FILM NOIR:

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• FILM NOIR

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Article by John Belton Presentation
by Evan Mays

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Outline

• beginning
• noir genre, series, mode
• noir red guts
• noir stylistics
• the Code!
• lit. origins
• women in film noir
• a critique
• revival

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Film Noir (1941-1958) Black film.

• Uniquely American term coined by 2 French film
  critics. Noirs roots are pulp fiction the
  wartime postwar despair n alienation
  that arose as America adjusted
  to a new social
  political reality.
• Unsettled audiences by violation
  of traditional narrative stylistic
  practices which orient stabilize
  spectators. Dominated by crime,
  corruption, cruelty a
  seemingly unhealthy
  interest in the erotic.

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Film Noir as Genre

• Genre (from the French) kind, type or category
  of phenomenon or particular thing in cinema used
  to designate various categories of motion picture
  production.
• A of recent scholars approach noir thus,
  discussing it in terms of iconography, fixed
  character types predictable narrative patterns.

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Film Noir as Series

• Certain characters, narrative situations,
  thematic concerns appear repeatedly in noir, but
  these elements play against audience
  expectations also, noir crosses over traditional
  genre boundaries. Because of this some critics
  see film noir as a series or cycle, like an
  aesthetic movement.

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Film Noir as Series

• Producers, directors
  screenwriters of 40s
  50s noirs, unlike
  genre filmmakers, do
  not deliberately set out
  to make noir as
  no body of set
  convention exists
  to follow.
• The audiences who see films noirs do not view
  them as they do conventional genre pictures. That
  is, they do not look at them in relation to a
  fixed system of prior expectations.

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Film Noir as Series

• Noirs rely upon identifiable
  character types
  conventionalized narrative
  patterns. But that which is
  generic in film noir is
  that which is not noir.
• A schizophrenic nature
  noir is not a genre, yet
  every film noir is also a
  genre film. What makes these films noir
  is the similar, transgeneric attitude they take
  towards any particular genre.

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Film Noir as Mode

• Noir as specific emotional reaction produced by
  certain films noir as affective
  phenomena. Noir for a moment is film
  noir.
• Noir as a description of tone,
  attitude, moodnot so much a genre as a
  modea particular way in which genre
  information is conveyed.
• However, traditional modes do not
  have temporal boundaries.

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Film Noir as All?

• Both a style a bundle of thematic concerns,
  film noir initially seems to be a phenomenon that
  could appear at any moment in time. But, as an
  aesthetic movement, it is necessarily grounded in
  a particular historical periodthat of wartime
  postwar America.
• Noir is part genre, part series, part mode.
• P.S. Its all about disturbance in the end

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Red Guts of Film Noir

• Aesthetically, noir relies on
• shadowy, low-key lighting
• deep-focus cinematography
• distorting, wide-angle lenses
• sequence shots
• disorienting mise-en-scene
• tension-inducing, oblique vertical
  compositional lines

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• jarring juxtapositions between shots involving
  extreme changes in camera angle/screen size
• claustrophobic framing
• romantic, voice-over narration
• a complex narrative structure, characterized
  by flashbacks and/or a convoluted temporal
  sequencing of events

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• Thematically, noir grapples w/existential issues
  of
• the futility of individual action
• the alienation, loneliness isolation of the
  individual w/in industrialized, mass society
• the problematic choice between
  being nothingness
• the absurdity, meaninglessness
  purposelessness of life
• the arbitrariness of social justice, which
  results in individual despair, leads to
  chaos, violence paranoia.

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Red Guts of Film Noir

• Noir heroes do not need to be detectives. Often,
  they are merely antisocial loners. But even the
  gainfully employed are subject to a certain
  deadpan, existential angst, especially given
  their relatively faceless anonymity w/in a
  larger, dehumanizing work environment.
• Why do you think some scholars consider the most
  existential of all film noir heroes to be the
  amnesiac?

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Noir Stylistics Shadow of the 30s

• Narrative linearity of C. H. C. gives way to
  narrative disjunction, fragmentation,
  disorientation.
• Soft, evenly distributed high-key lighting
  yields to harsh, low-key lighting obscures the
  action, deglamorizes the star, reduces actors
  to shadowy formal elements embedded within
  overall design of the noirs composition.

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Noir Stylistics Shadow of the 30s

• Carefully constructed sense of space disappears
  replaced by wide-angle cinematography distorts
  space, disorients viewer.
  Conventional eye- level camera
  positions give way to extreme
  low-/high-level perspective assaults the
  viewers complacency.
• Every violation of norm marks an
  intrusive intervention between
  spectator, exposition foregrounds
  narrative form making it visible.

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Noir Stylistics Shadow of the 30s

• When the staple of the industry the film most
  frequently identified with everyday motion
  picture entertainment, the genre film, developed
  psychotic tendencies, audiences of the time new
  something was wrong more so, they felt it.

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Noir and the Production Code

• American films of mid- to late 30s rarely dealt
  with taboo subjects. Noir frequently does,
  resulting in amazing displays of narrative
  contortions in order to allude to prohibited
  material w/out directly violating the Code!
• Violence takes place off screen its intensity
  amplified by disjunctive edits /or sound
  effects.
• Homosexuality prominent plot motive for a of
  novels turned noirs onscreen, motive displaced,
  desexualizedlays bare deep cultural fears of it.
  

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Noir and the Production Code

• Relaxation of Code in late 1950s advent of
  ratings system in late 1960s paves way for a new
  era of explicitness in 1970s.
• Subject matter sensational, presentation
  neither disturbed nor disturbing as classically
  direct as any of Hollywoods 1930s films.
• Ease w/which once taboo material dealt w/in
  liberated climate of 70s distinguishes
  authentic film noirs of the 40s 50s from
  pseudo-noirs of the 1970s onwards.

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Noir and the Production Code

• Remember !!! The Production Code played a crucial
  role in creating noir. Subsequent changes in this
  Code result in the production of films that are
  decidedly less noir.

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Literary origins of Film Noir

• In postwar era mistaken belief arises that
  simple world of prewar America could be
  recreated. Realization that this was a delusion
  influences world-weary cynicism of film noir,
  the sense of frustration experience of
  disempowerment at its center.
• Americas innocence was lost. Noir suggests it
  was lost long before war, that it was more than
  , jobs that were lost during Great Depression.

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Noirs Literary Origins

• Unlike English detective fiction, features
  proletarian tough guy living on fringe of
  criminal world. Relies only upon animal
  cunning, dogged perseverance, physical stamina
  brute force to solve his cases.
• Noir heroes, detective or not, are weak
  intellects. They attempt to make up for
  this failing with verbal wit. The writer of
  detective fiction the detective hero both
  control their worlds by controlling language.

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Literary origins of Film Noir

• Content style of American hard-boiled novels
  introduced new tradition of realism to genre of
  detective novel. Characterized by shift in
  detectives class technique, milieu, language.
• Contemporary America an urban, industrialized
  landscape of those bound to naturalistic drives.
• Boys in the back room, as Edmund Wilson called
  Black Mask school of writers of pulp detective
  fiction, inspired by Émile Zola, other 19th
  Century naturalists matter-of-fact depiction of
  decadence corruption.

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Women in Film Noir

• All weakness is associated with the feminine.

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Women in Film Noir

• Women the feminine a threat on two
  frontssocioeconomic psychoanalytic.
• Socioeconomic (1) changing status of American
  women during war/postwar period challenges
  patriarchy entry into workforce takeover of
  trad. male roles further violates fundamental
  order of sexual relations.

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Women in Film Noir

• Changes threaten traditional values
  centered in the institution of family.
• Noir registers this anti-feminist
  backlash by providing pictures of a
  postwar America where there is no
  family or where
  family exists chiefly as a
  (-) phenomenon characterized as a claustrophobic,
  emasculating trap or a bankrupt system of
  perfunctory relationships, featuring murderous
  wives corrupt children.

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Women in Film Noir

• Leaving the private sphere (home family) to
  enter the public sphere of work, women, it is
  assumed, have abandoned the domestic needs of
  sweethearts, husbands, children.
• Noir dramatizes the consequences of this neglect,
  transforming women into willful creatures intent
  on destroying both their mates the sacred
  institutions of the family.

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Women in Film Noir

• C. H. C. was at great pains to shield the
  family from the world of crime. Traditional
  genre films routinely oppose the sacred
  space of the family to that
  of the world outside.
• In noir, the world of crime
  that of the family overlap.
  Crimes moved from outside
  the family to within, the
  impetus for crime
  comes as often from
  women as men.

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• Psychoanalytic (2) the image of women on-screen
  functions to recall, for the male spectator, the
  castration anxiety he experiences on first
  perceiving sexual difference as a child (Mulvey).

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Women in Film Noir

• C. H. C. supports male dominance its attempts
  to alleviate castration anxiety by
  disavowal the females castrated
  status is denied.
• This disavowal achieved by fetishization
  and/or devaluation of female a way to erase her
  threat.

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Women in Film Noir

• Fetishization image of
  women is overvalued
  thru use of techniques
  that transform her into
  spectacle lack which
  she signifies is in this
  way filled in,
  replaced by her
  objectification.
• Devaluation women seen as guilty objecther
  castration is a symbol of her punishment.

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A Critique of Populism

• Destabilization of sex. relationships in
  noir symptom of larger social disorder.
• Prior to WW II, American society held together by
  various myths that structured a national identity
  rested upon principles of Jeffersonian
  democracy.
• Democratic promise of cheap or free land
  motivation for western settlement, which became a
  realization of Americas manifest destiny.

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A Critique of Populism

• Closing frontier, exhaustion of free land,
  rapid industrialization of America in latter 19th
  Century begins slow process of social change.
• By 1920, for first time in American history, more
  people in urban than rural areas. Millions of
  laborers white-collar workers live new reality
  but subscribe to old, preindustrial-era myths.
• Only after Depression do myths begin to waiver.

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A Critique of Populism

• Film noir reflects transitional stage in American
  ideology as American identity shifts from 19th
  Century, preindustrial, agrarian prototypes to
  20th Century models, which acknowledge the
  nations transformation to a mass, consumer
  society the industrialized corporate state.
• As a movement, noir reflects a chaotic period
  where old myths begin to crumble no new myths
  exist to take their placethe period in which
  national identity is in a crisis.

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A Critique of Capra

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A Critique of Populism

• Example of old myths in Capra films epitomize
  classicism, order of pre-noir wood cinema,
  celebrate 19th Century agrarianism. Stalwart
  protagonists fight the 20th Century evils that
  threaten populist spirit of small-town America.
• Nightmare inversion of Capras ideal American
  community in Its a Wonderful Life illustrates
  noirs subversive
  relationship to C. H. C. which attempts to
  repress the very forces to which noir gives
  voice. However, turns out It was just a dream. .
  .

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Film Noir the Undercurrent ends

• Noir does not dismantle American myth or identity
  in the 40s proves only one current in flood of
  films reaffirming traditional values. By the late
  50s, advent of TV virtually destroys low-budget,
  B-film industry (provided bulk of noirs). New
  mood reflects postwar prosperity at decades end
  Americans turn from depressed thoughts of
  technological blight to utopian visions of
  machine-age paradises, filled w/labor-saving
  devices.
• Film noirs cease to speak to the needs some feel
  for films that address their existential malaise.

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Vietnam, etc. Noirs Revisited

• Trauma of Depression shell-shock of war
  years has been treated, cured. Supposedly.
• However, in the 70s Americans rediscover
  noir of the 40s 50s becomes the source
  material that prompts new understanding
  of postwar American reality.
• In rediscovering it Americans locate a more
  modern body of myths thru which they might come
  to terms with contemporary American experience.

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End (remember)

• Film noir emerges as a cycle or series of films.
  It consists of a finite group of motion pictures
  made during a specific historical period which
  share certain aesthetic traits thematic
  concerns.

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• By Evan Mays