Noir
...it really a film genre, or a title assigned to and created by writers and critics striving to pigeonhole a vast and very differential range of films. Although volumes have been written on the subject, defining film noir essential traits is another matter.
It is impossible to simplify film noir by assigning it basic qualities as nightmarish, weird, sexual, ambiguous and cruel. While these characteristics are present in many classic noirs it cannot be confined to these alone. To fully understand and evaluate film noir you must look at the many contributing factors: writers, directors, actors, settings, story lines, studios and censoring.
"We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel...." This is the first of many attempts to define film noir made by the French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton in their 1955 book Panorama du film noir américain 19411953 (A Panorama of American Film noir), the original and seminal extended treatment of the subject. In the five decades since, no definition has achieved anything close to general acceptance.
As Borde and Chaumeton suggest, however, the field of noir is very diverse and any generalisation about it risks veering into oversimplification. But they do propose that "It is the presence of crime which gives film noir its most constant characteristic
Blackmail, accusation, theft or drug trafficking set the stage for a narrative where life and death are at stake
Sordidly or bizarrely, death always comes at the end of a tortured journey. In every sense of the word a noir film is a film of death." (Borde and Chaumeton, 1955 p19)
Dramatic camera angles, stark and angular sets, rain lashed streets, fog bound runways, sharp contrast lighting and empty public buildings all contribute to illustrate to the viewer the dark world of film noir. This world...
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