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Film Noir,
or "Black Cinema"
is a style of black-and-white
motion pictures common in
the 1940s and 1950s. Below
are several authors' descriptions
of the characteristics of
Film Noir.
Christine Gledhill
1. Investigative structure
of the narrative
2. voice over, flashback
3. proliferation of points
of view
4. frequent unstable characterization
of the heroine
5. Expressionist visual style,
emphasis on sexuality in
photographing of women
Raymond Durgnat
1. Crime as Social Criticism
a. Prohibition-type gangsterism
b. Corrupt penology
c. The fight game
d. Juvenile delinquency
2. Gangsters
3. On the run
4. Private eyes and Adventurers
5. Middle class murder
6. Portraits and doubles
7. Sexual pathology
8. Psychopaths
9. Hostages to fortune
10. Nazis and Communists
11. Guignol. horror, fantasy
Paul Schrader
1. Majority of scenes lit
for night
2. Oblique and vertical lines
preferred to horizontal
3. Actors and setting are
often given equal lighting
emphasis
4. Compositional tension
preferred to physical action
5. Freudian attachment to
water (rain, docks, piers)
6. Romantic narration
7. Complex chronological
order frequently used to
reinforce feelings of hopelessness
and lost time
Robert Profirio
1. The non-heroic hero
2. Alienation and loneliness
3. Existential choice
4. Man under sentence of
death
5. Meaninglessness, purposelessness,
the absurd
6. Chaos, violence, paranoia
7. Sanctuary, ritual and
order
Jeremy Butler
1. Low key high contrast
lighting
2. Imbalanced lighting
3. Night for night
4. Deep focus
5. Wide angle focal length
6. Dissymmetrical mise-en-scene
7. Extreme low and high angles
8. Foreground obstructions
To which one might
add:
-
Lighting through Venetian
blind gobos
-
Dialogue scenes where all of the actors face the camera, especially at different distances.
-
All main characters are
doomed and die in the course
of the picture. Just like
Shakespeare.
- Femme fatales.
- Hopelessness, inevitability,
and fate
Quintessential Film Noir examples include:
- Out of the Past (1947) ***
- Kiss Me Deadly (1955) ***
- Gun Crazy (1949) **
- Detour (1945) **
- Murder My Sweet (1944) **
- His Kind of Woman (1951) **
- The Big Combo (1955)
- The Big Heat (1953)
- Criss Cross (1949)
- Dark Corner (1946)
- Double Indemnity (1944)
- The Killers (1946) (Dragnet theme)
- Macao (1952)
- The Naked City (1948) (Dragnet theme) (There are eight million stories in the naked city.
This is one of them.)
- Night and the City (1950)
- Pickup on South Street (1953)
- Pitfall (1948)
- The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
- Roadblock (1951) (Chase through L.A. River)
- Scarlet Street (1945)
- The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
- Sunset Boulevard (1950)
- This Gun for Hire (1942)
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