What Is Film Noir

What Is Film Noir?

Sandra Lawrence attempts to give her own interpretation of the genre that isn’t a genre…

No one agrees on exactly what constitutes Film Noir – not even the academics who postulate around its minutiae. Books have been written, papers published and lists compiled about the elements – both visual and narrative – that constitute the classic noir vocabulary. But this is my board - so here I’m going to put my head on the block and my opinions on the record about how I see the coolest non-genre that ever hit the big screen.

Film Noir mocks the dying breath of a man who has cheated Society and lost.

So many things contributed to the birth of Noir that they become a blur of influences. German Expressionism, WWII, Prohibition, The Hays Code, The Depression, Feminism, Art Deco, Bauhaus, the Hollywood studio system – you name it, it’s in there. Noir is a product of twentieth century flotsam and jetsam.

Film Noir lingers in the cigarette haze of a late night dive bar.

I guess the best way to describe Noir is that it is a feel.

Film Noir sits on the razor shards of a shattered mirror in a darkened apartment

During the Second World War Film distribution to Europe was severely limited. Occupied France especially lived on a diet of last-year’s American confidence-boosting musicals, gung-ho war films in which GI Joe came out on top, emotion pictures that told American women to wait for their man, and rugged melodramas reassuring the lads Over There that their gals waited patiently for them. A balanced diet, then, of glamour, glitter and gloss. Then nothing. As rationing got worse, the Hollywood film supply in Europe dried to a trickle.

Film Noir lurks between the neon flashes of a cheap “room vacant” sign

After the war, there was a sudden influx of movies to mainland Europe. An embarrassment of riches and several years’ worth of Hollywood backlog to catch up on. French film critics had a field day.

Film Noir is the distant babble that crackles through a squad-car radio.

In their filmic feeding frenzy, these critics were able to see something that everyone else had missed because the change had been so subtle. Movies that celebrated America, and its precious Dream had been gradually replaced by grittier, more pessimistic visions of urban city life. The grubby, seedy underbelly that had been covered so carefully in the state of National Emergency.

Film Noir lies in the whispered platitudes of a faithless lover

Critics such as Borde and Chaumeton started to talk about the “dark” cinema they were experiencing film after film. They called it “Film Noir” – “black film” - a double meaning as though of course they were usually in black and white, the term reflects a series of French hard-boiled, cheap detective paperbacks of the 1920s and 30s, the “Fleuve-Noire,” distinctive for their black covers.

Film Noir eats the soul of the man who can never go back
Another link was between these new films and the American equivalent of the Fleuve Noire – the pulp fiction of novelists such as Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Dashiel Hammett which were often adapted to created the screenplays.

Film Noir gnaws at the lost innocence that once believed in truth

After the war, returning servicemen realised that the dream they had been peddled wasn’t necessarily true. The jobs they had had before the war weren’t always still waiting for them. The girls they had left had had a taste of life outside the home – in munitions factories and on the land. Worse still, these forces sweethearts hadn’t always found the single life to their taste and poor old GI Joe found himself replaced in virtually every facet of civilian life.

Film Noir punishes the woman who does what she has to do

And the movies Hollywood was now creating unwittingly reflected this. True, studios such as MGM gaily continued to make the glossy escapist feel-gooders with which they had always been associated.

Film Noir looks in the mirror and hates what it sees

But other studios were churning out a new kind of film as well as their flagship offerings. Sometimes these films were Class A major releases (Take “Gilda,” for example, or “The Maltese Falcon,”) but the real innovation was bubbling away underneath in the B soundstages. A combination of eager new talent and poor budgets created what my lecturers used to call “mutually limiting demands,” a series of constraints which actually defined the ultimate look and feel of a movie.

Film Noir lives in the last bullet of a trapped man’s 8mm Colt

No B movie director wanted to stay in that category, but they were faced with the challenge of getting themselves noticed by the Head Honchos so they could find promotion.

Film Noir looms in the nightmare alley of a beaten informer.

Head Honchos weren’t famous for sitting through hours of B movies by unknowns, but they all sat in on the rushes. These new directors knew that they would have to attract attention by making sure these movies LOOKED impressive despite their low budgets.

Film Noir squats smugly on the tray of the cigarette girl who will never make it to the final reel

Several of these directors – Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak for starters, were emigrés fleeing Nazi Germany. In their youth they would have been exposed to – or were even exponents of – German expressionist art. The angular symbolic sets and heavy chiaroscuro were just the kind of strong look they needed.

Film Noir is the relentless ticking of a merciless clock

It is often denied that the spare lighting and dark shadows in Film Noir were due to the fact that there weren’t enough lights and the sets were poor, but I can’t believe that this wasn’t at least part of the reality. It was, if nothing else, happy accident. Everyday 20th Century clutter– mirrors, venetian blinds, flashing neon signs – became symbolic of bigger – and, may I suggest -more expensive things. Lighting, especially, was a strong example of exterior influences reflecting interior turmoil, not to mention innovation on the part of the crew. Cinematographers vied with each other to perfect a look they weren’t even aware they were creating.

Film Noir balances precariously on the centre of a roulette wheel’s final spin

It was a time of fascination with the inner psyche, but an acknowledgement of harsh reality. Film Noir married the two. Petty gangsters, poverty stricken no-hopers forced into a life of crime, good men trying to earn a living in a world set against them, all desperately fought a deadly combination of their pasts, their minds and an even stronger foe, Fate.

Film Noir throws the punch of the boxer who knows he has already sold his dignity

And always at night. A dark, wet, dangerous night. A faceless American street drenched in never-ending rainfall. The glow of a single street lamp, not enough to illuminate the way back to the relative safety of an anonymous hotel room, but bright enough to reveal the rotting corpse of a man beaten by the henchmen of the local crime baron. The flash of neon heralding a bar. Not a bar that brings any hope of friendship or happiness, but one where the All American Loser must drown his sorrows. The last solace available to him.

Film Noir is the faceless mastermind behind a giant corporation

Film Noir isn’t just made in Black and white. Even the golden age of Noir boasts a couple of movies made in colour (check out the arrestingly vulgar hues deliberately slapped onto the screen to disturb the viewer in “Slightly Scarlet”) and neo-noirs these days are always in colour – to use black and white today would smack of pretension – I’m not even convinced the otherwise faultless Coen Brothers get away with it in “The Man Who Wasn’t There.” “Blood Simple” still shocks far more, possibly because of its dramatic use of colour.

Film Noir mocks the dark reflection of Beauty losing its war against Time

Film Noir isn’t the sum of its look, striking and distinct though it is with its dark shadows, exaggerated objects, iconic sets of Urban Life – bars, casinos, motel rooms, cars, streets. Check out “The Red House” or “Night of the Hunter” – both country-based psycho-horrors, or “Pursued,” a Noir western.

Film Noir feeds the desperation of one who may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb

Film Noir isn’t even just a collection of stereotyped femmes-fatales, doomed heroes, one-dimensional villains and corrupt policemen (look up “Phantom Lady” for a straight cop, or “The Naked Kiss” for one hell of a complex “femme fatale”)

Film Noir haunts the lost memory of a redundant war veteran

Film Noir is a mood. A mood that is so dark that there is no hope of any return to light. A mood that is all-pervasive and once experienced is like lost virginity. A one-way street leading firmly away from innocence.

Film Noir turns coincidence into fate

Film Noir is nasty, violent and grubby. An animal that rolls in its own dirt but hates itself - and the rest of the world - for allowing it to do so. A beast that hates itself so much that it can no longer live.

Film Noir is soaked in the relentless rainfall of a night that never ends

And a society that creates ciphers as excuses for its own behaviour. Gangsters. The Depression. Drink. Gambling. Big Business. Corporations. Foreigners. Women.

Film Noir presses a jealous nose against the window of the All-American Family

Ultimately the Noir hero excuses himself because Society made him do what ever he has done. He is not responsible. Society created his fall from grace. A Society that would rather absorb and absolve than admit culpability.

Film Noir pounds the diseased beat of a corrupt cop

But what is also so wonderful about Film Noir is that within that ugly, violent seedy world is a kind of beauty. A chink of light that cannot be entirely quashed by the darkness. And a glamour. Not the glamour of a former Hollywood with gigantic sets and soft limpid heroines in silks and satins, but realistic sets and heroines who are hard, their lips a slash of red against brittle white faces, their gowns a shimmer of hard metallic scales on velvet.

Film Noir is the final, good, act of a condemned criminal that cannot save him

For me, the beauty of Film Noir is what is not on the screen. It is in the recognition of humanity in its characters. All its characters. They may be stereotypes, but every one of those cardboard cut-outs cracks a kernel that lives within us all. We may not like it, but in seeing them on the screen we can identify with the basic human urges we all have. By seeing them up there we can indulge in a catharsis we could never allow in real life.

Site based on a design by Rick Clark,

reinterpreted and maintained by RoninG Systems