Film Noir

The genre known as film noir emerged from economic, political, and moral crises in European and American cultures in the years leading up to World War II. Its American origins are in the "tough-guy" and "hard-boiled" novels that became popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and which, as Hollywood became more liberal in the 1940s and 1950s, could more easily be adapted for the movies than before. Such novels were also popular in Europe, particularly in France, where they were known as "romans noirs," and were published under imprints with titles such as "La Série Noire." When the embargo on American films that existed in France under German occupation was lifted in 1944, many of the films that first arrived were based on hard-boiled novels, and it seems natural for French critics to have begun categorizing these films as "film noir." The European influence on film noir is not restricted to its name, however. Many of the cinematic techniques, and the overall pessimistic outlook of these movies, can be found in French "poetic realist" films made in the 1930s, and more especially, the work of German Expressionist film makers, many of whom emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis and went on to work in Hollywood.

German directors such as Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak, and cinematographers, such as Hungarian-born John Alton, used contrasting light and shade, odd camera angles, and scenes dominated by shadow, to reproduce on screen the bleak vision of hard-boiled writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, and others. Movies in the film noir style can be recognized by their visual dependence on the effect of chiaroscuro, the contrast between light and shade. Characters and objects in film noir are often backlit, so that they cast long shadows and their features are obscured, or else the principals are brightly lit from the front so that the background is dark. Faces are pictured half-obscured by darkness, or crosshatched by the shadows of prison bars, window frames, or banister rods; the corners of rooms are dark and the interiors of cars provide a gloomy, claustrophobic setting.

Although many of its visual codes are familiar, the overall concept of film noir is notoriously difficult to pin down; although their plots usually center on crime, films included in the corpus cannot easily be identified as belonging to one particular genre. For example, Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel of the same name, is a detective thriller, while Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) concerns an ex-con's search for the proceeds of a robbery committed by his former cellmate. Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) depicts a vain and ageing star of silent movies obsessed with loyalty, her lost beauty and star status; it ends with her murder of the young man who rejects her and is narrated, famously, by the victim, face down in the swimming pool. What these films do have in common, however, is a fascination with psychological instability, sexual obsession, and alienation. Unlike the "Hollywood Gothic" of films such as Dracula (1931) or The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), what appears as monstrous in film noir derives not from the half-human horrors of the vampire or Frankenstein's monster, but from the all too human characteristics of jealousy, greed, lust, and ruthless self-interest.

Such themes are by no means exclusive to film noir, of course, and film categories must be defined as much by their technical and visual features as by thematic and formal tendencies. If film noir is difficult to define in terms of the plots of the films it includes, the problem is hardly eased by critics' reliance on terms such as "style," "mood," and "sensibility" when discussing films of "noir" pedigree. Rather than seeing film noir as a genre, many critics instead view it as a movement, a set of films and filmmakers expressing a common approach to life using similar literary sources, narrative structures, and visual codes.

The difficulties of describing film noir as a genre combine the problem of the sheer variety of different types of stories such films encompass, and the question of what it is exactly that distinguishes them from other films. Many films, for example, use chiaroscuro but can be described only as noir-ish, while others, such as Gilda (1946) are accepted as film noir, but betray their otherwise pessimistic tone with a happy ending of sorts. A further complication is that while genres seem not to be trapped in a particular time or place, film noir is very closely linked with the Hollywood of the 1940s. A significant proportion of films in the film noir mode that have been made since then refer back, in some way, to the immediate post-war period, and many of the reasons for film noir's appearance at that time and place have to do with the particular culture of Hollywood. Financial restrictions on filmmakers during the war have already been mentioned, but other factors, such as the perception of German Expressionist style as "quality," and the need among the smaller studios for new and distinctive film products, are also important. The opportunities film noir gave for directors and cinematographers to "show off" their talents, combined with the gradual relaxation of the Hays Code, which controlled the "moral content" of movies, made Hollywood cinema receptive to the content, mood, and style of film noir in the 1940s.