Film Noir

About Film Noir

In the 1970s, notable films like CHINATOWN, THE CONVERSATION and TAXI DRIVER awakened attention to an unusually intriguing style in American Cinema, a style that comprises some of our most exciting, most intrinsically "cinemati" movies. Yet it is style that at the same time is one of the hardest to label or pin down. It defies the easy characterization of the Western, the Whodunit, the Musical or the Comedy. It is called "Film Noir."

In 1946, after American films had been absent from European screens for five years, astute French critics of the "Cahiers di Cinema," noticed a discernible new style in American movies, one which had roots in the early Depression. They coined the term "film noir," the black film, to denote these murky dramas framed in the intrigue of neon lights glistening on dark, wet streets. It is a world of strong women and forceful men, of adventurers and opportunists, of independent moralists and amoralists, of public and private eyes, of middle-class dropouts and misunderstood mobsters, of good and evil, and more evil. It might be called the dramatic equivalent of black comedy.

This is the cinema of people tough enough to handle a society readjusting after war and social trauma. It is the cinema of directors like Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Mick ray, Elia Kazan, Sam Fuller, Joseph Lewis and John Huston. The heroes, heroines and villains are legendary screen presences like Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Orson Welles, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum and John Garfield. To list the names themselves almost defines the genre.

Film noir is defined, not by the story itself, but by the look and psychological tone, making it an unusually visceral, almost palpable kind of film. Since most of these films were made as "B-Movies" designed to fill out the bottom half of double features, the studios gave their directors the freedom that can give way to startling creative moments. And that's precisely what happened.