TCF 112 Motion Picture History and Criticism
Class Notes: Film Noir

(Literally, "black film")

Mostly defined by style

But also: content--narrative & theme

Noir Visual Style

(See illustrations)

• Rooted in German expressionism
  • Many noir directors were German exiles
    • 1930s emigration, to escape Nazis
      • E.g., Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang (Austria) Edgar G. Ulmer (Olmütz, Mähren, Austria-Hungary [now Czech Republic]), Billy Wilder (Sucha, Austria-Hungary [now Poland]),
  • Stylization expresses inner state
    
• Mise-en-scene
• Lighting
  • Low-key lighting
    • High contrast
    • Opposite: high-key lighting
  • Night-for-night shooting
    • Opposite: day-for-night
      • Le nuit Americaine
• Setting
  • Urban setting: back alleys, cheap
  • Bars/hotels, waterfront dives
• Cinematography
  • Black-and-white film stock
  • Unconventional camera angles
    • Extreme low-angle
    • Extreme high-angle
    • Extreme deep focus
    • Dutch angle

Noir Thematics

• Fatalism
  • Indiscretion in past closes off future
  • E.g., Out of the Past (1947)
• Moral ambiguity
  • Evil/Good blurred
  • Guilt/Innocence blurred
  • E.g., In a Lonely Place (1950)
• Alienation
  • Cynical, paranoid
• Misogyny
  • Distrust/hatred of women

• Conventional characters
  • Men
    • Protagonists
    • Morally ambiguous, alienated, fatalistic, cynical
    • Trapped/fated/doomed
      • Ending is predetermined/fated
    • Destroyed by:
      • Inner desires
      • Social forces
  • Women
    • Evil woman, femme noir
      • "spider woman"
      • Lures the hero to his doom
      • Strong, independent, capable
    • Redemptive woman
      • As redeemer
      • Offers to save the hero
        • E.g., The Big Heat (1953

History of the Film Noir (1945-60)

• Antecedents:
  1. Poetic Realism (France)
  2. Gangster Genre (US)
  3. Expressionism (Germany)
• "film noir" coined by Nino Frank (1946)
  • 1^st applied to poetic realist films
• Ended around 1960
  1. Cheap color film
  2. End of the B-film
  3. Crime changes, becomes more corporate and business-like
• Latter-day film noir
  • E.g., The Matrix

Last revised: April 24, 2006 13:37