Film Noir

Film Noir, term (meaning literally “black film”, although “dark film” seems more appropriate and evocative) used by French critics to describe a cycle of American films inaugurated by The Maltese Falcon (1941), directed by John Huston. These were typically imbued with feelings of fatalistic pessimism, incidents of treachery, and a sense of a corrupt and violent society threatening the hero and perhaps other protagonists. Even when the hero survives, as Sam Spade (played by Humphrey Bogart) does at the end of The Maltese Falcon, there is frequently a bleak sense of loss: Spade has to hand over to the police for murder the woman who fascinates him (such obsessions with a dangerous or apparently dangerous femme fatale, often despite the presence of a young and pretty alternative, are typical of the cycle). Similarly, though Mildred (Joan Crawford) is reunited with her first husband at the end of Mildred Pierce (1945), directed by Michael Curtiz, both the narrative of the film and the composition of the final image present this as surrender and defeat.

This latter film draws attention to another characteristic of film noir: the term was initially a critical and analytical one, and for many years had no place in the discourse of the industry. When it was made, the industry would have classed Mildred Pierce as a melodrama or “women’s pic” and marketed it as such.

There was a strong and distinctive visual style associated with film noir, which affected the look of films in other genres. Thus, critics were divided over whether to regard it as a genre, style, or movement. Shifts in industry thinking in the past two decades have cut the ground from under such academic disputation. Directors now set out to make films noirs, distributors to market them, and television channels to package them in retrospectives. In 1990, the year his film The Hot Spot was released, director Dennis Hopper described film noir as “every director’s favourite genre”. Similarly, director Valeri Todorovski refers to his Katia Ismailova (1993) as “one of the first Russian films noirs”. Thus, the purist view, initially put forward by future screenwriter and director Paul Schrader in 1972 that the major period of film noir ended with Touch of Evil (1958), directed by Orson Welles, is no longer tenable.

The original film noir look was characterized by: low-key, chiaroscuro lighting; night scenes, sometimes in glistening wet streets; the use of shadow to comment on a character’s psychology (blocks of shadow on the face hinting at an initially unrevealed “dark side”) or narrative situation (shadowy grids, for example, conveying a sense of being trapped); claustrophobic framing and unbalanced compositions. Several of these effects were particularly striking in black and white. However, the lighting and design of many recent films noirs, including Taxi Driver (1976), directed by Martin Scorsese, Manhunter (1986), by Michael Mann, and The Hot Spot, have set out to achieve comparably expressive use of colour.

Film noir is generally regarded as representing a fusion between the Universal Pictures’ 1930s horror cycle and the detective and gangster sub-genres, without the latter’s concern with the social origins of crime. Literary sources include the “hard-boiled” private-eye novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the stories of Cornell Woolrich, and the novels of James M. Cain. Recent scholarship, however, has also demonstrated links between the 1930s “poetic realist” movement in France and Hollywood film noir. Certainly, the fatalism of, say, They Live By Night (shot 1947, released 1949), directed by Nicholas Ray, seems to make it a more passionate reworking of the themes of Quai des Brumes (1938), by Marcel Carné. Indeed, it was in a conscious attempt to evoke the notions of fate and inevitability that Ray pioneered the first use of a helicopter in the filming of action sequences.

Various factors are deemed to have contributed to the initial success of the genre: the insecurity resulting first from World War II, then from the onset of the Cold War; fear and insecurity amongst progressives in the industry following the onset of investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities; uncertainty about the position of women, as first they were emancipated from their traditional roles to participate in wartime manufacturing, then forced to readjust as servicemen returned from the war; the latter’s problems of readjustment; some relaxation in censorship—the film adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), for example, was only given the go-ahead a decade after the publication of Cain’s novel. The current lack of industry censorship, tensions deriving from renewed conflicts over the place of women in society, and general disillusionment with American morality, society, politics, and the American dream are factors underpinning current film noir production. Perhaps the most explicit recent exploration of the relation between the “normal” United States and its “dark” underside is seen in the David Lynch film Blue Velvet (1986).

The term “film noir” has also been applied to British and French production.