Sunset Boulevard Film Noir

You don’t need to see so many film noir to know the convention, so who wrote the rules and why after more than 60 years after the genre were find we like to play .

Film noir represents a dark night of the soul in American cinema; a dark play with a fancy French name a place where the sun is died and people get by with nil.

In the 1920s and 30s the most popular genre was the Western, with its tales of courage, self-reliance, male toughness and female sweetness. Westerns were infused with the values of the American Dream, and the Western hero was likeable, trustworthy and admirable.

Film noir have fantastic attitudes. A character will often feel like there is preordained and that free will is an illusion.

Film noir characteristic was influenced

Story location are urban , the character s will often be seem in murky sets, cheap, big city apartment or hotel room, and/or abandoned houses.

Some film noir are produced in a semi documentary style these movies are based on real events, usually crime or espionage, they are set in urban areas and deliberately have a realistic feel, many are film in location where the actual took take place in real life.

Ex: in Sunset Boulevard, the body of Joe Gillis floats in the swimming pool. In a flashback, Joe relates the events leading to his death.

Voices over are common this is due to the popularity of Freudian thought at the time, the voice over narration and introspection by a character.

Another role is the menaced women.

In film nor if the main character is female, she will often be formatted psychologically by a man, usually a love interest. The femme fatale, femme archetype originates in film noir.

These female characters represents independence, strength and desire, a response to the brief destruction of the demure housewife stereotype. They are often used to emphasis the fatalist attitude in that the male character feel powerless to resist women. Often the femme fatale will enter a love triangle with a married man or a man in love with someone