon,” “Laura,” “Murder, My Sweet,” and “Double Indemnity.” All of them were made during the Second World War (though “The Maltese Falcon” was made in 1941, before the United States was involved in combat). The film historian Sheri Chinen Biesen makes a convincing case, in her book “ Blackout ,” that there are two separate strains of film noir—one arose during wartime, the other followed it:

These early noir films created a psychological atmosphere that in many ways marked a response to an increasingly realistic and understandable anxiety—about war, shortages, changing gender roles, and “a world gone mad”—that was distinctive from the later postwar paranoia about the bomb, the cold war, HUAC, and the blacklist, which was more intrinsic to late 1940s and 1950s noir pictures.

I’m not sure that the distinction is as precise or as clear as she suggests. For instance, I don’t think that there’s a difference in kind between Siodmak’s “Phantom Lady,” from 1944, and “Criss Cross,” from 1949, or between Lang’s “The Woman in the Window,” from 1944, and “While the City Sleeps,” from 1956. But I do think that she’s right to call attention to the historical specificities on which the genre (if, indeed, it’s a genre) thrived. Many of the crime dramas of the nineteen-thirties had much to do with the Depression; those of wartime reflected the war (though it’s a critical temptation to read the war into any film contemporaneous with it), and those that came after the war—well, by definition, they reflect postwar life.

That’s why it’s strange to think of film noir as a genre—at least, as an open-ended one. A Western is a Western is a Western, whether it’s filmed by Thomas H. Ince in 1916, by John Ford in 1939, or by Clint Eastwood in 1992. The same is true of war films, comedies, and, yes, crime movies. But the film noir is historically determined by particular circumstances; that’s why latter-day attempts at film noir, or so-called neo-noirs, almost all feel like exercises in nostalgia.

• Film Theory

What is Film Noir? A Brief History with Examples from Cinema

Y ou’ve probably heard the term ‘film noir’ hundreds of times. You may associate it with detectives and femme fatales running around in black and white. But what is film noir, really? Well, it turns out it’s not so clear cut, but there are some elements of the style that are fairly obvious. Let’s get into it.

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Define Noir

What is film noir, exactly .

Is it a style or a genre ? Cine freaks and professionals alike, can’t seem to decide. But we came up with the best definition we could. And then we'll jump into a few examples from classic cinema. 

FILM NOIR DEFINITION

What is film noir.

Film noir  is a stylized genre of film marked by pessimism, fatalism, and cynicism. The term was originally used in France after WWII, to describe American thriller or detective films in the 1940s and 50s. Though, Hollywood’s film noir stretches back to the 1920s. Film noir literally translates to “black cinema” and French critics used it to describe Hollywood movies that were saturated with darkness and pessimism not seen before.

It’s hard to say if it's is a genre or style, and the elements of noir listed below do not  all have to be present for the film to be considered noir. But they are extremely common with this style. 

COMMON ELEMENTS OF FILM NOIR

• Anti-hero protagonist
• Femme fatale
• Tight, concise dialogue
• High-contrast lighting
• Post-war disillusionment

Film noir originated in a time of angst

This style of filmmaking was characterized by a painful time in history. Cynicism and pessimism from the Great Depression were ingrained in the American psyche. Then came WWII, which sent many men to the frontlines while many women took up the jobs in their absence.

After the war, there was a period uncertainty. Men returned from the battlefield with trauma, and the world lost quite a bit of innocence. Upon their return, the theory goes, men found women had shifted their role substantially. Housewives had become workers themselves so there was a perceived disruption to the gender roles that had been in place for decades.

In response to this insecurity, film noir gives us tales of men being taken advantage of by powerful and sometimes sinister women. Again, this merely the theory about how and why film noir became such a prominent style/genre in the post-war period.

The truth is that many of the iconic film noir movies that Hollywood produced in the '40s were based on novels written in the '30s. So, it can be argued that WWII had nothing to do with the source material but that it might explain the popularity of the films made later.

Examples from Cinema

Film noir examples.

What characterizes cynicism in cinema? Is it dialogue dripping with sarcasm and mordancy? Or is it simply the high contrast lighting in each scene. Notice the bleak feel of all three of these classic film noirs.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Starring Humphrey Bogart, this mystery noir made a lasting impact with its spectacular cinematography and menacing use of shadows. 

Humphrey Bogart bringing noir to the forefront

Laura (1944).

Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, and Vincent Price star in this noir classic that boasts incredible acting and a staple of the genre. 

By the mid 40's, more noir started popping up

The blue dahlia (1946).

An  Academy Award nominee for best original screenplay , this murder mystery noir features the popular pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. The Blue Dahlia is a story about a sailor who comes home only to discover his wife is having an affair and his son has died due to his wife’s alcoholism. It is one of many noirs echoing the disillusionment of wartime. 

Film noir captured America’s cynicism in Blue Dahlia

Touch of evil (1958).

According to many critics, film noir ended with the 1958 release of one of  Orson Welles' best movies , Touch of Evil .  

Today, there are films that are influenced by the genre (or style)...

Mulholland Drive (2001)

It seems like almost anything David Lynch does echoes noir. Mulholland Drive's look and feel was surely influenced by film noir. 

Lynch’s mind-bending, Mulholland Drive is surely noir influenced

Noir has a touch of a madness in each scene. The stark lighting and heavy use of flashbacks all capture the headiness of the era, and the frequent murderous plots only heighten the pessimism.

There are specific lighting techniques that build these grave worlds, read our up next article.

Related Posts

• What is Chiaroscuro? →
• A History of the French New Wave →
• German Expressionism — Pre-Film Noir Darkness →

What is Chiaroscuro? 

Interested in going deeper? Maybe darker? Our next post comes just a little southeast of our French friend noir, and explains this Italian lighting technique and how its used to create the noir style. Learn about chiaroscuro below. 

Up Next: Chiaroscuro lighting →

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• Introduction

The cinema of the disenchanted

The omniscient narrator and the flashback.

• The noir hero
• The legacy of film noir

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• Table Of Contents

film noir , 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.

The golden age of film noir

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.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

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 .

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.

Defining the genre

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.

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 isolation from society of the typical noir hero was underscored by the use of stark high-contrast lighting—the most notable visual feature of film noir. The shadowy noir style can be traced to the German Expressionist cinema of the silent era. Robert Wiene ’s Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ) contains one of the best early examples of the lighting techniques used to inspire the genre. Wiene used visual elements to help define the title character’s madness, including tilted cameras to present skewed images and a dark atmosphere in which only the faces of the actors were visible. This Expressionistic style was later used by German directors such as Fritz Lang ( Metropolis , 1927; M , 1931) and F.W. Murnau ( Nosferatu , 1922; Sunrise , 1927).

These lighting effects were used in Hollywood by cinematographers such as Gregg Toland ( Citizen Kane , 1941), John F. Seitz ( Double Indemnity , 1944), Karl Freund ( Key Largo , 1948), and Sid Hickox ( The Big Sleep , 1948) to heighten the sombre tone of films in the genre. Classic images of noir included rain-soaked streets in the early morning hours; street lamps with shimmering halos; flashing neon signs on seedy taverns, diners, and apartment buildings; and endless streams of cigarette smoke wafting in and out of shadows. Such images would lose their indelibility with realistic lighting or colour cinematography .

The inherent subjectivity of Expressionism is also evident in film noir’s use of narration and flashback. An omniscient, metaphor-spouting narrator (often the central character, a world-weary private eye) frequently clarifies a characteristically labyrinthine noir plot or offers a subjective, jaded point of view. In other films—such as Welles ’s Citizen Kane and Wilder ’s Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard (1950)—the denouement (often the death or downfall of the central character) is revealed in the opening scenes; flashbacks then tell of the circumstances that led to the tragic conclusion. Tension and suspense are increased by the use of all-knowing narrators and flashbacks, in that the audience is always cognizant of impending doom.

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Film Noir by William Luhr LAST REVIEWED: 28 October 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 28 October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0029

Film noir emerged out of a nexus of American sociopolitical crises, including the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It presented the underbelly of the traditionally optimistic and utopian “American Dream” and drew upon numerous cultural influences, such as German Expressionism, American hard-boiled fiction, French Poetic Realism of the 1930s, tabloid journalism, Italian neorealism and American postwar documentary filmmaking. The formative discourse about film noir appeared in journals such as L’Ecran Francais and Revue du cinema in post–World War II Paris. No new American films had arrived in France during the Nazi occupation; and when, in spring 1946, wartime Hollywood movies became available, critics identified a new and darker quality in them that they termed “film noir.” The first book on the subject, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s Panorama du film noir americain 1941–1953 , was published in Paris in 1955. English language discourse on it did not emerge until the 1970s, after the genre had lost its commercial viability: but simultaneously, cinema studies was growing and becoming institutionalized in journals, film clubs, and universities. At this time, film noir held a special appeal for young critics in light of the fact that their elders had dismissed many of the films on their original release; the younger generation tried to overturn these categorizations and embraced film noir in an enthusiastic exercise of rediscovery and of rewriting film history. Early articles in English and American journals sought to define the form. In the 1980s book-length studies appeared and have continued unabated; they range from general surveys to those using newly developing, cross-disciplinary methodologies. These analytical tools include formal, structural, and po ststructural approaches as well as feminist, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered methodologies. There were also masculinity, psychoanalytic, spectatorship, and genre studies as well as approaches linking film noir with American literary and social history, particularly of the Cold War era.

Early assessments sought to identify and define the form. Generally presuming film noir to refer to Hollywood films made during the 1940s and 1950s, they introduced issues that are still being debated, such as whether or not it is a genre, whether it is politically progressive or reactionary, whether or not it is an exclusively American form, and the nature of its canon. Most early commentaries, such as Frank 1995 and Borde and Chaumeton 2002 , appeared in France; English-language discourse on film noir did not appear until the 1970s and included Durgnat 1998 , Schrader 1998 , Place and Peterson 1998 . These early works tended to be typological and structural in approach, and they employ socio-historical contexts and existential thought as a guide to the world of the films. Cawelti 1985 established early contexts for understanding generic transformation and change within film noir.

Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953 . Translated by Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights, 2002.

This first book-length study declares the form’s main characteristic to be the dynamism of violent death and notes its widespread misogyny. Film noir is crime presented from the criminal’s POV; and although individual shots often appear semidocumentary, their cumulative effect is that of a nightmare. First English translation of the 1955 French edition.

Cawelti, John G. “ Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings . 3d ed. Edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 503–520. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Uses genre theory to discuss the shift from film noir to neo-noir and describes genres as constantly evolving entities. The essay contextualizes Chinatown within mythic, literary, and cinematic traditions and sees it as marking a paradigm shift by both invoking and changing the hard-boiled paradigm in narrative, social critique, and character development. First published in 1979.

Durgnat, Raymond. “Paint it Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir.” In Film Noir Reader . Edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 37–51. New York: Limelight, 1998.

British left-wing critic Durgnat rejects castigation of film noir as “Hollywood Decadence” by citing historical precedents such as Greek tragedy, Jacobean drama, and Romantic Agony. It explores film noir’s use of the world of crime for social criticism and a critique of capitalism. First appeared in Cinema in August 1970.

Frank, Nino. “A New Type of Detective Story.” Translated by Connor Hartnett. In The Maltese Falcon: John Huston, John, Director . Edited by William Luhr, 8–9, 14. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

This groundbreaking essay coined the term “film noir” in its analysis of recent Hollywood films, exuberantly proclaiming them evidence of a fundamental shift in Hollywood cinema and the dawn of a more mature era. Frank conflates the innovations of the films with those of American hard-boiled fiction.

Place, Janey, and Lowell Peterson. “Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir .” In Film Noir Reader . Edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 65–75. New York: Limelight, 1998.

Place and Peterson laid the groundwork for the assessment of film style based upon the formal specificity of the films rather than upon broad thematic and impressionistic assertions. Beginning with a primer on camerawork and lighting, they identify film noir practices as deviations from the norm in pursuit of viewer destabilization. First published in Film Comment , January–February 1974.

Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir.” In Film Noir Reader . Edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 53–63. New York: Limelight, 1998.

Describes film noir as an American form, not a genre, but rather films defined by tone, mood, and historical era. A major theme is a passion for the past and present but also a fear of the future. He laments the paucity of stylistic studies and presents “notes” on film noir’s techniques.

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The Philosophy of Film Noir

Les reid sees through a lens darkly with mark conard ..

Film noir represents a dark night of the soul in American cinema. In the 1920s and 30s the most popular genre was the Western, with its tales of courage, self-reliance, male toughness and female sweetness. Westerns were infused with the values of the American Dream, and the Western hero was likeable, trustworthy and admirable. By contrast, the films made in the 1940s and 50s referred to as ‘film noir’ convey dark feelings of disillusionment, pessimism and cynicism. Recurring characteristics of these films are that the whole society portrayed seems corrupt; the protagonist is more anti-hero than hero; a femme fatale lures the protagonist into crime; crime is presented as a cunning exploit; and fatalism rules as plans go awry. The expressionistic use of black/white photography which gives film noir its name emphasises the bleak reality of urban life and the disillusionment it brings.

Film noir has been written about extensively since Borde and Chaumeton first analysed it in 1955. This new book brings together thirteen essays on philosophical aspects of the genre, covering a wide range of issues, from ontology (is film noir a genre or what?) to aesthetics (does its fatalism equate with tragedy?) to the meaning of life (is its cynicism founded on a moral crisis, such as existential angst?) and more. Among the philosophers mentioned, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer feature most often, with Plato and Aristotle close behind. Thomas Nagel, Paul Edwards and Charles Peirce are the most popular modern philosophers cited. I found the references clearly explained and effectively used, adding considerably to the interest of the discussions.

The phenomenon of film noir invites sociological speculation. For example, in a well-known essay on its social context, ‘Notes on Film Noir’ in Film Noir Reader 2 , Paul Schrader emphasised the trauma of World War 2 and the difficulties encountered post-war when the survivors tried to resume normal life. Film noir gave expression to those social problems.

Such speculations are tempting, but they are methodologically dubious since they make broad sociological comments usually with little empirical data to support them. For the most part, the contributors to this anthology avoid such speculation and concentrate on the films rather than on the society in which they were made.

The essay by Steven M. Sanders is a case in point. He examines the fatalistic outlook found in many classic noir films, and compares it to the concept of absurdity in existentialism. He uses Vertigo and The Third Man as his main examples, but Double Indemnity , The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Asphalt Jungle are also obviously fatalistic. In these films, the protagonist seems doomed: plans do not work out, human relationships are flawed and unreliable, and society seems biased in favour of others. That combination of fatalism and alienation has some kinship with existentialism. The existentialist is alienated because he or she refuses to accept as given the moral codes of others. According to Sartre, anyone who denies his or her own freedom by following a received moral code (eg by being an orthodox Catholic) is guilty of bad faith. Freedom however brings absurdity in its wake, because the world is indifferent to the hopes of humanity. Hence the pointless toil of Sisyphus, which is celebrated as heroic by Camus.

Such existentialist defiance of the absurd world is expressed in the dark wit which is a feature of film noir. However, Sanders concludes that film noir and existentialism are fundamentally different in their attitude to human freedom. Both recognise that our freedom is bounded by physical limits; but existentialism emphasises the capacities that humans have – the scope of our freedom – whereas film noir sees only contingency, failure and fate.

A similar analysis of the fatalism in film noir leads Ian Jarvie to conclude that despite the combination of flawed heroes and pessimistic outcomes, the narratives do not attain the status of tragedy. In Aristotelian terms, film noir is low drama . Jarvie says that the stories are “morally incoherent.” They provide glimpses of personal integrity, but no clashes of principle which test the moral fibre of the protagonist, thus falling short of tragedy.

Those arguments I found quite persuasive, but there were others which were much less so. I was assured by J. Holt that the pessimism of neo-noir is one of its strengths because pessimism is more realistic than optimism. That assertion is contentious in itself; but it was also at odds with the critique offered by P.A. Cantor, in which he claimed that the pessimism of film noir is the product of a distorted view of the USA which 1930s European émigré directors like Ulmer, Wilder, Siodmak and Lang conveyed through their films. I was left wondering whether pessimism is realistic, distorted, or both.

Equally debatable was the identification of a lack of religious faith with meaninglessness, alienation or a lack of moral values (the world of film noir is largely God-free). Sometimes such false assumptions have been inherited from earlier philosophers. Conard, for example, accepted from Nietzsche the assertion that the death of God entails the death of meaning, as if no-one could find a purpose in life without belief in the supernatural. No doubt Nietzsche is a fitting source to quote, as his rhetorical excesses match the melodramatic expressionism of film noir; but I would not take anything he wrote as gospel.

Discussion of film noir is often too narrowly focused, in my opinion. Precursors in the pulp fiction of the 1920s and 30s are acknowledged here, but earlier prototypes are rarely mentioned. Consider Hamlet, certainly a film noir anti-hero: alienated, cynical, and abrasive in his wit, hostile to the society in which he lives, shrewdly intelligent in his pursuit of his enemy and ruthless when others block his path. His black attire, specified in Shakespeare’s text, suits his dark broodings and the pessimistic outcome of the play. Hamlet deals with all forms of killing: accidental manslaughter, deliberate murder, impulsive killing and suicide. Hamlet ponders on the morality of the killings, but events often outstrip his philosophising, and the audience are swept along in his wake. Emotions run high, and the interludes of rational thought are brief and ineffectual. At the end we feel sobered by a grim pursuit of justice in which many innocent people have been killed. Hamlet dies, and “the rest is silence.”

The classics of film noir stir the emotions in the same way. Killings happen, and we are morally implicated by our sympathy for the wrongdoers. We feel more sympathy for the killers than for their victims. Ordinary moral reasoning seems to be undermined.

Hume argued quite convincingly that morality ultimately rests on our emotions of sympathy and compassion. Those feelings provide the ‘ought’ – the basic moral values – from which all our complex moral reasonings are derived. But Hume assumed our sympathies would follow a conventional path and cherish our common humanity. The challenge of film noir is to deny that assumption and depict a world where our sympathies take a different path that leads us down darker alleyways. Perhaps that is part of its attraction. We enter a world where our moral bearings are lost, and we allow ourselves to side with amoral people living in a world quite like our own, but with all its ugly, unjust defects emphasised. We cannot tell how well we shall cope, confronting murky situations with our moral complacency switched off, but that uncertainty grips our conscience and our attention and carries us into the story.

Philosophy is the art of putting our thoughts in order. But doing that requires us to scatter the pieces sometimes, just to see how we again arrive at order from the disorder. Film noir performs such a function for our moral thinking, and does so in a most engaging way. This collection of essays, delving into the films and elucidating their philosophical depths, is also challenging and engaging. Read it and prepare to be provoked.

© Les reid 2008

Les Reid is Chair of the Belfast Humanist Group : belfast.humanists.net . You can find a list of classic noir films at imdb.com/chart/filmnoir .

• The Philosophy of Film Noir , edited by Mark T Conard, published by the University Press of Kentucky, 2007, pb, 248 pages, $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8131-9181-2.

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Vague Visages

Movies, tv & music • independent film criticism • soundtrack guides • forming the future • est. 2014, crime scene #18: ‘victims of sin’ – nightclubbing with ninón sevilla.

Crime Scene is a monthly Vague Visages column about the relationship between crime cinema and movie locations. VV’s Victims of Sin  essay contains spoilers. Emilio Fernández’s 1951 film on The Critierion Channel features Ninón Sevilla, Tito Junco and Rodolfo Acosta. Check out film essays, along with cast/character summaries , streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings , at the home page.

Midway through Emilio Fernández’s 1951 film Victims of Sin , there is a wonderful tracking shot that encapsulates much of the movie’s exuberant, feminist energy. Having turned to sex work after being fired as a nightclub dancer, protagonist Violeta (Ninón Sevilla) is attacked by wannabe pimp Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta) in her home. The other women of the street come to her aid in solidarity, and Fernández cuts to an image of everyone at the police station afterwards, lined up against the counter. The camera pans from right to left, finishing at Violeta and Rodolfo but finding time to survey the faces of the women who came to help: old, young, tired, fresh-faced, made-up and plain. Victims of Sin centers female solidarity from the off, and this is its most explicit image: a gang of women from the margins of Mexican society, all standing together to bring down a man who is intent on causing misery to one of their number.

Victims of Sin is otherwise part of a larger stream of noir-inflected social melodramas common to Mexican Golden Age cinema of the time, an era when the country’s film industry was in full swing with multiple studios producing movies at a thrilling rate. As so often with other various “golden ages” of cinema, quantity begets quality; a film industry which emerged partly to fill the gap created by Europe and the USA as they got involved in WWII found itself producing cinema at a mass quantity in studios, many of them based in Mexico City. Within that system, yes, there was plenty of forgettable, derivative material, but also a certain level of minimal technical quality (thanks to guaranteed regularity of work for film crew and cast ), and a home for genuine visionaries (Luis Buñuel being probably the most famous).  

Victims of Sin Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘A Million Miles Away’

Like many films of its era, Victims of Sin  is largely studio-bound, with much of the movie taking place in the two differing nightclubs of Changoo and La Maquina Loca. Changoo, where the film opens, tends towards the more well-off, featuring a larger band and more performers. The grottier La Maquina Loca, where Violeta ends up after adopting a baby (after being fired from the Changoo and turning to sex work), tends to a more working-class clientele, located as it is next to a train yard .

Victims of Sin Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Bullet Train’

The contrast between the two sets up a simple dichotomy within Victims of Sin , which tends to pair character types: the solidarity and collective action of the women vs. the predatory, lecherous behavior of the men; the class and race-based hierarchies of the Changoo (epitomized by its sleazy owner) vs. the openness and warmth of La Maquina, with owner Santiago (Tito Junco) being one of the few “good” men in the film, going so far as to take in Violeta and her son as an adoptive family. Superficially, this might seem polemical, and Victims of Sin certainly is a product of its time and place in regard to its prescriptivism, but Fernández’s movie far surpasses its simpler elements because of its rather glorious and noirish textures.

Victims of Sin Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Detour’

Take the imposing figure of Rodolfo, who Victims of Sin presents as a signifier of everything “wrong” with contemporary Mexican society. He impregnates women then ignores them, forcing them to dump the baby in the street (it’s this which compels Violeta to rescue her friend’s child and adopt him). Rodolfo is a serial criminal and perpetually greedy. He’s also the first figure seen in the film, as Fernández opens Victims of Sin with Acosta’s character in a barbershop. It appears to be an interior scene, but the camera pans around as Rodolfo leaves to a street on an outdoor stoop, where he roams the neighborhood freely. Many of the character’s entrances into the Changoo and La Maquina see him arrive from the mezzanine at the top, before descending into the dance floor beneath, like a feudal lord arriving to stake his claim.

Victims of Sin Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Fancy Dance’

In contrast, Violeta and Santiago are rarely, if ever, given this top-down visual descent in Victims of Sin . Both characters usually enter the nightclub from the dance floor level, forced to accept their social position. Even Tito’s position as a nightclub owner — seemingly a well-off individual — is precarious, at risk from parasitical forces. That the name of the club Changoo is derived from Changó , a spirit from Yoruba mythology, links the location to Mexico’s colonial and racial past (and present), and that the Changoo clientele is largely white when La Maquina’s is more mixed, is a quietly-placed irony touching on racial appropriation and the warped context of pop culture’s ever-shifting touchstones.

Victims of Sin Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Sicario’

Fernández, a mainstay of Mexican Golden Age cinema as both a director and actor, uses various textures to ground Victims of Sin’s melodramatic and prescriptive tics. To be clear, there’s nothing “wrong” with these melodramatic elements (modern film culture has long since deemed melodrama a dirty word when it is, in fact, a glorious thing for a film to be), but what elevates the drama is the contrast between a brash, sensationalistic and socially-conscious story and subtle, expressive directing that finds its way into the material in unexpected ways. In the leading role, Sevilla is charismatic and sensual; the Cuban-born actress was initially a dancer and Victims of Sin’s many musical sequences pay testament to that. But as Sevilla emerged as a star, she also staked a claim as a leading lady of substance , capable of commanding the screen on her own.

Victims of Sin Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Longlegs’

Amidst all this is a Mexico City that was undergoing massive changes in the 1950s. The region expanded rapidly throughout the 20th century to become, alongside São Paulo in Brazil, the largest city in Latin America. In a film reasonably low on location shooting, Fernández still provides glimpses of the capital’s major landmarks (often caught before or after scenes at the Changoo). These monuments dwarf the main characters, reminding them of their insignificance in the bustling metropolis. But it is the entrance of La Maquina Loca that sticks in the mind, with Violeta traversing a smoky, factory-dotted industrial landscape, with trains thundering across, before entering the club’s welcoming confines. Both versions of the city are imposing, but one arrives in hell and the other at a haven: the community of one is formed around state-led iconography, whereas the other is generated organically through people seeking respite from hard work. Again, these symbolic pairs are simple on paper, but they’re given an earthiness in Fernández’s hands, and elaborated on in the nightclubs themselves.

Victims of Sin Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Griselda’

The nightclub is a stock location in crime cinema — a place where the sleazy, the glamorous and the greedy get to mix together and let their hair down. In Victims of Sin , it’s the centerpiece of a bustling world at the margins of official society, where rules are broken but tolerated. Fernández’s 1951 film is a wonderful, noirish study of what it means to move through its central locations.

Fedor Tot ( @redrightman ) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

Victims of Sin Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Bandidos’

Categories: 1950s , 2024 Film Essays , Crime , Crime Scene by Fedor Tot , Drama , Featured , Film , Movies , Musical , Thriller

Tagged as: 1951 , 1951 Film , 1951 Movie , Crime Movie , Drama Movie , Emilio Fernández , Fedor Tot , Film Actors , Film Actresses , Film Critic , Film Criticism , Film Director , Film Essay , Film Explained , Film Journalism , Film Publication , Film Summary , Journalism , Movie Actors , Movie Actresses , Movie Critic , Movie Director , Movie Essay , Movie Explained , Movie Journalism , Movie Plot , Movie Publication , Movie Summary , Musical Movie , Ninón Sevilla , Rodolfo Acosta , Rotten Tomatoes , Streaming , Thriller Movie , Tito Junco , Víctimas del pecado , Victims of Sin

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American Film Noir: The History of an Idea

1995, Film Quarterly

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This paper contends that, given the thoroughgoing criticism of Lacan and despite the current turn towards philosophy in film studies, psychoanalytic theory must not be abandoned. To this end, I propose a new reading of the critical category of film noir in terms of Lacan’s point de capiton and his theorisation of the retroactive construction of meaning. This is not a regression to the investigations of film, language and psychoanalysis articulated in the 1970s (Metz, Screen) but a return to the site of this encounter to plot a new trajectory for psychoanalytic enquiry into the cinema. While the intersection of psychoanalysis and noir is of course well established, the major interventions (Kaplan, Krutnik) have been oriented towards questions of gender. This leaves unexplored the possibility of noir’s relation to Lacan’s theory of signification presented Seminar III, ‘Instance of the Letter’ and ‘Subversion of the Subject’. It is a truism of film criticism that noir is a retroactive category. However, this function is insufficiently understood in noir historiography (Naremore), which gives little consideration to the theoretical implications of this characterisation. This paper investigates both the wealth of writing on noir as well as various film noir tropes to understand this conception of noir as retroactively constituted. The critical history of noir and the films themselves indicate a structure, predicated on the retroactive production of meaning, which is irresistibly suggestive of Lacanian theory. Reading noir with Lacan, I suggest that this retroactive “noir temporality” is the temporality of the Symbolic order. As such, this paper explores the function of the signifier “noir” as a point de capiton in film criticism, enabling the analysis of a certain type of 1940s Hollywood film; and how a noir film such as Double Indemnity (1944) is concerned with the retroactive production of knowledge through narrative structure.

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‘My Late Summer’ Review: A Woman Resists Repeating Her Mother’s Romantic Mistakes in Poignant Dramedy

The Sarajevo Film Festival's entertaining opening night selection follows a feisty 30-something woman who is won over by a charming island when she visits to collect an inheritance.

By Alissa Simon

Alissa Simon

Film Critic

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Maja’s reasons for coming to the picturesque isle of Prvić in the off-season are not fully revealed at first, although the unreturned phone messages from her increasingly upset mother eventually fill in the gaps. After a local lawyer (Marija Škaričić) reveals that her case will require some time, Maja takes on a barmaid job offered by the island’s left-leaning mayor Icho (the sympathetic Goran Navojec), which conveniently comes with a place to stay. Although she has no waitressing experience, Maja is more than capable of handling the late summer locals and foreign tourists at the mayor’s outdoor harbor pub.

Surrounded by clear sparkling water, the gorgeous, car-free island, with its cobblestone streets, ancient stone buildings and green patches of garden, becomes as much a character in the film as the performers. It’s such an enchanting locale that viewers can understand why Icho declares that he is married to it, and his dearest wish is to add to its perfection by bringing the residents a better sewage system. The screenplay even pays tribute to the island’s anti-fascist heritage with an elderly, trigger-happy partisan shooting from her balcony and singing Communist songs with the Mayor.

After a small role in Tanović’s “Neighborhood Affair,” the graceful, athletic Matković (before taking up acting, she was a professional alpine skier) shows off her leading lady chops and evinces a tender, believable chemistry with Fehmiu. She makes us feel Maja’s bewilderment and pain as she realizes that she is making the same romantic missteps that her mother did — and in the very same place too.

The evocative tech credits are aces in every respect, with kudos due to the atmospheric lensing by Serbian DoP Miloš Jaćimović (whose feature career started with the 2010 Sarajevo fest winner “Tilva Rosh”) and composer Livina Tanović’s melancholy score.

Reviewed online, Aug. 11, 2024. In Sarajevo Film Festival (opener). Running time: 98 MIN. (Original title: 'Nakon ljeta')

• Production: (Croatia-Bosnia and Herzegovina-Romania-Slovenia-Serbia) A Propeler Film production in coproduction with Production, Obala Art Centar, Baš Čelik, Tramal Films, with the support of the Croatian Audiovisual Center, the Ministry of Culture and of Sports of Sarajevo Canton, Slovenian Film Center, Film Center of Serbia, Sarajevo Cinematography Foundation, Romanian Film Center, Subprogram MEDIA of the Creative Europe Program for project development, BH Telecom. Producers: Lana Matić, Boris T. Matić. Co-producers: Jelena Mitrović, Srdan Golubović, Mirsad Purivatra, Jovan Marjanović, Anamaria Antoci, Miha Černec, Jožko Rutar.  
• Crew: Director: Danis Tanović. Screenplay: Anja Matković, Nikola Kuprešanin, Danis Tanović. Camera: Miloš Jaćimović. Editor: Redžinald Šimek. Music: Livina Tanović.
• With: Anja Matković, Uliks Fehmiu, Goran Navojec, Mario Knezović, Marija Škaričić, Mirela Brekalo, Snježana Sinovčić, Luka Juričić, Boris Ler, Ivana Roščić, Jadranka Matković. (Serbo-Croatian, English dialogue)

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Family Is a Lot of Trouble in August’s Graphic Novels

Generational connections — and divides — abound in four new volumes that take vastly different approaches to storytelling.

Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

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By Sam Thielman

Sam Thielman is a reporter and critic based in Brooklyn. In addition to his monthly column for The Times, he has written about comics and graphic novels for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate and The Guardian.

• Aug. 14, 2024

The warp and weft of a single life is impossible to describe because there’s no such thing as a single life. Perhaps that’s why family stories are such a satisfying microcosm — they ask us not to consider one person’s vast depths, but to think about how a collection of people form and change one another over their shared lives.

The people in Sole Otero’s remarkable MOTHBALLS (Fantagraphics, 336 pp., $29.99) are so simply delineated that their facial features are almost individual characters. Our narrator, Rocío, has a gap in her teeth that sometimes makes her mouth into an inside-out Q; her tragic great-uncle Antonio’s hairline is a pair of conjoined W’s. But their interlocking lives are complex in inverse proportion to their visual simplicity, as are the amazing architectural habitats and panel layouts Otero has designed for them to live in during their triumphs and miseries.

The most vivid character in “Mothballs” is Rocío’s estranged grandmother, Vilma, whose funeral opens the book. Vilma’s life is a sweeping melodrama that crosses generations, but that story is framed as Rocío’s recollection as she moves into her grandmother’s old house and tries to get acquainted with now-unfamiliar surroundings. The huge changes of Vilma’s life accrete into a family history, and little incidents in Ro’s sections form parallels. Beneath it all lurks Vilma’s possibly literal ghost.

The spirit of the great anarchic underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson is alive and well in Leo Fox’s BOY ISLAND (Silver Sprocket, 168 pp., $29.99) , where family is also important, but in far wilder ways. Fox’s book is a parable about identity and transition, and while he writes dialogue that sounds so real it could have been lifted from a supper-table argument, his imagery is ferociously imaginative. The book follows Lucille, who realizes he is a boy and must leave his mother and Girl Island for Boy Island, two places that were once one. His head looks like a blue executioner’s mask covered in spikes, but he is tenderhearted; when he finally confronts Fairy, the butterfly-winged spirit of conformity, conservatism and oppression, he confusedly accepts Fairy’s invitation to come inside and have a cup of tea and talk things through.

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