noir essay

The Concept of Film Noir Essay

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One of the most praised and seen movie genres, “Film noir” is considered as a remarkable and classic movie form by the audience. Film noir is that movie form in which dark and criminal events are showed to the audiences.

This form serves as a revolutionary genre in Hollywood movies as it played a vital role in changing the tradition of sunny, optimistic and commercial movies after World War II. The term “Film Noir” was coined by the French critics in order to criticize and evaluate those movies which are dark, pessimistic, negative, and serious i.e. different from the usual commercialized cinema.

There are some of the apparent characteristics of film genre. In particular, film noir has some of its distinctive features as well. In this paper, we shall discuss two silent features of film noir namely style and narrative structure. We shall elaborate such features through the analysis of movie LA Confidential that is categorized in film noir genre.

This was authenticated by Foster Hirsch who is known for his brilliant work as an analyst who used to analyze the most original genre of American cinema ‘Film Noir’ in his classic way. He evaluated that: “ Noir deals with criminal activity, from a variety of perspectives, in a general mood of dislocation and bleakness which earned the style its name.

Unified by a dominant tone and sensibility, the noir canon constitutes a distinct style of film-making; but it also conforms to gender requirements since it operates within a set of narrative and visual conventions…. Noir tells its stories in a particular way, and in a particular visual style. The repeated use of narrative and visual structures….certainly qualifies noir as a genre, one that is in fact as heavily coded as the western” (Conard & Porfirio, 2007, pp. 9-10).

The inventers and those who supported the genre and write many movies on this were strongly opposed by the government in the post war period as there were lots of reasons behind this.

Cain, the writer of Double Indemnity was terribly criticized by the Production Code Administration (PCA) which was against the depiction of lawlessness and acts of demoralization to the audiences. So, in this way the genre of Film Noir was greatly opposed as it was injecting a negative thought in people that one can do anything for the sake of self indulgence and material satisfaction (Staudler, 2005).

The most prominent feature of film noir genre is its style that is influenced by social change in American society in post war era. The stylistic feature portrays doomed heroes, manipulating people, personal and political agendas of characters. Moreover, the stylistic feature projects dark light sets which create long and wide shadows, disturbed and uncomfortable atmosphere and are usually dragged.

Other than this a prominent quality of this genre is the development of negative behaviors in heroes or ant-heroes usually generated by Femme Fatale which is the depiction of Women in Film Noirs in a way which has never seen by the audience previously. This kind of women is different, thrilling and serve as an illicit desire for Men.

Conclusively, these features of Style in Film Noir can be precisely considered as the salient feature used in the story projection of this genre. Stylistic feature is greatly visible in various Film Noirs in the past. One of the most notable examples include “L.A. Confidential” (1997) directed by Curtis Hanson show these features in order to present the original idea of Film Noir.

L.A. Confidential shows the evil and personal desires of different people related to different backgrounds. It bears the characters of a typical film noir which includes criminal activities and lethal women engagements within criminal groups. The city shown in the movie serves as the combating zone of human insights.

The story is about some cops, their crimes and the guilt which they are carrying in their hearts. The style of the film is like a typical film noir i.e. dull and slow but interesting. The cinematographers have done every possible effort in order to bring originality in the movie. The movie atmosphere is dim with fewer colors and the characters have usually awkward gestures and style of clothing. (Arthur, 2008).

Another feature of film noir is the narrative structure which means a lot to a film noir genre. The characterizations are done in such a way that the people who play those characters become the source of story narration.

The narrative structures are different in different movies. Sometimes the screenplay’s voice-over adds a special essence in storytelling which also acts as a source of putting intensity and quality to the movie. Also, sometimes the film’s voice-over addresses are done by a specific person who narrates the story throughout the film. This narration is spoken in a deadpan way by which the story seems more interesting to the audience (Staudler, 2005).

The narrative style used in L.A. Confidential is descriptive and mind captivating. For example, the entry of Ed Exley, an ambitious and concerned cop in a crime scene shows the descriptive narrative structure when the camera focuses on each and every details of the entire grimy objects from ashtrays to the torn register.

Means, the cinematographers have paid attention to every character and even to the minor things which are although not related to the main story theme but they do play an important part in the narration of story. This means that narration in L.A. Confidential is done usually through the visuals of a scene.

By giving importance to the minor things the director has tried to give the whole explanation which is commendable. Another style of narration used in other film noirs is the narration through any of the character. For example in Double Indemnity the voice-over of the story is not the camera but a character from the film. An insurance investigator, Barton Keyes, narrates the whole plot of the story throughout the film (Staudler, 2005).

L.A. Confidential although depicts the confused moods of fifties but it also updates its theme by showing all possible contemporary cultural obsession. It presents government, law enforcement and organized crime as the three interlinked forms. According to the creator of the story these three forms are interconnected with each other and each has common goals and brutal business tactics. They can do anything to victimize the city’s underclass (Arthur, 2008).

The movie L.A. Confidential has all the features of a film noir and presents briefly a clear idea about the style and narrative structure used in the film. The story is quite different from the usual film noirs but it has many variations which and mind captivating characteristics which attract the audience. L.A. confidential has provided information about this genre to the audience by showing them the original features.

The new thing in this movie was the depiction of a brief account of crimes by the government officials not the common people. Other than this, the movie makers like the other film noirs have again incorporated their suggestions about the evil desires of human and their devilish plots in this movie which clarifies the fact that man can descend to any level in order to achieve his goals (Arthur, 2008).

Although this genre of film making was opposed to a high extent but originally it is a way of depicting real life incidents. The stories and characters are made on the basis of real life happenings. Writer Cain (Double Indemnity) has also taken example from his own life and clarified that although this genre seems controversial and is something which is showing things which can have a demoralizing impact on people but in actual these are the hard realities of life which the Hollywood movies are trying to show to the people.

Arthur, P. (2008). L.A. Confidential. New York: Cineaste Publishers.

Conard, M., & Porfirio, R. (2007). The Philosophy of Film Noir. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.

Staudler, G. (2005). Doble Indemnity, Hard-Boil Film Noir. New York, London.: W.W.Norton&Company.

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Bibliography

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How to Write a Film Noir: Utilising the 8 Essential Pillars of Film Noir

This article will delve into what film noir is and its common tropes . We’ll offer pointers on how to write a film noir that both honours the traditions of the genre and puts a contemporary spin on the genre.

Wikipedia defines film noir as…

“a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations”

What Is Film Noir?

It quite literally translates to ‘dark film’ in French. There is often a debate as to whether film noir is a film type or genre.

However, what we do know for sure is that there was a period in American cinema in which there was a series of films which typically adopted a dark, chiaroscuro lighting appearance, a narrative which centres on crime, and a moral lesson.

Film Noir’s Origins…

Film noir dominated the screen in the 1940s-1950s. This was the ‘classical period’ of American film noir.

Despite film noir developing during the classical Hollywood period, there have since been several attempts at reviving the genre. 

In the 1980s there was the reintroduction of these stories through the ‘neo-noir’ genre. These films (often adaptations i.e. The Postman Always Rings Twice ) had similar traits.

They showed graphic depictions of sex and violence and had similar storylines BUT didn’t carry the same emphasis on ideology.

For Example…

• The 1981 remake of, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Directed by Bob Rafelson.
• This film was drastically different to the original. It was in colour and it overtly sexualised Cora and depicted sex as well as graphic violence (as opposed to the hint of such things).
• Despite being the same script, it did not carry the same moral significance.

Additionally, since ‘neo-noir’, it is possible to spot elements of film noir, and in particular, the figure of the femme fatale in current films. Gone Girl and The Favourite particularly stand out – We will discuss this in detail later on in the article.

Film Noir’s Stereotypical Traits and Tropes:

Film noir has an unmissable visual style.

• Black and white (typical of the time)
• Dark, low-key, chiaroscuro lighting
• Harsh shadows
• High-contrast mise en scene
• Ominous cinematography influenced by German Expressionism
• Voice-over narration
• Allusion over depictions (sex, violence etc.)
• Significant and telling iconography
• A femme fatale
• An anti-hero protagonist (typically male)
• Direct, simple dialogue
• Figure of authority (e.g. a police officer or lawyer)

Narrational Devices In Film Noir:

• First-person voice-over narration
• Narrative sequences/events clearly blocked out

Stereotypical Film Noir Characters:

• An anti-hero protagonist
• An investigator (voice of morality)
• A femme fatale figure who is the antagonist
• A husband (who does not fulfil the femme fatale’s needs- she wants to get rid of him and will manipulate the protagonist to assist her)
• An ‘ideal’, submissive female character- ‘ the domestic woman ‘

Film Noir’s Themes and Ideology:

Film noirs ALL have an underlying message. The messages are directly and obviously aimed at 1940s/1950s audiences. They serve as reminders of the male-dominated, patriarchal and misogynistic society which viewed women as domesticated wives or suspicious figures.

This gender clash is central to film noir films. The femme fatale symbolises this as she is a-typical. Other key themes/traits brought to the centre of the narrative of these films are:

• Violence and death
• Power and patriarchy

Notable Film Noir Films:

• Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (Wilder, 1946)
• The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)
• Double Indemnity ( Wilder, 1944)
• Gilda (Vidor, 1946)

8 Steps To How To Write A Classical Film Noir:

Below we have listed a few key steps which will help you with writing your film noir.

The stages aren’t exhaustive, but they are important and should be included at some stage of your writing.

For the purpose of the article we will largely refer to The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity

Step One – What’s The Story?

First and foremost, you need to decide on what your narrative is going to be. It might sound an obvious first stage, however it is essential! What is the point of your narrative? What do you want to achieve and is there a message you want to send?

A Few Ideas May Include…

• A wife wanting to escape her mundane life?
• Someone trapped in an unhappy marriage?
• A hitchhiker aspiring for a better life and love?
• Someone is on the run and they stumble into a femme fatale?

Whatever storyline you decide on, there are a few elements (as already mentioned) you must include to make it a classical film noir…

• A murder (typically of the husband)
• A femme fatale antagonist
• An ‘ideal’ woman
• A figure of authority (usually police officer or lawyer)
• Retribution – reinforcement of authority and patriarchy/ moral order typically via the death of the femme fatale

If you include the above elements, you have laid a solid groundwork for writing a film noir narrative by including the main tropes . You can avoid and lose some of these trope but having them as a guide may help lay initial ground.

Step Two – Who’s The Protagonist?

An obvious vital stage is to decide who your protagonist is. Typically they tend to (like most protagonists) desire something:

• A better life
• Work and security

The protagonist is manipulated and seduced by the femme fatale and is almost always an outsider and an outcast.

The femme fatale exploits them and draws them into a murder plot she has concocted in order to improve her life and achieve her want.

As with any character you write, you need to know them inside and out. And remember, they are not a hero .

Questions To Ask of the Protagonist:

• What’s their flaw? And how do you plan to reveal this to the audience?
• What’s their need vs want?
• They need to be seduced and easily manipulated- what is their weakness?
• What is their job?
• What is their background and where are they from?

Of course these are simplistic questions, but it is important to think about your protagonist in detail. Who are they?

• Why is the narrative centred around that specific individual?

The majority (if not all) of film noirs introduce the protagonist through their first-person voice-over narration.

• In The Postman Always Rings Twice Frank is introduced as a drifter looking for work.
• Whereas, in Double Indemnity , Walter is introduced as a man who is an insurance salesman.

Step Three – The Femme Fatale :

The temptress and seductress.

As mentioned, when you write a film noir, one of the main individuals, if not the most important figure, is the femme fatale.

According to Wikipedia…

“A  femme fatale … is a stock character of a mysterious, beautiful, and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, deadly traps”.

The femme fatale plays a vital role in impacting the protagonist ‘s arc and actions as well as impacting the narrative chain of events.

From her first introduction her danger must be hinted at. This is often where camerawork becomes extremely important and effective.

• In The Postman Always Rings Twice , Cora is introduced through the camera tracking a lipstick rolling along the floor to her feet.
• Here, the camera tracks upwards along her body to reveal her face. Her introduction centres on her body and her awareness of her sexuality.
• It is important to note that the camera tracks the protagonist’s perspective, reinforcing his desire and interest in her sexually.
• In Double Indemnity , it is similar. Our introduction to Phyllis is sexualised – the camera tracks the protagonist’s perspective revealing her standing at the top of the stairs wearing only a towel.

As discussed, the role and function of the femme fatale is often to seduce and manipulate the protagonist into helping her achieve her goal. This goal typically defies social convention i.e. work, escape marriage etc.

Whilst these characteristics feel outdated and of their time, their narrative function is the lesson to take away. How can these stereotypical characteristics be subverted but still serve a similar narrative function? This is a key question in writing a contemporary film noir.

The introduction to the femme fatale is essential in hinting at the protagonist ‘s weaknesses and flaws. Through her manipulation of the protagonist she will bring out their weaknesses. And this will ultimately have fatal consequences.

You should ask yourself:

• What is her want and desire? Money, love, work, freedom and independence?
• Is she a figure who goes against patriarchy? (Typically, she represents male fears of women dominating and working, disturbing the patriarchal order).
• What’s the end game- how will she get her retribution?
• What about her is so alluring?
• Why is she unhappy in her life?

Step Four – Make The Protagonist and Femme Fatale Compatible (She Needs To Fulfil the Protagonist’s Want):

First of all, you need to create a situation for the two characters to meet. As discussed above, the introduction to these characters is significant for the narrative development and character arcs.

• In The Postman Always Rings Twice , the protagonist is looking for a job and notices the sign for work at the diner and enters and thus, meets Cora, the boss’ wife.
• In Double Indemnity , Walter arrives at Phyllis’ house to inform her husband that he needs to renew his automobile insurance policy (a key element which will play a central role in the murder of Phyllis’ husband).

How are they coming to meet? Is he looking for work? Typically, there tends to be some involvement with the femme fatale’s husband or love interest. What this is, you can decide. However, it is important to create some form of relationship between the protagonist and the other love interest.

Compatibility and The Seduction:

It is important to create an initial first impression that the protagonist and femme fatale are compatible, making their desires and wants seem understandable.

• In The Postman Always Rings Twice , the initial meeting between Cora and Frank is frosty. She ignores him and applies makeup- appearing obsessed with her image and disinterested in Frank.
• Cora tells Frank she is unhappy in her marriage and desires to be rid of her husband. Frank wants to be with her and offers to assist her in getting rid of her husband so they can be together.
• Her aim is to gain control over the Twin Oaks, making it the diner she has always wanted.
• Cora seduces him by claiming she loves him when this is a facade to gain his alliance.
• In Double Indemnity , the two flirt, and Phyllis enquires about getting a life policy on her husband. Walter picks up on her hints at wanting him dead.
• He helps her murder her husband (strangles him) and covers it up by dressing as him then placing his body on train tracks.
• Her aim is to gain her husband’s money and live independently.

A key aspect to remember is that the femme fatale deceives the protagonist and promises if they remove the obstacle (her husband, for example), they will be together. Whereas, she really wants independence.

Step Five – Writing The Murder:

A central aspect to the film noir is the murder and crime aspect. Typically, the protagonist murders the Femme Fatale’s husband, the obstacle in the film.

The below are classic forms of murders from film noirs:

• Strangulation
• In The Postman Always Rings Twice , the initial attempt at murdering Nick fails. Having planned for Cora to hit him on the head with a bag of rocks, a power outage occurs and Cora hits Nick, but not fatally.
• It is only later, when Nick catches Cora attempting to kill herself, he says he will kill Nick himself. The three of them drive to Santa Barbara, and on the way they get Nick drunk. Frank hits him over the head and drives the car off a cliff, with himself and Cora escaping.
• As already discussed, in Double Indemnity , Walter strangles Phyllis’ husband in the back of the car when they are on the way to the station. From here, he adopts his identity and boards the train, later jumping off and placing the real body on the tracks.

As you can see, the murders tend to be similar in practice. You can attempt to make this more complex. However, to write a classical film noir, simplicity is often the key.

Step Six – The Aftermath:

The aftermath of the murder is a key point in the narrative.

Despite appearing to be in the all-clear , the protagonist and femme fatale are always caught by the authorities and morality comes first.

However, the immediate aftermath typically tends to leave the protagonist and femme fatale in the all-clear momentarily.

• In The Postman Always Rings Twice , Cora is held under suspicion and is charged with murder.
• However, Cora’s lawyer prevents her full confession from being released and she is released on probation with manslaughter charges.
• In Double Indemnity , the Chief, Mr Norton, is suspicious of Phyllis and believes she planned the murder and was having an affair.
• Lola, Phyllis’ step-daughter, blames her, so Walter starts seeing her in order to distract her
• A witness claims the person on the train was younger than the body found.
• Lola reveals Phyllis has been seeing her boyfriend, so Walter decides to kill her.

As you can see, it is important to create the idea of a return to normality, the idea that perhaps they will get away with it. However, this will always only last for a short period of time.

However, it is important to add in more layers of drama here:

• Is there another love interest?
• Was one of them hiding something/working for someone else?
• Will one of them die?

These are a few questions you should ask yourself as they make the narrative go from interesting, to compelling. After all, it is always more dramatic and engaging to add another layer to the story.

Step Seven – Retribution – Reinforcement Of Morality: .

The reinforcement of morality and order is conveyed through the villains (the protagonist and femme fatale) getting punished for committing murder.

For Instance This Can Be Seen In…

• In The Postman Always Rings Twice , Cora and Frank begin to run the diner the way Cora had always wanted. However, it stirs suspicions surrounding their involvement in Nick’s murder.
• They marry as a means of protecting themselves in court
• Cora leaves to visit her mother and whilst she is gone, Frank has an affair
• When Cora arrives she is blackmailed by the man who wrote her confession but Frank beats him up
• Frank’s affair comes out and she says she is pregnant
• They make up and go to the beach, but on the way back they have a car crash and Cora dies
• In Double Indemnity , as Walter states his intentions of killing her and framing Nino, he attempts to shoot Phyllis, she retaliates by shooting him in the shoulder, showing her true colours. She says she never loved him and was using him. He hugs her then shoots her dead.

The Take Away…

The Femme Fatale should die.

An important element from the 1940s film noirs is the femme fatale receiving her comeuppance for luring the seemingly ‘innocent’ protagonist to his doom.

Step Eight – How To End The Film Noir:

Typically, the noir follows a cyclical narrative, and ends with the protagonist ‘s first person voice-over narration (the same as the narration at the beginning of the film).

Additionally, the protagonist will pay the price for being manipulated and seduced by the femme fatale.

• In The Postman Always Rings T wice , Frank is convicted for killing Cora. The lawyer says that the evidence proves he was involve in killing Nick so would be sent to death row anyway.
• Through a voice over Frank says how both of them had to accept their fate and pay for their crimes.
• In Double Indemnity , Walter goes to his office and, whilst speaking into his dictaphone, confesses (a return to the film’s opening). He attempts to flee, but collapses as a result of being shot earlier by Phyllis.

The Take Away?

As mentioned above, the protagonist will suffer for their involvement with the femme fatale.

• What has the protagonist learnt? Have they grown and changed throughout the duration of the narrative?
• What message are you trying to convey within the film and its conclusion?

To Summarise…

• Mystery- there needs to be a clear sense of mystery within the narrative
• An outsider and outcast as the protagonist (not a hero)
• The femme fatale
• First-person narrative with flashbacks
• No happy ending
• A sense of the American Dream

But, What About Modern Film Noir and the Femme Fatale?

As earlier discussed, classic film noir is a product of 1940s/1950s society and values. Therefore, there is danger in writing a classic noir today of it turning into somewhat of a parody.

This is the same with 1980s neo-noir, which was very much a product of its time.

However, recent films feature aspects from classical film noirs, such as the figure of the femme fatale, which effectively, yet subtly, revive the genre.

There is no ‘set in stone’ path to follow to write a modern film noir. However, below we have listed a few films and their tropes which may inspire you write your own.

Gone Girl (2014)

David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name, is arguably a film noir and most significantly, includes a highly complex femme fatale figure.

The film is structured around dual protagonists, Amy and Nick. The first half of the narrative centres on Nick and is from his point of view, whereas the second half is from Amy’s.

Nick arrives at his house to find his wife, Amy, missing and the house appears to be ‘broken in’.

The missing persons case soon becomes a murder investigation in which he becomes the main suspect (it is revealed he was having an affair, wanted a divorce and didn’t want Amy’s baby).

In the second half of the film it is revealed that Amy plotted her murder, framing Nick because of his unfaithfulness.

She alters her identity and watches Nick’s life slowly fall apart from afar. When she’s ready to return to the spotlight, she cold-bloodily murders her ex-boyfriend and manipulates and threatens Nick into staying with her by saying she is pregnant.

The Key Noir Aspects…

• Murder and the careful plotting
• Betrayal (ironically it is the man who is betraying his wife as opposed to the woman in classical film noir)
• Replacing for a new, younger model (again it is the man not the woman)
• Flashbacks to younger, happier years – the trope of flashbacks is central to classical film noir
• Idealised female through the figure of ‘Amazing Amy’ – in classic noir the femme fatale was presented as the male ideal of a woman
• Nick doesn’t regard Amy as a person in the normal sense – he looks down to her and doesn’t treat her as a person. This is similar to the way men treated women in 1940s noir (i.e. Cora and Nick in The Postman Always Rings Twice ).
• Amy gives up her job for Nick (she moves house for him- her own independence and life is taken away from her).

The Favourite (2018)

Likewise, there are hints at film noir in 2018’s The Favourite through Emma Stone’s character, Abigail.

The film centres on Queen Anne and her two love interests, Sarah and Abigail.

From the offset, we learn Anne and Sarah have a sexual relationship, but also that Sarah advises (tells) Anne how to run the country. This is soon disturbed by the arrival of Abigail, Sarah’s cousin, who has fallen on hard times.

Abigail, witnessing their relationship, decides to manipulate and use Anne as a means of gaining her status and wealth back. She soon wins over the Queen’s affections by becoming her lover, replacing Abigail.

With Anne’s favour, Abigail’s status is restored when she marries Colonel Masham, making her a Baroness again. From here, she uses her status to socialise and have affairs, neglecting Anne. Her evil nature is conveyed when she hurts one of Anne’s rabbits.

The film ends with Anne forcing Abigail to care for her.

• A femme fatale figure who manipulates Anne (in place of a man in classical noir) for her own vested interests of regaining her status and wealth.
• A femme fatale who will go to any lengths to get what she wants (sleeps with Anne, threatens Sarah and marries) and shows her true evil nature at the end of the film (hurts a rabbit).
• There is no real love between Abigail and Anne .

To Die For (1995)

The Gus Van Sant film To Die For centres on Suzanne Stone, a wannabe broadcast journalist who obsesses over fame and celebrity.

At the beginning of the film she marries Larry, who is part of a family restaurant business. She gets a job, having attempted to seduce the boss, at a local cable station as a secretary. She soon manipulates her way into becoming a weather reporter.

However, once Larry tells her to give up her career, she begins to plot how to get rid of him. Having visited a local school to get students to help with her documentary, she seduces and manipulates three pupils to help her with her murder.

She begins sleeping with James, using her sexuality to manipulate him into killing Larry on the basis that they will become a couple. However, as soon as the murder is complete she cuts ties and denies any relationship with the three to the police.

The three teenagers are arrested. Lydia wears a wire and gets Suzanne to confess. However, she is later released on bail.

Released, Suzanne loves the fame and tells fake stories about Larry to gain attention (drug addict etc). The two teenage boys are sentenced to life in prison.

The film ends with Larry’s father using the mafia to murder Suzanne and leave her underneath a frozen lake.

• A leading femme fatale figure who uses her sexuality to manipulate those around her, particularly James, as a means of achieving what she wants.
• A femme fatale who plots the murder of her husband so she has freedom and independence (she craves attention and praise).
• A femme fatale who dies as a result of her actions (manipulation and murder) – there is a clear sense of restoration of morality.
• There is a cyclical narrative.
• The film makes use of voice-over narration, but of the secondary characters not the protagonist
• There are multiple flashbacks (the entire film is a flashback).

Under The Skin (2013)

Under the Skin centres on a woman (unnamed, but played by Scarlett Johansson) who goes around ‘collecting’ men. She lures them by seducing them with her female physique, and then disposes of them into a ‘void’.

She does this throughout the film. However, the film ends with her being attacked in a shelter by a logger. She runs into the woods, but he eventually rips her skin off her body, revealing her true alien form.

The Key Film Noir Aspects…

• The film centres on a femme fatale who uses her sexuality and body to seduce and exploit men.
• She is a deceitful and evil character who murders men she meets- fulfils her want.
• It makes use of dim-lighting and shadows to create an ominous look.
• She is sexualised and appears vampish.
• There is a strong sense of isolation throughout the film.

Ex Machina (2014)

Ex Machina centres on Nathan Bateman, a Programmer who wins a competition to stay at CEO Nathan Bateman’s luxurious, isolated home for one week.

Here, Nathan asks Caleb to judge Ava (a female humanoid robot built by Nathan) and decide whether or not she has a conscience and can think.

As the narrative develops, it becomes clear that Caleb is using her to fulfil his sexual needs. At the same time, Caleb interviews Ava, and the two soon develop a mutual attraction.

Ava expresses an interest to flee to the outside world, but Nathan plans on wiping her memory. After seducing and manipulating Caleb into turning against Nathan (who she later kills after cutting the power out), she escapes having ‘repaired’ herself and abandons Caleb.

• The sense of isolation and ‘no escape’.
• A leading femme fatale figure (Ava) who manipulates and seduces the protagonist by telling him about her desire to escape and be with him if Nathan was gone.
• Nathan has created Ava as the idealised, perfect female form and exploits her to fulfil his sexual needs and desires.

However, unlike classical film noirs, Ex Machina ‘s femme fatale is not punished for her behaviour. Instead, the film ends with her being given a chance at life in New York City.

We know she is evil, but she has gotten away with it. And we almost root for her as she’s taken advantage of the flawed men in her path.

This is a major difference between classical film noir and modern noir, highlighting how a modern film noirs can adapt to reflect more contemporary values.

The Beguiled (2017)

The Beguiled centres on Martha Farnsworth, the Headteacher of a girls school, and her five pupils and one teacher during the American Civil War. When they find a wandering solider on their land, the women decide to care for him.

As the film progresses, he becomes a large presence at the school, gaining the attention of the girls and the teacher, Edwina. They all attempt to out do one another for his affections.

Already having relations with Edwina, one night she walks in on him with a student and in a rage, pushes him down the stairs and breaks his leg. When he wakes the next day, he has had the leg amputated by the women.

In a rage, he gets a hold of a gun and threatens the women. Later that evening, the women poison his food and he soon dies.

The last shot of the film is of the women dragging his body to the road.

• A wanderer/drifter figure.
• The idea of ‘evil women’ through all of the female characters.
• An isolated location (typical of classical noirs).
• Strong undertones of sexuality and the watchful male eye.

However…

The narrative is female-driven and the film does not condone the behaviour of the women- there is no restoration of morality. Therefore, despite it being a period film, it adopts more contemporary values.

So, Now It Is Your Turn To Write…

The above films are examples of modern films which have hints of noir through their employment of classical film noir tropes i.e. a femme fatale, use of location, plot, cinematography and lighting etc.

They are contemporary. They may not be classified as film noir’s but they most definitely fit in with the type and reflect an attempt at reviving the genre and Femme Fatale figure into modern film culture.

How To Write A Modern Femme Fatale:

As the examples show, the character of the femme fatale now goes beyond the film noir genre. She appears in:

• Thrillers (most similar to classical noir)
• Dark comedies
• Action and Science Fiction

What To Consider…

• Why is she there?
• What purpose does she serve?
• What role will she play on the narrative events?
• She doesn’t have to be your stereotypical femme fatale- make her different and subvert stereotype.
• How will she be modern? What will her values be? And will they speak to contemporary audiences?

A Few Final Pointers To Reiterate To Think About Before You Write A Film Noir:

• Why this story?
• Who is your protagonist and what do you want their arc to be?
• What will your femme fatale be like? Will she adhere to the classical film noir character archetype or will she be different?
• What is the message you want to convey with the film? Is there a point you’re trying to make with the film?

It’s a genre with a long and continuing legacy. And writing one requires an all important mix of following well established rules and bleeding in contemporary subjects, contexts and values.

When you write a film noir, use the traditions as guidelines to subvert and freshen up the genre and continue to push it forward.

• What did you think of this article?  Share It ,  Like It , give it a rating, and let us know your thoughts in the comments box further down…
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This article was written by Milly Perrin and edited by IS Staff

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8 thoughts on “How to Write a Film Noir: Utilising the 8 Essential Pillars of Film Noir”

“reinforcing the patriarchy via the death of the femme fatale who is the antagonist” What Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the femme fatale is more often a tragic character. Usually the rich client and the world of power they represent is the true antagonist (though they’re usually let go because their “punishment” of losing someone important due to their own greed has already happened to serve as the basis and eventual reveal of the plot – and also to reinforce that the world’s corruptness, the reason for the hero’s cynicism, can not be truly defeated.) The femme fatale and their self-destructiveness is presented as a victim of the same “Under The Skin” isn’t even a noir, what the heck? It is however, an excellent satire/sci-fi/(feminist film?) that I often recommend to people. Same goes for Ex Machina. But you can’t shove it into the noir genre just because it has a woman killer or a woman who’s exploited. Those themes are more universal than the unreliable vamp and what they represent. Admittedly I’ve not seen every movie on your list, I’m basing it on Raymond Chandler novels (who we should consider being the “creator” of the noir genre) and other authors after him. So this could be a fair criticism of post WWII cinema, but I think it’s wrong to equate that with the noir genre as a whole.

This was an awesome article, it helped me so much with my university film project. Thankyou!

Most welcome Tahj!

Great article. Is there any way a film noir can end with hope or positively?

Thanks Tee! Tradition would dictate…not…but tradition is always there to be re-invented.

I’d consider Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ to be a modern noir, and despite the violence and depravity therein, it has a nice, hopeful ending.

The quality of the articles in Industrial Scripts is really good and I enjoy reading them. They’re witty, direct to the point and elucidative. This one helps me a lot. I realized there’s a small, though not harmless error here: The Postman Always Rings Twice was directed by Tay Garnett, not by Billy Wilder.

Congratulations and keep up the high quality work.

Enjoy the article and the insights given. Currently doing the final editing on a science fiction novella with noir aspects.

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Collections of Essays

• Cameron, Ian, ed. The Movie Book of Film Noir. London: Studio Vista, 1992. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 M68 1992 This collection of essays by eminent British movie critics and historians examines the films, directors and themes of classic film noir from 1945 to 1955. It is illustrated with over 100 stills that capture crucial moments in the films.
• Copjec, Joan, ed. Shades of Noir: A Reader. New York: Verso, 1993. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 S5 1993 This collection of academic essays examines films from the classic film noir era, as well as more recent pictures such as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" that arguably contain elements of film noir.
• Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, 1998. DAVIS and UL PN1995.9.W6 W66 1998 This collection of academic essays looks at film noir from a feminist perspective. It includes 80 black and white photographs.
• Palmer, R. Barton, ed. Perspectives on Film Noir. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1996. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 P47 1996 This is a collection of critical essays on classic noir films up through more recent neo-noir.
• Server, Lee, et al., eds. The Big Book of Noir. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1998. DAVIS and UL PN 1995.9.F54 B54 1998 This collection of essays and interviews covers classic film noir, as well as related genres such as hard-boiled fiction, comic books, and cartoons.
• Silver, Alain and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 F57 1996 This book is an anthology of 22 seminal and contemporary essays on film noir, drawing together definitive studies on the philosophy and techniques that have gone into the creation of films from the 1940s through more recent neo-noir films. It also includes many black and white photographs.
• Silver, Alain and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader 2. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 F58 1999 This follow-up to the Film Noir Reader includes more critical essays on film noir, including several articles by American authors from the 1940s that are among the first writings on film noir in English.

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5 (page 75) p. 75 C5 Styles of film noir

• Published: February 2019
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Contrary to what has sometimes been said, there never was a single narrative or visual style of film noir, even in the 1940s. The major directors played the movie game in slightly different ways and each of the studios also had something of their own style because of the photographers, designers, and musical composers they employed. ‘Styles of film noir’ explains that classic film noirs were as stylistically heterogeneous as any other kind of picture, but they were governed by a generally agreed upon ‘mysterious’ look. Film noir has persisted, but it doesn’t look the same in different periods. The shift from black and white to color is discussed along with parody, pastiche, and postmodern noir.

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From Sprocket to Pixel

Film Noir: A Study in Narrative Openings, Part 1

Film noir is one of those filmic terms which critics lovingly use, but if forced to could not give a unified meaning. Like other borrowed terms (mise en scène, genre, realism), when applied to film the definition becomes hazy. Film noir has been referred to as a genre, a cycle, a movement, a mood, and a style. In a more recent study James Naremore refers to film noir as belonging to a history of “ideas” tied to “commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies,” an idea we have “projected into the past” (as a retro genre term, like horror, which is usually referred to critically prior to its use by the industry as a term, i.e. pre-1930). Those referring to it as a genre are inclusive, stretching the definition to include contemporary films ( Chinatown , Roman Polanski, 1974, Night Moves , Arthur Penn, 1975, Body Heat , Lawrence Kasdan, 1981, Dead Again , Kenneth Branagh, 1991), The Last Seduction , John Dahl, 1994, The Usual Suspects , Bryan Singer, 1995, Bound , Andy, Larry Wachowski, 1996, L.A. Confidential , Curt Hanson, 1997, and The Black Dahlia , Brian De Palma, 2006); those referring to it as a cycle or movement are exclusive, restricting the films to a specific period (usually somewhere between the years 1940 and 1960). Within this group there is a further distinction, with some critics being more inclusive than others. When defined as a mood the films are selected cross generically ( The Lost Weekend , Billy Wilder, 1945/The Problem Picture, Leave Her to Heaven , John Stahl, 1945/Melodrama, Val Lewton’s nine RKO films from 1942 to 1946/Horror, Pursued , Raoul Walsh, 1947/Western, Beat the Devil , John Huston, 1954/Comedy, Bladerunner , Ridley Scott, 1982/Science Fiction, Sin City , Tarantino/Rodriguez 2005/Science-Fiction/Animation. If one were to make a list of every film referred to as film noir by one critic or another the total would certainly exceed 300.

My predilection is to define film noir as a specific period, a movement, between the years 1940 and 1958, which gives weighted balance to social/cultural issues and industry factors (post-World War 2 malaise/uncertainty, changes in the family structure, Cold War paranioa, exodus of German/Austrian talent to the US during the rise of Nazism, etc.). There is little reason to go over this area since it has been treaded over to death. It is important, however, in my structural account of film noir openings, to discuss it in an historical context. I have decided to narrow my area of study to the years 1940 to 1950 –which could be considered as the classic period (or moment) of film noir. My reason here is that this period is more representative of the classic film noir because it remains closer to its original sources and impetus and had not yet attained the status of retro/neo-noir. (See Paul Schrader’s seminal article on the film noir for a list of the motivational factors and phases.)

Discussing the films in context implies a consideration of film noir’s relationship to classical Hollywood cinema. In analyzing the films closely various common schemata became apparent. Contextualizing them only seemed natural.

My decision to study film noir openings was not approached a priori but discovered itself when a concerted viewing of over forty film noir revealed a pattern of forceful and emphatic openings. Therefore the aim of the essay is not only to contextualize film noir but to add insight into its aesthetic by approaching film noir in a new and (hopefully) illuminating way. I will elaborate on my definition of “opening” a little later.

To define film noir as classical or anti-classical is a risky endeavor. A case in point is David Bordwell’s writings on the subject. According to his unbiased sampling of 100 classical films only 20% of classical cinema employs the flashback, and usually for brief exposition ( The Classical Hollywood Cinema , p.42). How does film noir fit in to this model? Realizing Bordwell’s shifting paradigm which allows for large variances of “bound alternatives,” both linear and non-linear narrative structures are to be considered as part of the classical style. [1]

This is understandable, since both linear and non linear narrative structure have appeared in classical cinema, but it is also apparent that the flashback structure is used more often, and elaborately, in the film noir. Hence it is a schemata more common to the film noir than, say, the comedy. Does this make film noir less classical?

Bordwell discusses film noir under the section “Bounds of Difference” and lists four ways in which film noir is seen to challenge classical cinema ( The Hollywood Classical Cinema , p.76). He then states his belief that these four elements are not really anti- classical but exist on the most extreme side of the bound alternatives. He concludes: “These films blend causal unity with a new realistic and generic motivation, and the result no more subverts the classical film than crime fiction undercuts the orthodox novel” (p.77). In his book Narration in the Fiction Film he is even clearer on this:

In sum, film noir is not outside the pale, as many of its admirers prefer to think. It is a clearly codified option within classicism, a unified set of syuzhet tactics and stylistic features no more disruptive of classical principles than the conventions of genres like the musical or the melodrama (p.198).

I agree with Bordwell in this respect. Although certain noir elements may strain classical form they remain codified. Therefore the motivation for the deviant schemata still falls under one of the four pertaining to classical cinema: compositional, realistic, intertextual, or artistic ( The Hollywood Classical Cinema , p.19). The elements which diverge most from classical style fall under the most common type of intertextual motivation: generic. Hence a typical downbeat noir ending is no more anti-classical than the song and dance which interupts the narrative in a musical or the direct camera address in the 1930s ‘Anarchistic comedy’ (according to Henry Jenkins, a form of comedy derived from the ‘Vaudeville Aesthetic’).

So why is it that film noir is seen by many as a challenge to classical style? The answer lies in an earlier comment: that most noir schemata exist on the most extreme side of the ‘bound alternative.’ Take for example film noir’s consistent and complex use of the flashback, its (at times) baffling narrative structure, its intricate and symbol laden lighting patterns, compositions, and camera movements, its ambiguous morality, and its assault on clearly defined story/character motivation. These elements remain within the bounds of classicism because they are motivated realistically and generically, but they appear anti-classical because they counter the dominant style and hence force the spectator to work harder by searching for less used or more complex schemata. Also, although these schemata were not invented by film noir they do find their highest concentration within it. To quote Bordwell:

Of course, the classical style defines certain spectatorial activities as salient, and the historical dominance of that style has so accustomed us to the activities that audiences may find other schemata more burdensome ( Classical , p.8).

Bordwell’s inclusive system may lead one to ask the question, if indeed classicism encompasses such broad stylistic variance then is it really saying anything as a classification? Defining classical cinema is not an easy task. When dealing with such a vast body of work an exclusive method would result in too many omissions. The inclusive method, while saying less about individual films, remains the only system capable of managing such a vast undertaking. I have accepted Bordwell’s system, faults and all, because of its implications. Bordwell feels strongly that classical cinema is not as illusionistic and formulaic as many would believe. Watching classical cinema involves the spectator in an active process where deductions and inferences are made based on incoming information. This is a participation necessary to the completion of the artwork. Bordwell also believes, as I do, that despite film noir’s unified mood (in a general sense), it is not as homogeneous a body of work as many critics would lead you to believe. An example is the fine essay by J.A. Place and L.S. Peterson, “Some Visual Motifs of the Film Noir which tends to homogenize the visual style of film noir (concentrating on lighting and composition), while acknowledging that they are ‘diverse films’ that can not be grouped together through “pat political or sociological explanations” (p. 325).

Bordwell’s definition of classicism ranges far enough to include the baroque/mannerist strain of any art form. Other genre critics, notably Jack Shadoian in Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film and Tom Schatz in Hollywood Genres have discussed the evolutional quality inherent in film cycles and genres. Each genre/cycle has various stages it undergoes, from the formative stage where conventions are realized, to the classical stage where they are honed and perfected, to a baroque stage where formal and stylistic experimentation occurs, to a final reflexive and parodic stage. In a sense, Bordwell’s inclusive definition of classical cinema (all Hollywood films made between the years 1917 to 1960) can be understood through Noel Carroll’s reworking of George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art. Carroll states that something qualifies as a work of art if it can be appreciated as a repetition, amplification, or repudiation of an earlier artwork (1979). With respect to Bordwell any film which repeats, amplifies, or repudiates classicism, while remaining within the said parameters, belongs within the classical style. In effect, this becomes the bound alternative.

In discussing classical narration Bordwell says: “Typically, the opening and closing of the film are the most self conscious, omniscient, and communicative passages” ( Narration in Fiction Film , p.160). Keeping in mind film noir’s tenuous relationship with classicism I aim to discuss the noir opening and how it is an amplification of the typical classical opening. All openings in classical narration are important, but in film noir they seem to take on an added importance, thereby remaining within the classical paradigm but amplifying it. The importance may rest on several levels: dramatic (quickly pulling us into the diegesis), narrational (retarding/withholding information or setting the story in motion), stylistic (setting the tone for the balance of the film), and thematic (revealing the themes and currents underlying the film). Marc Vernet describes the opening of film noirs as being marked by a disarming ‘quietude’ which seems paradoxical when compared to the violence and brutality which follows. “Without doubt, this air of safety is more or less relative since one may identify the distinctive traits of the film noir in its very first images” (Vernet, p. 3). Of course not all film noirs come shooting out of the starting gate. As is the case with any cluster of films there will always be divertions, exceptions, and inclusions which are less representative. To quote Jack Shadoian:

The gangster/crime genre is an involved system of family relationships. Specific films tend to violate, extend, adapt, and sometimes dismiss the conventions that in part color and motor them even as they are evoked and put into play. (p. x)

Returning to the earlier discussion of Bordwell’s broad definition of classicism, if you replace the words “gangster/crime genre” with “classical Hollywood cinema” this quote serves the Bordwell/Carroll parallelism of repetition, amplification, and repudiation very well.

Before beginning the analysis a definition of what I mean by “opening” is in order. In trying to come up with a working definition I attempted to keep it as simple and sensible as possible by allowing the openings to describe themselves. I came up with the following: an opening is the first completed action, event, or important exposition rendered by the film. For example, the train ambush in White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), the murders in The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak, 1948), and The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946), the hired killing in This Gun For Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942), and the pardoning of Roy Earle in High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941). Although the variances are great in terms of length (from 45 seconds to 17 minutes) and manner of assembly (one shot/several shots, one scene/several scenes) they are almost always clearly demarcated by fades, dissolves, or wipes and usually have a microcosmic Aristotlean structure (beginning, middle, and end and, yes Godard, in that order).

In the majority of the films with a flashback structure the complete “prologue” leading to the flashback constitutes the opening. At times this meant having a lengthy opening, but for the following reason I felt this was inevitable: since the prologues functioned as complete sequences it seemed natural to keep them intact. Subsequently (with the exception of Knock on Any Door , Nicholas Ray, 1949) I could not find a comfortable “out” point. What would become of the remaining portion of the prologue? The most difficult film to establish an opening for was Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945). The brief 35 second murder scene which opens the film may appear to be a cohesive scene, an opening, but the manner in which it fuses to the next scene, in tone and temporal order, suggests otherwise; and, once the subsequent scene begins it must be followed to its conclusion: the beginning of the flashback.

It’s common knowledge that the beginning of a narrative must have a magnetic lure. In discussing the insulation and “public privacy” accorded to us by the darkened theatre house V.F. Perkins suggests that film is self consciously aware of the psychological distance between the film world and the real world “…by allowing the spectator time at the beginning and end of the movie to shed and reassume his self consciousness” (Perkins, p.134). Indeed many films draw us into their world with slow, inviting camera movements, usually beginning from afar and then moving forward (sometimes in conjunction with dissolves), often literally bringing us into the diegesis through the frame of a window or door: The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935), Journey Into Fear (Norman Foster, 1943), The Big Clock (John Farrow, 1948), Conflict (Curtis Bernhardt, 1945), Nocturne (Edwin L. Marin, 1946), Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947), Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). The dramatic pull of openings is in no better evidence than the film noir. Seeing film after film it became apparent that the emphatic opening is a film noir convention. (And my study did not include The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), and Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)! Based on my findings the openings can be divided into four general types:

Group A consists of films with a flashback structure. It is subdivided into two types: the framed flashback (Group A1), where we begin in the present, go to an extended flashback and then return to the conclusion in the present (the classic A B A structure), and the interspersed flashback (Group A2), where the narrative oscillates between the present and the past. The majority of the framed flashbacks are of the A B A variety. The transitions from present to past and back are clearly demarcated by a dissolve, wipe, or fade, and from a story standpoint we never actually leave the initial location (a police station in D.O.A. , Rudolph Maté, 1949, The Dark Past , Rudolph Maté, 1948, and Murder, My Sweet , Edward Dmytryk, 1944, an armored truck in Criss Cross , Robert Siodmak, 1949, and a swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard , Billy Wilder, 1950) because the flashback has taken place inside a character’s mind. Although cued subjectively, by the lead protagonist, once the flashback begins the narration takes on an objective or omniscient point of view. As Bordwell says:

Character memory is simply a convenient immediate motivation for a shift in chronology; once the shift is accomplished, there are no constant cues to remind us that we are supposedly in someone’s mind. ( Classical , p.43)

The variances within the second type, the interspersed, depend on the number of times the narration returns to the present. The slight variances from the A B A model will be mentioned in context.

The films from Group B1 maintain a linear narrative in accordance with classical Hollywood style. All the openings are revelatory in some way. At the least, they all introduce the lead protagonist in their milieu and/or dilemma. Many of them go further by revealing important emotional and psychological character traits and a few go a step further by interweaving them with the theme(s) of the film. In classical Hollywood style (if you want a message call Western Union) this is motivated by the need to start and move the story forward (narrationally).

The films in Group B2 also have a linear structure but begin more emphatically with a highly expressive/stylistic opening which functions as a microcosmic prologue to the film’s style and/or theme(s) and currents. In these openings thematic and stylistic revelation dominate over character/story revelation.

Since space prohibits a close reading of all the openings I have selected one or two representative films from each group which I will discuss in depth in Part 1 of the essay ( The Dark Past , Sorry, Wrong Number , This Gun For Hire , White Heat , The Set-Up , The Letter ), and will then continue with a greater sampling of films treated in less detail, in the second part of this essay ( Journey Into Fear , Murder, My Sweet , The Strange Love of Martha Ivers , Body and Soul , Criss Cross , Champion , D.O.A. , Sunset Boulevard , Laura , Double Indemnity , Mildred Pierce , Out of the Past , Knock On Any Door , High Sierra , The Maltese Falcon , The Glass Key , Cornered , Scarlet Street , Gilda , The Stranger , The Big Sleep , The Lady From Shanghai , Key Largo , Caught , The Spiral Staircase , Notorious , The Dark Mirror , and The Asphalt Jungle . The thrust of my analysis will be to describe the action and formal elements of the opening and interpret them in terms of stylistic and thematic intent. Broken down, there are general questions I asked of all the openings: what can we infer from them and what is the driving motivation behind them? For the latter question I was guided by Bordwell’s system: 1) compositional: common sense elements which are required for a particular narrative to function, for example, “a story involving a theft requires a cause for the theft and an object to be stolen” (p. 19) 2) realistic: the plausability factor 3) intertextual: factors relating to the conventions operating within that type of art, with generic being the most common, and 4) artistic: when aspects of the art form call attention to itself through technical virtuosity, showmanship, or strategies that expose the ‘invisibility’ of classical style through reflexivity, parody, etc. (Classical, p.21-23). In support of and in addition to these motivational factors I employed a triad of broad semantic and syntactical parameters: narrational (when an element relates directly to the plot and its ordering), sensational (an element which is less concerned with plot than spectacle and exploitation), and reverberational (elements which are laid out for the expressed purpose of setting up (or foreshadowing) a mood, atmosphere, tone, or motif). [2] I am also indebted to the theoretical insights of E.H. Gombrich, Noel Carroll, and V.F. Perkins. Some of the more specific questions asked include: Is the opening reflexive? Does it have a symbolic or structural link to the conclusion? What is the relationship between directorial and generic style? From group A1 have selected Rudolph Mate’s The Dark Past (framed flashback) and Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (interspersed flashbacks).

Case Studies. Group A1: Framed Flashback

The Dark Past (Rudolph Maté, 1948) Length of Opening : 6’30”

Description : The film begins with a series of dissolves from an overhead shot of the city, to tall buildings, to a crowd of people. The images are cued by L.J. Cobb’s (Dr. Andrew Collins) voice-over narration. The camera follows people boarding a bus. The V.O. comments on the routine daily activities we all must endure. Inside the bus the camera tracks left to right along the faces of the passengers while the V.O. interprets their thoughts. As the bus stops and passengers disembark the V.O. informs us “this is where I work.” Cut to an optical point of view [3] tracking shot toward a building. Several police officers greet Dr. Collins/camera as they walk by. Two dissolves bring us into the police station. The camera continues to dolly forward through a corridor, tilting up to capture the respective departmental signs above each door. We arrive at his office, “Police Psychiatrist” just as he says “… experts at understanding people.” The camera tilts down from the sign, the door opens and the camera enters the room. Moments later the doctor enters the frame to pick up a sheet of paper from his desk, ending, for the moment, the subjective narration. As the doctor and police officer speak Dr. Collins looks out the window at a new group of prisoners being escorted into the precinct (seen as his POV ). His V.O. begins and bridges a cut to the viewing room. As each prisoner is identified he externalizes their thoughts in V.O. The fourth prisoner, an 18 year old, catches his interest. After he analyzes the young prisoner we shift back to objective narration and he attempts to convince the arresting officer that the young prisoner be sent to the psychiatric ward. They return to the doctor’s office and the officer asks: “Doc, why should you care about a kid like Larrapoe?” To prove his point the doctor begins to relate the story of Al Walker (William Holden), an infamous criminal. The camera dollies in slightly to the seated doctor and his voice bridges the dissolve to the flashback: “Wasn’t too long ago, not more than a couple of years ….”

Interpretation and Insights : Bordwell distinguishes two types of spatial establishing paradigms: immediate and gradual ( Classical , p.63). The former begins within the locale, usually on a small detail, then pulls back to reveal the entire space. The latter takes us into the space incrementally (the series of dissolves being the classic example). The Dark Past establishes its location gradually.

This opening is important stylistically and thematically. Stylistically the subjective POV shot which brings us into the police station and into his office primes us for the film’s most important and impressive scene, Al Walker’s surrealist/subjective recollection of the childhood incident which triggered his Oedipal Complex. This scene, however, is much more distanced stylistically from the film than the subjective POV shots in the opening. The subjective strategy in the opening is similar to the opening of Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1932).

The oscillating point of view in the opening primes us for the rest of the film. The point of view in the opening shifts from subjective to objective. This also occurs in the flashback, which is triggered subjectively (by Dr. Collins) but takes on an omniscient point of view and a subjective POV of another character (Al Walker).

We can infer many of the film’s themes from the opening. Its documentary tone (partly on location photography, V.O. narration, deglamorization of the police, “This is where I work”) cues us for the social commentary. One of the film’s most blatant statements is the need to recognize the individual within the mass.

At two points in the opening the V.O. narration interprets the thoughts and feelings of various people. From this we can infer the subsequent importance that psychoanalysis will play in solving the story’s obstacle (Al Walker’s Oedipal block) and the significance placed on psychiatry as a means of correcting and preventing deviant social behavior. Dr. Collins places the burden of such control squarely on the back of society. From this vantage the motivation for the opening is narrational, slightly artistic (didactic) and also reverberational, since many of the film’s themes are established in the opening.

Comparing the opening of The Dark Past with that of Maté’s other film noir, D.O.A. , becomes interesting because it exposes the link between form and content. Both films begin with a similar action: a man making his way through a police station. In The Dark Past the camera POV is subjective. In D.O.A. it is not; instead the camera follows the man from behind his back. The reason for this strategy is to keep the man’s identity unknown, thereby emphasizing the theme of fate and coincidental tragedy. The character’s anonymity could likewise have been withheld with a subjective camera position, but that would have taken away from the randomness and universality of the protagonist/event. Therefore the camera style which opens D.O.A. indicates the film’s central theme: fate and chance happening. In The Dark Past we need a character to lead us. Dr. Collins becomes our authority figure (as he says, “It takes an expert to catch another expert”), informing us and convincing us of the importance of society’s role in the prevention and reformation of crime and criminals.

Group A2: Interspersed Flashbacks

Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948) Length of Opening : 9’15” (After a 25 sec. intertitle prologue)

Description : The film begins with a dissolve from the prologue to a shot of the city at night. A subsequent dissolve brings us into a dark, deserted office. The camera dollies toward a door; the words “Henry J. Stevenson Vice President” become visible. Another dissolve brings us inside the room. The camera continues to dolly forward toward the desk; on it rests a telephone, with its receiver off. There is a dissolve to another location. Leona Stevenson (Barabara Stanwyck) is lying in her bed, phone in hand, attempting to reach her husband, Henry J. Stevenson (Burt Lancaster). The camera pans to her night table as she reaches for a cigarette and lighter (a marriage photo and small clock are visible). Her behavior toward the operator is forceful, demanding, and impatient. Before hanging up she accidently connects into another line. The camera dollies to a close up as she realizes that the two men are planning a murder. Before the victim’s address is given the connection is lost. Leona hangs up. Cut to a medium shot. She graps the phone again and calls the operator, insisting that the operator trace the call. She reaches for a tissue paper on her other night table; the camera pans with her but remains on the table long enough to reveal a crowd of medicine bottles. Cut back to Leona. The camera now becomes assertive. (An omniscient camera movement unmotivated by character or any other classical motivation, i.e. reframe, follow a character, a moving vehicle, etc.) It dollies to her open window, across the length of her room (dissolve) down her staircase, and to a bell high up on the downstairs wall which she uses to summon her servants. Throughout this assertive camera movement we hear her offscreen voice complaining that she has been left alone for the night and that nobody cares for her. We cut back to Leona. She receives a phone call from her father in Chicago. A painting of her father bridges a dissolve to him. The camera pans around the den while they talk. He tells her daughter that the house is like a morgue without her, meanwhile there is a party going on in the next room. After their talk we dissolve to a clock in Leona’s room and to another location.

Interpretation and Insights : This powerful opening is extremely evocative of the film’s themes and primes us, with its visual style, for the harrowing conclusion. The use of the mobile camera is its most striking feature. However, it is not used for showmanship but to enhance the character’s mental and physical claustrophobia, her isolation, to complement the dialogue, and to expose subtle visual clues. For example, one of the several clues overheard by Leona about the murder plan is that it is to take place at 11:15 PM because the 11:15 train that passes on the nearby bridge will camouflage any screams. After the disturbing phone call the camera leaves her bedside and tracks to the open window. It is dark, but visible in the distance is a lit bridge. The camera continues to dolly across her room and then down the staircase leading to the bell on the wall. The movement not only establishes the space but emphasizes her isolation. It is simply mirroring her emotional state as she complains to the operator about her loneliness.

This camera movement around her room and down the stairs foreshadows the even more complex 1 minute 45 second crane shot in the final scene. The shot opens on a clock. It pans to a close up of Leona on her bed. She is talking frantically on the phone. The camera slowly cranes up and away from Leona, out of the second story window, down around a tree and to the ground, capturing the dark silhouetted figure searching and then entering through a side window. Litvak employs the Bazinian schemata of the moving camera to maintain the “integrity” of spatial unity. However, in this case its function is not to suggest the “ambiguity” of reality but rather to stress its very reality –a killer stalking its helpless victim. Rather than crosscutting, the uninterrupted camera movement from Leona in her deathbed to the killer visualizes the exact distance between them, augmenting the suspense by showing us both the spatial and temporal contiguity of killer/victim, life/death.

Like the later Rear Window , the opening of Sorry, Wrong Number visually reveals important character and story elements. Within the first few moments we infer that she is married (the photo), bedridden and ill (the medicine bottles), alone and isolated (the slow tracking shots), and wholly dependent on the telephone.

The moving camera captures her physical isolation in her immediate spatial environment; the telephone captures her emotional as well as physical isolation from the outside world. The operator, her link to the world, the police officer, society’s symbol of protection, and her father, her own personal protector, all prove utterly useless in realizing her pleas for help. (Her father says that the conversation she overheard was probably a radio program, a reflexive allusion to Lucille Fletcher’s original radio play.) It is no coincidence that she is murdered while on the telephone with her husband.

According to Nöel Carroll, one of the reasons why movies hold such a powerful attraction for audiences is because of its “erotetic” (question/answer model) narrative (1985). Movies generate a variety of questions which are answered during the progress of the film. This question/answer model engages the audience in an inductive process whereby they must absorb incoming information and infer what may happen. Carroll distinguishes between two of many types: the micro question and the macro question. A micro question is one which is answered in the same scene or in one of the immediately succeeding scenes. A macro question remains unanswered for the majority of the film, often until the final scene. The most obvious example being Citizen Kane ’s “Rosebud.”

The opening of Sorry, Wrong Number poses one of each. The micro question –where did Henry J Stevenson go after work?– is answered in the subsequent scene (the first flashback). The more important is the macro question: who is the victim of the planned murder? Although the conclusive answer only comes toward the end, we are certainly encouraged to infer a guess. The opening provides two noteworthy clues: the visual emphasis on Leona’s isolation and helplessness, and the pointed delineation of her overbearing, domineering nature, her illness, and her wealth: plenty enough motivation for murder in the film noir world!

Group B1: Linear

This Gun For Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942) Length of the opening : 6’00”

Description : The film begins with a fade in to a dingy hotel room, an immediate establishing of the space. A man, Raven (Alan Ladd), is lying on his bed. The camera is at a slight low angle. In the foreground hangs a coat and just below an alarm clock on a night table. The alarm clock rings. Raven awakens, shuts the alarm and sits up on his bed. Diegetic piano music is heard. He looks at his watch, removes a letter from his coat pocket and checks an address (insert shot). Cut back to a low angle medium shot of Raven. After securing that his gun is loaded he places it and the letter inside his briefcase and begins to leave. The sound of the window shutting draws his attention to a kitten. He pours the kitten some milk then leaves to wash his hands. In the meantime a young maid enters. The kitten spills a can, prodding the maid to frighten the kitten. Raven returns; angered, he slaps the maid and forces her out of the room. He pats the kitten then gets up to leave. Two dissolves later he is entering an apartment building. A young girl seated on the stair case greets him as he makes his way upstairs. He meets with a man, a blackmailer who is under the impression that Raven is there to give him money in exchange for an incriminating letter. A woman is also present. She leaves the room. After listening to the man ramble Raven removes the gun from his briefcase and shoots the man once. The woman enters the room. Raven remarks, “They said he’d be alone.” She runs back into the bedroom but Raven shoots her once through the door. He checks to make sure she is dead, confirms the letter, places it in his briefcase and leaves. In the hallway the innocent girl says, “Mister, I dropped my ball.” Two shot counter shots lengthen the moment. Raven makes a movement to go into his briefcase for his gun, stops, and decides to retrieve the ball. The scene fades out.

Interpretation and Insights : Here is an example of film noir excelling within the classical paradigm. This opening has all the earmarks of the classical Hollywood sequence: clearly demarcated scenes (in the hotel room, in the apartment, and in the hallway), transitions (fade in and fade out) and one completed action, culminating in a beginning, middle, and end. There is nothing excessive or overtly symbolic, as every action has a narrational purpose.

However, the opening remains richly evocative of noir character, environment, and visual and aural schemata. The noir visual look is established as early as the first shot of the film. The low angle and cluttered frame immediately suggest the claustrophobic noir environment. Several of the subsequent shots are again framed from a low angle, emphasizing the enclosing ceiling and walls. The room, replete with harsh shadows (they seem painted), murky walls and chipped plaster, characterizes the ‘seedy’ noir world. The deathly still aura lingering within the room foreshadows the impending murder. Not even the repetitive piano music can cut through the aura of silence.

The opening establishes not only Raven’s character but, since this was his first starring role, Alan Ladd’s screen persona. Raven, the hired killer, is awaken by an alarm clock: just another day at the office. His demeanor is quiet and gestures graceful and calculated. A loner, Raven has a stronger affinity for cats than humans. (As he says later, “they’re on their own, they don’t need anybody.”) He is the consumate professional, always turning in a “neat” performance. While the blackmailer rambles on Raven remains silent. Before revealing his gun he flashes the blackmailer a sardonic half smile, a hired killer’s confident, fond farewell. Raven’s professionalism and “neatness” is evident in his style: one bullet per victim. He is thorough, making sure that the woman is stone cold dead and that the letter is authentic before leaving. On the way out he is interrupted by the young girl. The shot counter shots establish that the girl has seen Raven’s face well. The completist, Raven contemplates killing her but decides against it. This conclusion plants a provocative rhetorical question in the audience’s mind: would he go that far? As Willard Cates (Laird Cregar) later finds out, Raven is a man you do not want to double cross. By the end of the opening Raven’s (and Ladd’s) screen persona is indelibly carved: the laconic “cold angel” with boyish good looks masking a tough, uncomprimising interior.

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949) Length of Opening : 4’10”

Description : The film begins with a series of dissolves from macro to micro: an aerial pan of the city, to a “California Highway State Line” sign, to a long shot of a train. From the train there is a L-R swish pan capturing a car in transit. Cut to the interior of the car. Four men are seated in the car. James Cagney (Cody Jarrett) is in the front passenger side. The camera dollies in slightly to frame on Cody. He nudges the driver, motioning him to speed up. Three cuts ensue, from the car to the train and back to the car. The camera pans to follow the car screeching around a bend. Cut to a head on shot of the train as it chugs past the camera left. The scene momentarily changes to the interior of the train to observe the other half of Cody’s gang at work. The scene returns to the exterior. The men quickly exit the car and execute their respective duties. In the ensuing shots the train comes to a halt, the mail compartment is dynamited open and the heist a success except for a few casualties. Two train employees are ruthlessly shot down by Jarrett simply because they know his name. After the second man is shot he falls onto a lever, which accidentally releases hot steam into the face of one of Cody’s men. Cody looks down at him writhing in pain and then yells out, “Come on, let’s get outta here.” He runs off screen right and the other men pick up the injured man. There is a dissolve to a radio newsman reporting the hold up.

Interpretation and Insights : The motivation for this opening is narrational (animates the narrative) and compositional (logical causal factors). In the first few shots director Raoul Walsh relies heavily on audience’s mental set. Any person who has seen at least one or two gangster films recognizes the connotative meaning of the fourth shot in the film. The car, the dress code of the four men and the presence of James Cagney cue us into the crime milieu. This shot, in combination with the previous shot of the train, are all we need to infer that a hold up is in progress.

This fourth shot is the most important single shot in the opening. Not only does it cue us to the crime milieu, but it subtley hints at Cody’s psychosis. Cody is framed in medium shot. He looks at his watch. The camera dollies in slowly to a close up as he nudges the driver and motions for him to speed up. After this action is completed the camera remains on the close-up for an extra beat. Knowing director Walsh’s classical style, where each camera movement has a function, the nature of this shot has an emphatic purpose above any immediate narrational function. For example, the lingering close up may inform us that this character is the leader of this gang, but, being James Cagney in 1949, the audience undoubtedly know this already. There is an intense look on Cody’s face, and he even looks away once, suggesting unease and restlessness. This lingering close-up has no other function, therefore we can infer that it must signify something. I will submit that this is a subtle nuance but, is it too subtle for Hollywood? In the Carrollian sense this opening challenges us, at this early point, to infer Cody’s psychosis (or in the least his viciousness) from the close up and Cody’s behavior during the hold up.

If interpreted in a certain way, the opening can be seen as a reflexive commentary. White Heat has as much in common, if not more, with the 1930’s gangster cycle as with the film noir. Cody Jarrett, like Roy Earle in High Sierra , is a throwback to the prohibition era: a man behind the times; it is 1949 and the gangster collective has given away to the individualistic noir anti-hero. The train hold up is reminiscent of the era of the western, when train hold ups were common. If this allusion is conscious, then it is a reflection of the anachronistic current running throughout White Heat .

I will now move on to the two examples from Group B2 (linear/powerfully emphatic), The Set Up and The Letter .

Group B2: Linear/Powerfully Emphatic

The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949) Length of the Opening : 5’45”

Description : (There is a title sequence of a boxing fight. All that is visible are the boxer’s legs. One of the fighters collapses to the canvas. Fade out.) Fade in. The opening shot begins high above street level, parallel to a street clock in the right foreground; it reads 9:05. On the extreme right we see a hotel’s neon sign. On the street level in the background is another huge sign: “Paradise City” (the wrestling/boxing arena). The camera cranes forward past the clock and toward street level. Another neon sign becomes visible: “Dreamland.” On the soundtrack we hear jazz music and a loud teenager selling the evening paper complete with fight card. There is a cut to a man selling only fight cards. (From his drawl we can correctly infer that he is an ex-boxer.) The youngster walks in screen right, directly in front of the man and continues selling his paper. The camera dollies in to a two shot. The man pleads: “Hey, I gotta make a buck too.” The brash youngster replies: “Ah, go take a walk.” Cut to the dejected man. Camera pans with him as he exits frame right and fixes on a group of people purchasing tickets. The central figures are a blind man and his male companion. Camera pans with them left as they enter the arena. Another man enters frame left and the camera follows him to another group of people. A quick reframe settles on a shot of two women. The following conversation takes place:

First Woman (without hat): I don’t know why I let George talk me into coming. Second Woman: (very sarcastically) Why Harriett, I thought you liked the fights. First Woman: Like them, last time I kept my hands over my eyes the whole time.

The camera reframes right (the corner of the building) to another shot of two men standing at the fight poster discussing who to place bets on. Stoker Thompson’s (Robert Ryan) age is the butt of a joke. They exit frame left and the camera turns slightly and dollies in to the poster. The Stoker Thompson vs. Tiger Nelson fight line commands center frame. An arm enters frame left and strikes a match over Thompson’s name. Camera reframes left to follow the match to the cigarette. Another two shot, of a short, balding man and a taller, sweaty and unkept man. (The taller man is Tiny, Stoker’s manager and the other Red, his corner man.) They enter the “Ringside Cafe.” Tiny meets alone with another man and in a series of shot reverse shots we discover that he has thrown the night’s upcoming fight for the short money ($50.00). Tiny and Red leave the cafe. Tiny cheats Red on his cut by telling him that their share was only $30.00. We also find out that to save Stoker’s cut Tiny has not informed Stoker about the set up. Red remains unsettled at the idea of Stoker being kept in the dark. The camera follows them to a point then dollies in quickly to Stoker Thompson’s name on the fight poster. (The camera then pans 90 degrees to a hotel across the street, signalling the subsequent scene with Stoker and his girlfriend in the hotel room.)

Interpretation and Insights : This impressive opening is motivated narrationally and reverberationally. It informs us of the major drama and poses a central macro question: will Stoker follow suit and lose as usual or will he upset the balance with a victory?

One of the interesting features of this opening is that it introduces several minor but key characters. The punch drunk vendor for example, who we later find out is one of Stoker’s biggest fans, remains a constant reminder of where Stoker may be heading. More importantly perhaps are the host of characters who will reappear during the fight scene as key spectators. Throughout the fight scene there are reaction cuts to the spectators. Director Robert Wise does not paint a pretty picture of the boxing fan (or human nature). Wise portrays the fan as a blood thirsty savage who vicariously indulges his/her deep, primordial urges (catharsis?). For example, the blind man, who has the fight recounted to him blow by blow by his friend, remarks in a viscious tone: “Why don’t he work on that eye.’ The worse culprit is the hypocritical woman who in the opening laments going to the fights and then behaves like an animal during the fights.

Whereas most of the noir openings introduce the lead character in the flesh, in The Set Up Stoker’s presence is felt equally strong through other means: his name on the fight poster, the people who discuss him, and the punch drunk vendor.

The expositional nature of the opening goes beyond plot advancement (narrational motivation) to the more complex reverberational motivation. Most of the film’s themes are echoed within the opening: corruption, lost dreams, father time, and the cruel and hypocritical side of human nature. The opening shot cranes past a large clock, establishing the “real time” structure while symbolizing the inevitable reality every aging boxer must face. Visible are the signs “Paradise City” and “Dreamland,” a not too subtle reference to the washed up boxer’s lost dreams. The punch drunk vendor trying to eke out a living selling fight cards is overshadowed by the aggressive youngster, exposing the capitalist version of Social Darwinism. Stoker’s manager Tiny has a highly dubious moral and ethical system. Not only does he cheat Red, in all likelihood his only friend, but his fighter. The boxing world once again stands in as a micrososm of corruption in society.

The first few shots establish the space of the film: hotel, fight arena, and cafe. Outside of a few scenes with Stoker’s girlfriend Julie, the film is confined to this area. Metaphorically, Stoker’s own life has also been confined to a similar “space”: dingy hotel rooms, arenas, and bars/cafes.

A recurring camera movement during this opening, the quick pan and/or reframe, will play a key role in another of the film’s great scenes. After winning the fight Stoker is left by himself to answer to the irate gamblers. He tries to elude them but is eventually cornered in a dark alley. He struggles but is pinned to the ground by several men. The leader, Little Boy, gives the signal to commence the savage beating and the camera quickly pans to a shadowed reflection of a jazz band on a nearby wall, the frenzied music standing in for the beating. (This exact same tactic is used in The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957) and, with variation, by Sam Fuller in Underworld USA , 1961.)

An unusual feature of the film is its strict accordance to “real time.” The film is 72 minutes. The credits last just under one minute. The clock in the opening shot reads 9:05. The final shot cranes back past the same clock, now reading 10:16, perfectly accounting for the remaining 71 minutes of screen/story time.

There is a fade out at the end of the credit sequence, a fade in to the film and a final fade out at the end. (Since the credit sequence is bridged by fades it is temporally distanced from the film and hence its action –a boxer being knocked out– serves as a metaphor for Stoker’s less than successful boxing career.) Outside of these three fades all other transitions in the film are straight cuts. At that period in the evolution of the language of film style the fade/dissolve/wipe were common transitional schemata depicting varying time lapses. The unadorned cut was used to join shots which succeeded each other in continuous temporal order. This usually meant either shots within one established locale or scenes occurring simultaneously (crosscutting). Being a former editor Robert Wise was as conscious of this as anyone. Therefore, to emphasize the temporal structure of the film (screen time=story time) Wise begins and ends on a clock and uses the ‘straight’ cut exclusively. I can not be sure, but would be willing to bet that The Set-Up is the only Hollywood film of the 1940’s not to employ a fade, dissolve, or wipe (excluding the beginning and end).

What intrigues me the most about this realistically motivated aesthetic choice is the rhetorical question of whether or not the audience at that time consciously made the connection between the exclusive use of the cut and the temporal structure of the film. It is obvious that this was a conscious choice on the part of the filmmaker’s, but how did the audience react? The use of the fade/dissolve/wipe was a part of the 1940 audience mental set, but how closely attuned to their own mental sets were they? They could perceive their presence but how about their absence? Were they conscious of the lack of a fade, dissolve, and wipe and accord that to the strategy of real time, or was it something they felt intuitively? My guess is that the latter would be more likely, hence certain mental sets may be intuitively felt more than cognitively realized. In fact I would say that, on a cognitive level, the opening and closing shots of the clock trigger the temporal strategy of the film more than the exclusive use of the cut. (That is, to an average viewer.)

On one of my viewings of The Set-Up I kept track of the cuts and counted 630. Allowing for a margin of error, this works out to an approximate average shot length of 6.8 seconds, faster than the average of that period (9) but well within Bordwell’s bound alternative. My brief research reveals the limitations of such studies. The 6.8 ASL might persuade someone who hasn’t seen the film to infer that The Set-Up does not employ much mise en scène (long takes, depth of field, mobile camera, intricate blocking) but rather that it derives more of its stylistic meaning from the editing. The cutting in The Set-Up is excellent, and used for more than just moving the story along, but the ASL does not reveal that a great percentage of the cuts, (approx. 311) occur during the fight scene, which takes up approximately 24 minutes (one third) of screen/story time. Away from the fight scene –and fight scenes are always cut quickly– the ASL is much higher. Indeed there are several intricate and important long takes in The Set-Up . Therefore the ASL is not always an accurate indication of shooting style for someone who has not seen the film in question. A better assessment of the film’s statistical measures would be a scene by scene average, which would then reveal precisely where and when the average shot length varies.

The Letter (William Wyler, 1940) Length of the Opening : 15’45”

Description : Although the opening lasts 15’45” I will only describe the most important section, the first 5’45”. The film begins with a night shot of the moon. The shot dissolve to a sign –“Rubber Co. Singapore, Plantation No. 1”– and then to a tree trunk. The camera tilts down the trunk to a bucket collecting sap. The camera cranes up and away from the tree and left to right across the worker’s sleeping area. Workers are seen lying on hammocks, sleeping, resting, playing chess, etc. The camera cranes up to a second level and continues over the straw roof; (Dissolve) the camera is still tracking L-R. A cottage is visible in the background. A gunshot is heard. A man stumbles out of the door onto the front porch; a woman is seen following behind him. A second gunshot is heard and (cut) to dogs awakening to the sound. Three shots of the workers ensue. The third gunshot is followed by a closer shot of the incident. The man, in the foreground, falls down below the frame while the woman (Bette Davis as Leslie Crosby), dressed in black, follows him down the stairs, emptying out the revolver. She slowly brings her gun hand down and drops the gun. The camera dollies in to a close-up. Her face is still, emotionless. Cut to the disturbed workers. The fourth shot is a close-up of a man looking out from behind bamboo bars. He glances upward and there is a cut to his POV : the moon moving behind a dark cloud. Cut back to the close-up. The frame is now considerably darker and growing increasingly darker. Cut to a medium shot of Leslie, also in high angle and in partial darkness. Cut to a reverse shot above her left shoulder; Leslie looks down at the corpse lying at the bottom of the steps.

During the course of the shot the light pattern and intensity alters according to the position of the moon and the clouds. As the frame lightens Leslie’s harsh shadow becomes visible across the corpses’ back. She turns quickly and glances up to the sky. Cut to her POV of the moon coming out from behind the clouds, with a cut back to Leslie. She returns her attention to the corpse. Cut to a frontal shot. The back lighting casts her in a semi-silhouette. Cut back to the reverse shot; Leslie exits frame left (up the stairs). Cut to a servant running toward the cottage and stopping at the sight of the corpse. Leslie invites the servant into the cottage. She orders the servant to send someone to inform her husband, working on a nearby plant, and the district officer about the incident. The servant remains in the living room. Leslie walks to her bedroom, opens the Venetian doors and calmly shuts them behind her. The camera remains fixed on the Venetian doors long enough to capture the nuance as Leslie turns the lights on. This brings us up to the 3’45” mark of the opening. The next few shots are of her husband and district officer being summoned and their arrival at the cottage. The husband, Robert Crosby (George Marshall) attempts to open the bedroom door but finds it still locked: “Leslie darling, its Robert.” Seconds later the door slowly opens and Leslie cautiously exits the room. My reason for ending at this point will soon become apparent.

Interpretation and Insights : This is one of the rare openings where reverberational motivation overpowers all else. The murder, which triggers the story and sets the drama in gear, is secondary to the overlaying symbolism. The symbolism centers on the timeless theme of the doppelgänger, a common motif in expressionism and film noir. It pervades the entire film and is animated in a variety of interesting ways (to varying degrees of originality and subtlety).

The moon, the image on which the film opens and closes, is used as a symbol of both oncoming death and the imminent duality of human nature. Its position in relation to the clouds establishes the light/dark, good/evil patterning which dominates the film in nearly every facet: actual shifts in lighting intensity, lighting patterns, chiaroscuro, clothing, characters, and narrative structure. In one way or another these elements are established in the opening.

The opening and closing scenes of the film mirror each other. One begins and the other ends with a shot of the moon; also, the death of Mr. Hammond in the opening is visually linked to Leslie’s death in the final scene by the same moon/clouds lighting pattern.

The shift in light intensity within a continuous shot occurs several times in the opening (close-up of the worker behind the bamboo bars, the reverse shot of Leslie, the Venetian doors) and is repeated throughout the film. Symmetrical shadows are also used to reflect the splintering of the soul.

The light/dark patterning is also reflected in the clothing. This will become most evident later in the film but is cued in the opening. During the murder Leslie is wearing a long, dark dress. The victim, Mr. Hammond, is wearing a dark top and white trousers. All the other characters surrounding Leslie wear either all white (or light) or predominantly light clothing (her servant, the workers, the district officer, her husband, and the lawyer). Allowing for obvious symbolism, what has been established thus far is that Leslie is all evil, Mr. Hammond “grey” and the others all good. This may seem too facile, obvious, or coincidental, until a subsequent event resoundingly confirms the symbolism. Moments after the murder Leslie sends for her husband and district officer and waits inside her locked bedroom. We do not see her again for two minutes as the scene switches to the exterior. In story time this intervening period is not long, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes. Her husband arrives and she exits the bedroom. Leslie is now wearing a white blouse and a black skirt, the reversal of Mr. Hammond’s clothing pattern. I did not detect this subtle change until the fourth or fifth viewing. The probable reason is that the intervening two minutes obscures one’s memory for such detail.

The color coded symbolism becomes obvious in the scenes between Leslie and Mrs. Hammond (Gale Sondergaard): Leslie dressed in white and Mrs. Hammond in black. Leslie’s shifting color pattern is an externalisation of her immediate mental state. It is no coincidence that the final two shots of the film are of a veil hanging over a chair and of the moon.

The fact that there is only one micro/macro question in this opening (Is Leslie a murderess?) is emblematic of its motivational factor. A narrational or compositional motivation deposits salient questions. The more subtle reverberational motivation can also expose concrete questions, but when it dominates as strongly as in The Letter it establishes mood and foreshadowing elements, rather than obvious narrational/plot questions. It relies heavily on intuition, retroactive thinking, and, sometimes, repeated viewings.

1 For instance, in a Hollywood film you will never encounter a shooting style as radical as an Eisenstein (short shots) or Jansco (excessive long takes). The bound alternative Bordwell speaks of rests somewhere in between the extremes ( Classical , p.62).

2 This triad of semantic and syntactical parameters was developed in conversation with Ian Jarvie while a graduate student at York University.

3 A subjective camera shot is described by Edward Branigan as “a shot in which the camera assumes the position of a subject in order to show us what the subject sees” (p.103). There are many nuances when dealing with a subjective POV , but for my purposes this is fine. Branigan calls this an optical POV . Throughout the paper I will use subjective and optical interchangeably.

For complete bibliographic references see end of Part 2.

Donato Totaro has been the editor of the online film journal Offscreen since its inception in 1997. Totaro received his PhD in Film & Television from the University of Warwick (UK), is a part-time professor in Film Studies at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and a longstanding member of AQCC (Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma).

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Singapore Sling : Postmodern Noir, Narrative, and Destructive Desire

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Peter Wilshire

Dark Tales from Hollywoodland

Catherine Benoit

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Noir Fiction: Money, Sex, and Revenge

In the city, two young members of rival street gangs meet in a basement for a game of Russian roulette, a “Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special” set on the table between them. In rural Maine, a disgruntled neighbor murders his enemy and turns him into a scarecrow, leaving him “drying—slowly, slowly in the wind.” And in the suburbs, small animals are turning up dead, finished off “by clean edged rectangular stab wounds.” These bulletins from a world gone mad are just some of the dark pleasures to be found in “ The Best American Noir of the Century ,” a new anthology edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, which features short stories from an eclectic list of writers that includes Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, and Elmore Leonard.

In his introduction to the book, Ellroy writes that noir “indicts the other subgenres of the hard-boiled school as sissified, and canonizes the inherent human urge toward self-destruction.” Noir as an idea and a mood may be familiar to us from its prominent, and easily parodied, place in cinema—the rich black-and-white cinematography, the tough talking dicks and sultry dames, the lines of cigarette smoke that run to the ceiling. But what characterizes the style in fiction? And is there a difference between noir writing and detective or mystery fiction? Last month, I asked Penzler —a writer, editor, and owner of the legendary Mysterious Bookshop in New York—to shed some light on noir.

“Most mystery fiction focusses on the detective, and noir fiction focusses on the villain,” Penzler explained when we met in midtown Manhattan. “The people in noir fiction are dark and doomed—they are losers, they are pessimistic, they are hopeless. If you have a private eye, the private eye is a hero; and he’s going to solve the crime and the bad guy will be caught. That’s a happy ending, but that’s not a noir ending.”

No heroes and no happy endings. Penzler writes in a foreword to the anthology about “the lost characters in noir who are caught in the inescapable prisons of their own construction.” Think of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or the loveless lovers in James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” or of all that fatalistic doom in Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men.” It’s always the bad guys and gals that stand out. They may, like several of Poe’s more deviant characters, feel the urge to confess, either to prove their demented genius to the world, or to have their outcast urges punished and perhaps corrected. Or, they may just be too dumb, sex-crazed, or down on their luck to pull of their crimes. But there’s a thrill in reading these stories—in the artful plots, the often baroque style, and the thick air of desperation.

[#image: /photos/590953a2019dfc3494e9e453]

Andrew Pepper, in an essay published in “ The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction ,” identifies the central themes of noir: “the corrosive effects of money, the meaninglessness and absurdity of existence, anxieties about masculinity and the bureaucratization of public life, a fascination with the grotesque and a flirtation with, and rejection of, Freudian psychoanalysis.” Camus cited noir as an influence, but this American crime version of existentialism is less rigorous, more vague, like the mumbling of some low-rent hood. Take Evan Hunter’s “The Last Spin,” wherein one of those Russian roulette players twirls the barrel of the gun, and before pulling the trigger, sums it all up: “What the hell’s the difference?”

Noir characters stand alone, outside of civility and outside of society. “Nobody in noir fiction has a mother, nobody has children, nobody has someone that they love and care about. They live by themselves, for themselves.” Cut off from the longstanding values of the human family, these characters turn to immediate desires.

“Noir is about sex and money, and sometimes about revenge,” Penzler told me. These three elements often fuse into a frenzied craving that leads to half-cooked plots doomed to failure. And what about all the sex, and the prominence of the soulless woman, the femme fatale ? Ellroy puts it best in the introduction: “This society grants women a unique power to seduce and destroy. A six-week chronology from first kiss to gas chamber is common in noir.” Many have observed, with good reason, that women are misused by the mostly male writers of the genre. The men may be bad, but the woman are often very bad, and often no more than projections of male desire.

“Yes they are sexual objects, and yes they are dominant,” Penzler said. “Noir fiction was written by men for men. There are exceptions to everything; Patricia Highsmith was written for nobody—for everybody and nobody at the same time; and Dorothy B. Hughes is a wonderful noir writer. But if you look at a kind of literature where the bad girl is the heart of the story, well, those women are not very likable in general.”

Noir fiction came out of the First World War and the Depression but still thrives today, in slightly altered form. Early on it was often produced for the low-paying pulp presses, which valued speed and volume from its writers, leading to uneven output even from the most talented artists. “In recent years, the writing has just gotten so much stronger,” Penzler told me. Indeed, much of the anthology is dedicated to noir writing from the past thirty years, stories from authors such as Dennis Lehane and Chris Adrian , who was recently included in The New Yorker ’ s 20 Under 40 list of best young American writers.

What accounts for the lasting popularity of such dark tales?

“Have you ever lifted up a rock and seen slugs and millipedes and other ugly creatures come out?” Penzler asked me. “We like to watch them.”

For more noir, check out Catherine Corman’s photographs of Los Angeles , with captions by Raymond Chandler, over at Photo Booth.

Books & Fiction

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American Film Noir: The History of an Idea

1995, Film Quarterly

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This paper contends that, given the thoroughgoing criticism of Lacan and despite the current turn towards philosophy in film studies, psychoanalytic theory must not be abandoned. To this end, I propose a new reading of the critical category of film noir in terms of Lacan’s point de capiton and his theorisation of the retroactive construction of meaning. This is not a regression to the investigations of film, language and psychoanalysis articulated in the 1970s (Metz, Screen) but a return to the site of this encounter to plot a new trajectory for psychoanalytic enquiry into the cinema. While the intersection of psychoanalysis and noir is of course well established, the major interventions (Kaplan, Krutnik) have been oriented towards questions of gender. This leaves unexplored the possibility of noir’s relation to Lacan’s theory of signification presented Seminar III, ‘Instance of the Letter’ and ‘Subversion of the Subject’. It is a truism of film criticism that noir is a retroactive category. However, this function is insufficiently understood in noir historiography (Naremore), which gives little consideration to the theoretical implications of this characterisation. This paper investigates both the wealth of writing on noir as well as various film noir tropes to understand this conception of noir as retroactively constituted. The critical history of noir and the films themselves indicate a structure, predicated on the retroactive production of meaning, which is irresistibly suggestive of Lacanian theory. Reading noir with Lacan, I suggest that this retroactive “noir temporality” is the temporality of the Symbolic order. As such, this paper explores the function of the signifier “noir” as a point de capiton in film criticism, enabling the analysis of a certain type of 1940s Hollywood film; and how a noir film such as Double Indemnity (1944) is concerned with the retroactive production of knowledge through narrative structure.

olga papamichali

Norbert Spehner

david demers

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The origins of american noir.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you’ve discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents. While only intermittently in print for much of the last half century, its influence on crime fiction is unsung yet inescapable. From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every “serial killer” tale of the last seventy years bears its imprint—both in terms of its sleek, relentless style and its claustrophobic “mind of the criminal” perspective. But its larger influence derives from Hughes’s uncanny grasp of the connection between violence and misogyny and an embattled masculinity. And its importance extends beyond form or genre and into cultural mythos: the birth of American noir. 

Over the course of her career, Hughes wrote fourteen novels, most of them published between 1940 and 1952. She also reviewed crime fiction and wrote an award-winning critical biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason. Several of her novels were made into Hollywood movies, including, most famously, In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. What truly sets her apart from most of her crime-fiction peers, however, is, as noted in Christine Smallwood’s New Yorker Page-Turner blog post on Hughes’s final, superb novel, The Expendable Man (1963), her abiding interest in the psychology of difference, in taking on the perspectives of those unlike herself: from street punks to political prisoners, from an African American doctor to a war refugee among the Tesuque Indians. And, in In a Lonely Place , a returning veteran.

In a Lonely Place is the story of Dix Steele, a World War II fighter pilot who ends up in Los Angeles, the terminus of America. Much like Highsmith’s Tom Ripley (still eight years from creation), Dix is jobless, living beyond his means on precariously gained family funds and a talent for exploiting wealthy and weak friends. When we meet him, he’s desperate to recapture that wartime glory, “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom.” Without his fighter-pilot uniform, without the purpose and glory the war brought, Dix is unmoored, unstable, dangerous. And while we remain in his head for much of the book, it’s what he does mostly in the gaps between the chapters, the startling ellipses, that forms the dark marrow of the novel. To his mind, the enemy is not the war, its trauma, but what men face upon their return: staid domesticity, the strictures of class, emasculation. And these threats are embodied wholly in women. Women, whose penetrating gazes are far mightier than his sword.

It is nearly impossible to read In a Lonely Place , with its Los Angeles setting, its themes of dislocation and paranoia, its charged male-female relations, and not consider its place within the American hard-boiled tradition of writers like Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett. By 1947, when the novel appeared, these tales of (mostly) cynical detectives, crooked cops, and tabloid murder had exerted a cultural pull for some decade and a half. While other crime fiction may have sold better (Chandler, for instance, was never a big seller), hard-boiled tales dominated pulp magazines and the burgeoning paperback market and proved irresistible to Hollywood. From its private eyes to its beat cops, from its wily gangsters to its craven millionaires, the hard-boiled world was predominantly male. When a woman did appear, it was typically in the form of the femme fatale whose powerful sexuality threatens to entice the male protagonist to his doom. Occasionally we find another type, the good girl, the Girl Friday (consider Anne Riordan in Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely , or Lola in Cain’s Double Indemnity ), who represents a different kind of entrapment to the male: the surrender of freedom and the acceptance of the role as husband, father, breadwinner, company man.

At the hard-boiled story’s end, the good girl must be rejected (or recuse herself) and the femme fatale must be sent to prison ( The Maltese Falcon , The Big Sleep ) or die ( Farewell, My Lovely ). Her defeat heralds the hero’s regaining of control or mastery of himself. In the more fatalistic tales, such as Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice and, later, countless Jim Thompson and David Goodis novels of the more nihilistic 1940s and ’50s, the protagonist goes down with her.

Yet, in Hughes’s dexterous hands, In a Lonely Place reverses and upturns all these conventions. Her Dix Steele (whom Hughes, winkingly, has pose as a mystery novelist) views women with even more wariness than Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and more cynicism than Hammett’s Sam Spade. Soon enough, Dix faces both genre staples: a putative femme fatale in the glamorous, morally questionable, sexually independent Laurel, and a good girl—Brub’s wife, Sylvia. But Dix is no slightly tarnished knight nor is he a simple sap; he’s an amoral hustler, a liar, and much, much worse. As the story unfolds, we gradually understand that the danger is not without but within . And it is Laurel and Sylvia who prove to be the real detectives here, the hard-boiled “dicks” uncovering Dix’s secrets, while Dix himself is the threat, the contaminant. The femme fatale turns out to be an homme , leading us to wonder if, perhaps, he always was.

In so doing, Hughes doesn’t merely overturn a genre. She also presciently dissects a cultural movement that is just getting under way: as she was writing In a Lonely Place , critics were beginning to talk about what they called film noir, a dark, fatalistic cycle of movies that emerged as the war ended, many of which were adaptations of hard-boiled novels of the prior decade. The psychological richness of the movies made them stand out to French critics, who would come to view them as a response to the traumas of the war. But it would not be until decades later that film critics and scholars would pinpoint what Hughes understood implicitly: how such trauma connects to gender and a dangerously beset masculinity—and how it can explode into sexual violence.

In recent decades, the prevailing theory is that noir emerged from a cultural crisis following World War II. Returning soldiers came home to a changed world where the girls next door they left behind became the women who took their jobs and (potentially) their agency. The result was a dark current of books and films about men facing a world over which they have no control. The system—organized crime, police, government, fate, all of the above—is out to get them, but it usually takes the form of a woman. And whether it’s Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis ( Double Indemnity ) or Jane Greer’s Kathie ( Out of the Past ) or Ava Gardner’s Kitty ( The Killers ), women are revealed to be duplicitous, treacherous, annihilating.

This is certainly Dix’s view. “They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores,” he reflects. “Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore.” Hughes’s trick, however, is to situate the narrative impulses that drive noir in the mind of a man whom she is painting, inch by inch, as a violent and mentally ill criminal. With each passing chapter, we come to doubt or utterly reject Dix’s characterizations of both others and himself. For instance, the moment Dix sees the life his wartime buddy Brub, now a cop, has made for himself—home, hearth, and domesticity embodied in his new wife, Sylvia—he feels a rage he cannot understand or control. Brub, to Dix, has been “made different by being chained to a woman.” Pussy-whipped. The warm, homosocial world of the war is gone forever and in its place is only isolation and paranoia. In the expressionistic world of film noir, such paranoia is justified and universal. For Hughes, however, it is specific, personal, unglamorous, ugly, even ridiculous. By the novel’s final stretch, an increasingly out-of-control Dix determines that the cleaning lady and her “hideous siren” of a vacuum cleaner are out to get him.

Likewise, we increasingly doubt Dix’s insistence on Laurel’s treachery. “He’d known what she was the first time he’d looked at her,” he asserts. “Known he couldn’t trust her … Known he couldn’t hurt her and she couldn’t hurt him. Because neither of them gave a damn about anyone or anything except their own skins.” It is telling that the woman he repeatedly frames as a femme fatale is also the person with whom he most identifies. “I knew you before I ever saw you,” he tells her soon after they meet. It seems only right, as it is Dix who is the true shape-shifter, the masquerader, the fatal combination of sex and death. He is the one who seeks entry to Laurel’s life, her home, the one who stalks women, who weeps over them, who falls in love too easily, too fast as he does with Laurel. He is his own femme fatale, the author of his own doom.

But Sylvia and Laurel refuse to let him be their homme fatal . As Dix’s paranoia heightens, he imagines both Laurel and Sylvia encircling him, and their power to see and see through him as nearly godlike. The paranoia is, in this case, apt. They are watching him and do see through him. In the ultimate role reversal, Hughes’s women are the heroes and it is they who must contain Dix’s poisonous masculinity. They are the detectives “snooping” and “meddling” in order to stop the very real, very small, frequently teary Dix from turning his personal fears of inadequacy and impotence into bloody acts of gendered violence.

And the triumph is theirs. Hughes insists on it. In its original review of In a Lonely Place , Kirkus Reviews called it “hard, holding.” Hughes, like her two female heroes, remains cold-eyed and incisive, rational and effectual. It is the men who collapse, who wilt, who fall to pieces. In the novel’s final impassioned moments, it is the policeman Brub who “crie[s] out in agony” and the “hero” Dix who bursts wildly into tears. And it is Sylvia, the good girl, who calls out, her voice not hysterical but “bell clear.” “It worked,” she says, triumphant. “It worked!”

Megan Abbott is the author of eight novels, including  The Fever ,  You Will Know Me , and the Edgar Award–winning  Queenpin . She is also the author of  The Street Was Mine , a study of hard-boiled fiction and film noir and the editor of  A Hell of a Woman , a female crime-fiction anthology. This essay is excerpted from the New York Review Books’ forthcoming reissue of In a Lonely Place .

On August 16, at the Mysterious Bookstore , Abbott and Sarah Weinman will read from In a Lonely Place  and discuss Hughes’s groundbreaking career as a crime writer.

Narrating the City in Film Noir

• Reference work entry
• First Online: 30 October 2022
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• Simão Valente 2  

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The first film critics to study film noir emphasized the interplay between its formal characteristics and the cynical worldview of plot and character development, underlining the influence of German Expressionism, particularly concerning lighting and camerawork, and the bleak outlook on life resulting from a post-war context. Pursuing the literary lineage of this genre, the American hardboiled style of crime fiction, pioneered by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain during the 1920s and 1930s has also been seen as its direct precursor. Urban settings are the norm in film noir , framing the exploration of themes of moral decay and corruption.

In Narrative Discourse (1983), Gérard Genette introduces the concept of external focalization to describe a narrative voice that emphasizes the actions of characters, rather than their thoughts, giving Hammett as one of the foremost practitioners of this literary technique in the twentieth century. The term would go on to be incorporated in the field of film studies, and it is taking this into consideration that this entry surveys how opening scenes of major examples of film noir, The Maltese Falcon , Double Indemnity , and The Naked City , portray the urban environment into more than a backdrop, shaping the construction of main characters and, occasionally, turning cities themselves into characters. As film noir became international, the depiction of American settings and American characters influenced stories set in other cities, as can be seen in Odd Man Out (1947), Stray Dog (1948), The Third Man (1949) , and Elevator to the Gallows (1958).

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The Suburban Plots of David Bezmozgis’ Films

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Valente, S. (2022). Narrating the City in Film Noir . In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62419-8_127

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What The Best Film Noir Movies Can Teach Every Filmmaker

Even in the age of color, lessons from the best film noir movies can ignite inspiration and captivate audiences..

'Double Indemnity'

I'm sure we've all met people (you might be among them!) who espouse a distinct aversion to black and white films, for whatever reason.

But according to this video essay from Jack Nugent of Now You See It , not only are they some of the most important movies, they can "do just as much if not more than color." Check it out below to learn how the techniques of black and white filmmaking can be just as important to cinematography in the age of color film.

Learning From The Best Film Noir Movies

The essay lays its case primarily by looking at monochromatic filmmaking through the lens of film noir , as film noir is one genre where black and white cinematography is put to its full use (a handy guide to the stylistic elements of film noir can be found here ).

"Black and white can do just as much, if not more than color."

But that begs the question...

What is film noir?

The classic film noir period is considered as being from the early 1940's until the late 1950's. The films that qualify as film noir cinema feature low-key, black and white photography inspired by the chiaroscuro lighting of renaissance art and German Expressionism.

Many film critics and historians have cited Citizen Kane and T ouch of Evil as the bookends of the film noir era in Hollywood, of course both of those films were directed by Orson Welles.

Film noir movies were as much a moment in history as they were a look created by a lighting style. It was the post-war era in America. The world, and particularly the returning veterans, had seen horrors the likes of which they'd never imagined.

They'd killed, seen friends killed, liberated concetration camps, witnessed first hand the horrors of a world war. The men who came back had a unique view of the world. One that they were not equipped to talk about.

How did this manifest?

One way was in classic film noir cinema. Picture Humphrey Bogart playing Phillip Marlowe. Or Sam Spade. In either case he was a man with a past, and man capable of violence. A man unsure of right and wrong until the final moment.

This was the hardboiled detective, and the film noir detective is a large part of the genre.

Many famous film noir films weren't detective stories.

Classic Film Noir Examples

The stark contast and low key lighting complimented the inner state of the primary characters.

They were living in a world that felt enveloped by darkness. Sometimes they were criminals trying to go straight after one last heist. Check out John Huston's Asphalt Jungle , which also featured Marylin Monroe in an early role.

Huston was something of a film noir movie mainstay as he also put out genre definer The Maltese Falcon , and the star-studded Key Largo .

Key Largo takes place almost entirely in a hotel in the Florida Keys, but the tension sizzles the entire time. Bogart, Bacall, and gangster movie icon Edward G. Robinson are all there, but the scene stealer is Claire Trevor as Robinson's drunk and miserable moll.

Bogart is a veteran, come home to visit the family of a man from his platoon that died in action. He brings with him the jadedness, and the events of the movie test his jadedness, and question if his inner hero will come out.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is another classic film noir example, starring Lana Turner in the defining execution of the femme-fatale. She practically burns the celluloid. One of cinema's most enduring entrances of all time:

Poor John Garfield. He never stood a chance.

Another classic entry into the film noir cinema hall of fame? Out Of The Past starring Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Mitchum is running from the past. But the past catches up. Out Of The Past features the kind of tough guy inner monologue running through the action that is also a beloved film noir convention.

The best film noir movies aren't all from the United States, however. Cinematic master Akira Kurosawa had his own entry, Stray Dog , which uses many of the same motifs but of course it takes place in Japan and is influenced by the Japanese side of the WW2 experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's not all that different.

Stray Dog stands as one of the greatest film noir movies of all time because it presents audiences with two reactions to the horrors of war. It changed some men for the better, and some for the worse.

In the end, everyone was a victim.

A nice companion piece to Stray Dog is Kurosawa's much later film High and Low . Again shot in beautiful black and white, the film has very noir sequences and undertones as it explores morality.

It honestly doesn't get much better than High and Low .

Learning From More Modern Film Noir

Nugent begins his examination by showing what film noir is not, or rather, by showing what happens when, in his words, "black and white is done wrong."

To wit, the essay looks at some film noir examples done in parody , specifically this skit from Saturday Night Live , a parody of the classic Casablanca , a film that, while not rigorously adhering to the thematic tenets of film noir (primarily in its lack of the doomed cynicism endemic to the genre), employs many of its most important visual elements.

And, yes, Nugent does admit that it's perhaps unfair to compare a classic film to a TV parody of said film, but parody does, in a multiplicity of fruitful ways, have a way of throwing difference into sharp relief.

The point is that in the parody, the contrast is extremely low. And contrast, it is argued, is a central element of skillful black and white cinematography. In the skit, there "isn't much difference" between the darkest and lightest shades. Compare this to the same scene in Casablanca, where "The darkest shade on screen is nearly black, while the brightest shade on screen is nearly white."

Nugent's thesis is that, when done well, the "simplicity of black and white means that the eye can observe more key features in the shot." But the video essay isn't a polemic on the virtues of black and white over color cinematography.

Rather, it is that by carefully using elements of black and white cinematography, filmmakers who are working in color, but going for a film noir feel , can achieve greater results than by ignoring the simple tenets of excellent black and white cinematography.

As examples of color cinematography that successfully achieve a noir-ish feel, the essay cites, among others, the work of David Fincher and cinematographer Darius Khondji in 1995's Se7en, a modern film that uses many elements of classic film noir, from its doomed mood to, in Roger Ebert's words , "locations that reek...of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate." Verily. (Please note, this clip is a great demonstration of film noir techniques, but it is also pretty yikes , so, you've been warned.)

The essay also cites the cinematography of Breaking Bad , which is full of high-contrast lighting, as well as examples of film noir's ubiquitous "blinds shot," where a character is seen through the slats of venetian blinds, with the alternating points of contrast providing visual storytelling.

A good example of this would be where the image on the screen splits the characters and provides a visual metaphor for their two sides, the good and the bad, the visible and the hidden.

The effect can be seen in the above clip from Se7en, in the apartment of a man who is simultaneously a criminal, as well as the victim of John Doe's plan to teach the world his twisted black and white morality, where there are no shades of grey, only sin and virtue. It can also be seen in the following clip from the classic film noir example, Double Indemnity :

This is a fascinating essay that makes the case, not just for black and white cinematography in and of itself, but as an aid to storytelling in all filmmaking, and any filmmaker interested in the art of light and shadow would do well to give it a look.

What We Learned From Film Noir Cinema

The movies of the past have value. The photograhic tools available to us now when we create content certainly give us more rang,e and far more color, than the film noir classics had.

But they can still teach us how to compose an image that pops, draw our eye to the right place, and use light to reveal who are characters are, and who we are. All the while leaving some of the truth forever shrouded in pools darkness.

Source: Now You See It

• 10 Writing Prompts in the Film Noir Genre ›
• Neon Noir: The Dopest Film Genre You’ve Never Heard Of ›
• The Stylistic Elements of Film Noir, Explained In One Handy Infographic ›

Why Hasn’t The Apple Vision Pro Caught On With Filmmakers?

Do you know anyone using the apple vision pro for any film or video projects.

The answer to the above is most likely a resounding “no” from just about everyone in the film and video industry. Granted, while the Apple Vision Pro wasn’t marketed as a filmmaking or video editing tool per se, a lot of creators and Apple fans pointed out the film and video possibilities that could be unlocked with Apple’s AR/VR headset.

Yet, announced just over a year ago at Apple’s WWDC event in 2023, virtual reality appeared to be the way of the future. And while AI was certainly in the conversation a year ago, it apparently had not quite clicked that AI was going to be the dominant narrative moving forward.

Recent reports indicate that the Apple Vision Pro is struggling mightily. And for film and video professionals, it might be the biggest afterthought of the year. Let’s explore why.

No Killer App for the Apple Vision Pro

As pointed out in this Ars Technica article , Apple’s biggest problem with the Vision Pro headset has been the lack of a “killer app” to really hook anyone to pay the $3,500 price tag for the headset. And for this, we’re talking about a killer app for—well—anything. It’s even more dismal for any film or video production app.

We saw some hints that Apple had at least thought about creating some features to allow video editors the ability to use the Vision Pro to edit their videos in a 3D workspace—which could include multiple screens with advanced editing consoles.

However, there’s been nothing from Apple for a virtual Final Cut Pro or any other killer app for something like this. In fact, there really hasn’t been anything at all for video editors. Ultimately, it really looks like Apple Vision Pro has been a huge miss by Apple, at least for now.

With AI taking over the industry as quickly as it did, the most recent WWDC was all about ramping up AI tools and features, which is pretty much cementing the Vision Pro—and anyone who bought one or was interested in one—as kind of just out of luck.

Blackmagic Camera App Set to Finally Come to Android

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A subreddit dedicated to film noir and neo noir films, and hard-boiled crime fiction. Feel free to post reviews, links to articles and public domain video, material concerning hard-boiled crime fiction and related subjects.

Elusive 'Bowling Noir' essay

So for a few years now, I have heard of an essay titled "Bowling Noir" about the role of bowling in film noir films (Double Indemnity, Big Leboswki, etc). I cannot find it anywhere. If anybody knows where I can read it, I would be very grateful. Thank you.

LA Confidential and Film Noir

The Maltese Falcon is now viewed as the typical film noir style movie because it contains traits and qualities of filmmaking that were adapted by film noir filmmakers. Film noir started during the mid 1940’s and has been a popular film style ever since, yielding such contemporary movies like The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), Pulp Fiction ( Quentin Tarantino , 1994), and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998). These films have proved that film noir is not a method dedicated to past decades, but rather an innovative style of film that influences movies today.

Film noir played upon the idea of loneliness and solitude; two traits that are easily found in a big city (Monaco 246). Nighttime scenes were chosen because of the mystery that comes with darkness. Night projects a feeling to the viewer that he or she would not absorb in the daytime, very much the same way horror movies play themselves upon the night. Just like the basis of the big city, film noir acts upon the conventions of mystery and suspense: it is easier for the filmmaker to play with the viewer’s emotions if he or she is placed in a setting of uneasiness.

The nighttime images in LA Confidential portray that anxiety and allow the mystery of the plot to expand. This use of nighttime and darker images lends the movie to take advantage of the stylistic low-key lighting. The movie begins with the narration of Sid Hudgens, editor for Hush Hush magazine, a sleazy tabloid concerned with getting a news story no matter what the consequences are. Typical of film noir, the story is adapted from a tabloid or pulp fiction novel . Sid Hudgens describes a town of beauty , filled with beaches, people, and economic potential.

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Occult Detectives

CFP: Occult Detectives

Edited by Michael Goodrum, Kris Mecholsky, and Philip Smith

The occult detective has a long history. Depending on how one defines the genre, occult themes coincide with the earliest detective fiction and theatre, 公案小說 (gong'an, or crime-case) stories from the Song dynasty (13th-14th century), which often featured supernatural appearances and interventions. To Anglophone audiences, however, the figure is, perhaps, most closely associated with the decades that followed the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882. While Sherlock Holmes dedicated much of his efforts to exploding notions of the supernatural, most famously in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), other detectives both drew on and fought against the occult. Making his debut in 1898, Flaxman Low is perhaps the first to fit the (inevitably) loose model of the occult or psychic detective. Driven by a late Victorian interest in the occult and ghost-hunting, though, Low was rapidly followed by a stream of successors, a connection that continues to the present with new detectives appearing well into the 21st century in a wide variety of media (including novels, short stories, comics, theatre, television, film, games, and more). Horror and crime fused in weird fiction in the pulps; in comics such as Hellblazer and Dead Boy Detectives; in video games such as Alan Wake and Alone in the Dark; in TV shows such as Twin Peaks and True Detective; and in films such as The Exorcist III and The Sixth Sense, to name just a few.

The editors seek essays of ~4,000 words. Topics should include occult detectives and any text which sits at the intersection of detective and horror narratives. Texts can be of any medium or time period. Some possibilities include, but are not limited to, the following figures, genres, or texts:

Gong’an (Judge Dee and/or Judge Bao in any medium)

Abraham Van Helsing (in any medium)

Flaxman Low

John Silence

Luna Bartendale

Carnacki the Ghost-Finder

Fantastic/horror noir (e.g., Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Angel Heart)

Hellblazer and John Constantine (in comics and film)

Hellboy (in comics and film)

The Exorcist series (in novels and film)

Stephen King (in any medium)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (in television, film, and comics)

The X-Files

Supernatural

Ed Brubaker’s Fatale

Essays should be accessible but touch on big ideas, using a single text, author, artist, or director as a lens to comment on the genre(s) and themes at play. We particularly encourage contributions that take an international, cross-cultural perspective, and/or touch on topics of queerness, ethnicity, gender, and disability.

Proposals of up to three hundred words due by 29 September 2024 to [email protected] Final drafts for accepted proposals will be due by 30 March 2025. Each essay will be subject to editorial review; authors should expect to undertake at least one round of revisions before final acceptance.

Spider-Man Noir Series at Amazon, MGM+ Casts Lamorne Morris as Robbie Robertson

By Joe Otterson

Joe Otterson

TV Reporter

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Lamorne Morris will star alongside Nicolas Cage in the upcoming live-action Spider-Man Noir series at Amazon, Variety has learned.

The show, now titled “Spider-Noir,” was formally ordered to series in May with Cage in the lead role. As previously reported, the show will debut domestically on MGM+’s linear channel and then globally on Amazon Prime Video .

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Marvel fans will recall that Robertson has long been a supporting character in the “Spider-Man” comics, where Robertson is an editor at The Daily Bugle. He also played a part in the comics mini-series “Spider-Man Noir: Eyes Without a Face.”

Morris is best known for his role as Winston Bishop in the hit Fox comedy series “New Girl,” which ran for seven seasons. He recently starred in Season 5 of the critically-acclaimed FX anthology series “Fargo” and in the Hulu comedy series “Woke.” He has previously made appearances on shows like “Ghosts” at CBS, “Call Me Kat” at Fox, and “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder” at Disney+. On the horizon, he has been cast in the upcoming film “SNL 1975” in the role of Garrett Morris and will appear in the second season of the Netflix comedy series “Unstable.”

He is repped by CAA, Entertainment 360, The Lede Company, and Myman Greenspan.

“Spider-Noir” was the second show announced under a partnership between Amazon and Sony to develop projects around Marvel characters associated with Spider-Man that Sony controls. The first was “Silk: Spider Society,” which was originally greenlit in 2022, but it was reported that the show would not move forward at Amazon back in May.

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