Film Noir

Film Noir is a French term meaning “black film,” or film of the night, and is inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and had a popular audience. It is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas particularly those that empathize cynic attitudes and sexual motivations. It began in the early 1940s and has a certain storytelling sensibility of being over stylized, over theatrical, and overly emotional. Everyone in Film Noir is smoking and the film locations reek of the night, of shadows and alleys, dark apartment buildings, taxi drivers, and bartenders who have seen it all. It is considered the most American film genre, because no society could have

The term “Film Noir” was first applied to term in Hollywood in 1946 by French Poet Nino Frank. Film Noir heightened the emotion of the audience by dark, disturbed environments, introduced femme fatale and the mcguffin that would later on be in many modern day films, and created strong male protagonists. A femme fatale is an attractive and seductive women that uses her attractiveness and deviousness to manipulate men in order to gain power, independence, money, or all three. She rejects the traditional roles of devoted wife and loving mother that mainstream society had for women. During WWII while the men left for war the women were left to take care of businesses and monetary responsibility. This started to change the perspectives on how people were to judge women which was also known as the Cult of Domesticity. Femme fatale represented the most direct attack on traditional womanhood. The women showed

A mcguffin is a plot device that propels the plot of the movie and gets all the characters working against each other but is later proven to be worthless. In The Maltese Falcon, the entire movie plot is based around the falcon and trying to find the falcon. In the end when Sam Spade gives the falcon to Gutman it turns out to be a fake. They went through so much trouble and many deaths to get an object that does not exist. The mcguffin is a very popular concept seen in modern day films that are not necessarily categorized as Film Noir or Neo-Noir. In the 2006 comedy The Pink Panther, the mcguffin (the pink panther) is stolen and detective Jacques Clouseau along with several other characters look for it throughout the entire movie. The Indiana Jones movies also center around a mcguffin. The mcguffin gives a reason for people to continue watching the movie so they can know whether, in the end, it is found or