Film Noir I INTRODUCTION Lynch's Blue Velvet The motion picture Blue Velvet (1986) brought wide acclaim to American director David Lynch.

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Film Noir
I

INTRODUCTION

Lynch's Blue Velvet
The motion picture Blue Velvet (1986) brought wide acclaim to American director David Lynch. Critics praised the film's
originality, and Lynch was nominated for an Academy Award for best director. Here, actor Kyle MacLachlan portrays the
naive Jeffrey Beaumont, who is forced to acknowledge his own dark side as he discovers the seamy underworld of smalltown life.
The Everett Collection, Inc.

Film Noir, American motion-picture style popular in the 1940s and 1950s, typically featuring shadowy lighting, fatalistic pessimism, incidents of treachery, and the sense
of a corrupt and violent society. The name, pronounced film no-WHA and taken from the French for "black film," was coined by French critics to describe movies of the
period that shared such themes and techniques.
Although the style faded in popularity beginning in the 1960s, films noirs continued to be produced and appreciated in the ensuing decades. Well-known modern films in
this style include The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), Reservoir Dogs (Quentin
Tarantino, 1992), and A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi, 1998).

II

CHARACTERISTICS

Billy Wilder
Working as a screenwriter and later as a director, American Billy Wilder expressed a cynical view of life in his films.
Although he worked mostly on comedies, he is best remembered for the haunting 1950 drama Sunset Boulevard.
Milan Ryba/Globe Photos, Inc.

Film noir has a number of specific cinematic attributes. These include low-key, chiaroscuro lighting (the dramatic use of light and shade); night scenes, sometimes in
glistening wet streets; the use of shadow to comment on a character's psychology (such as blocks of shadow on the face, hinting at an unrevealed "dark side") or the
film's narrative (bars of shadow, conveying a sense of being trapped); and claustrophobic or unbalanced camera framing. Several of these effects are particularly
striking in black and white, but they have also been used in color films noirs.

Double Indemnity
Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray are featured in Double Indemnity (1944), a story of lust and greed in the film noir
tradition, directed by Billy Wilder. The film's events are related in flashbacks by protagonist Walter Neff (MacMurray), who
makes a dying confession about a plot to kill a man for his insurance money.
Bettmann/Corbis

Another common aspect of film noir is the femme fatale, a seductive woman who lures the protagonist into actions that ultimately lead to his downfall. The emotional
tension generated between these characters (sexual attraction pitted against ethical or practical considerations) often lies at the core of film noir and drives the action
and plot.
Despite these specific characteristics, film noir also borrows heavily from other film genres, such as detective movies and thrillers. Critics were initially divided over
whether to regard film noir as a genre, a style, or a movement. This division has largely been erased over time, as the genre has become accepted both within the
industry and outside it. Thus the purist view, that film noir essentially ended with Touch of Evil (directed by Orson Welles, 1958) is no longer widely held.

III

HISTORY

Raymond Chandler
American crime-fiction writer Raymond Chandler was one of the leading figures in the so-called hard-boiled school of
detective writing during the 1920s and 1930s. Chandler's famous detective, Philip Marlowe, epitomized the tough,
unsentimental point of view of this style.
Bettmann/Corbis

Film noir has its roots in a fusion of the 1930s horror style and the detective and gangster subgenres, without the aspects of the supernatural or concerns about the
social origins of crime. Literary sources include the "hard-boiled" private-eye novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the novels of James M. Cain, and the
stories of Cornell Woolrich. The genre was also influenced by German expressionism of the early 20th century and the poetic realist movement in France in the 1930s.
For example, the Hollywood film noir They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949) is a passionate reworking of the themes of the French film Quai des Brumes (Marcel
Carné, 1938).

Dashiell Hammett
American writer Dashiell Hammett produced some of the most memorable detective novels and characters of the 20th
century. Hammett introduced his best-known character, detective Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon (1930). A 1941
motion picture based on the book, starring Humphrey Bogart, also became famous.
Bettmann/Corbis

Many film critics believe that the first true film noir was The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941). The movie, about a private detective who gets involved in the search
for a priceless antique while investigating his partner's murder, is based on a 1930 novel of the same name by Hammett. Although the hero of the film (Sam Spade,
played by Humphrey Bogart) survives at the end, there is a bleak sense of loss as he turns over the woman who fascinates him to the police. Other classic films noirs
include Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), Sunset
Boulevard (Wilder, 1950), and Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955).

James M. Cain
American novelist James M. Cain was one of the chief figures of the "hard-boiled" style of writing in the 1930s and 1940s.
His plots mirror film noir stories, in which a man is seduced by a femme fatale, becomes involved in a criminal scheme
with her, and is betrayed in the end. His best-known novels are The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Mildred Pierce
(1941), and Double Indemnity (1943), all of which were made into movies.
Culver Pictures

The rise and success of the genre during the 1940s and 1950s has been attributed to various factors, such as insecurity resulting from World War II (1939-1945) and
then from the onset of the Cold War; uncertainty about the roles of men and women following World War II; and fear within the movie industry during and after the
anti-Communism investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The genre also flourished due to some relaxation
in the film censorship laws during this time.
Today, much greater lack of industry censorship, tensions deriving from sources such as terrorism and nuclear weapons, changing family dynamics and gender roles,
and general disillusionment within American society are all factors that have spurred more recent film noir production. Directors such as the Coen brothers (Blood
Simple, 1984; Fargo, 1996; The Man Who Wasn't There, 2001) and David Lynch (Blue Velvet, 1986; Mulholland Drive, 2001) continue the noir tradition in their films by
exploring the vivid contrasts between "normal" American society and its dark underside.

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