Film Noir was a movement born from the disillusionment of post-war Americans. The term was coined by French critics who, after not having had access to American films since before World War II, were astonished by the “darkness” of post-war Hollywood cinema. Film noir did not provide the escape previous Hollywood films offered during the Great Depression, but instead confronted the audience with its characteristic anxiety-inducing style. The settings of these films were oppressively grim, where light came into rooms only through the slants of blinds over windows, or not at all, and shadows hovered over the faces of villains and heroes alike. The characters of film noir were predictable—the “proletariat tough-guy” contended by the “femme fatale”—each an embodiment of corruption, vice, and seedy morals (Benton ). Themes of sexual aberration and crime were woven into narratives that centered on murder and adultery. Presented in low-lighting and skewed angles, film noir was meant to psychologically disturb and disorient it viewers. The film, Double Indemnity, is a prime example of film noir in that it accomplishes the goal of film noir to unsettle its audience through its style, setting, characters, and themes.
Directed by Billy Wilder and released in 1944, Double Indemnity, was adapted from James M. Cain’s novella of the same name, a piece of American hard-boiled fiction. Fred MacMurry plays Walter Neff, an insurance salesman, and Barbara Stanwyck is Phyllis Dietrichson, the scheming wife. Edward G. Robinson is Barton Keyes, Neff’s boss, whose job it is to sniff out fraudulent claims. The opening scenes of the film set the tone—the silhouette of a man, hobbling on crutches, walks toward the audience, becoming larger on the screen; ...
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...nd, Neff ironically decides to trust her, providing the brute strength needed to carry out her female machinations. Phyllis is the dangerous dame, the spider woman who lures the hero into her web of lies. She is made a spectacle, as she meets Neff for the first time, wearing nothing but a towel; she is seen from above, at the top of the stairs, a pinnacle of femininity and beauty. However, she is not the fragile creature that she seems, and she uses her sexuality to manipulate Neff into killing her husband. Typical of the women of noir, Phyllis embodies the monstrous feminine, whose hyper-sexuality is a tool to destroy the nuclear family and to castrate the men she encounters. She dismantles the Dietrichsons from the inside, killing the mother to take her place, then her husband, and finally turns Zachetti against Lola, who is supposed to be like a daughter to her.
Chinatown (1974), a film written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski is centered around Los Angeles during the 1920s. Because of its setting and era, the film has cinematic style and and thematic elements that allude to “film noir”, a common genre for 1920s films. One aspect commonly brought up in this genre is gender role, specifically that of women, during the noir era . Polanski’s film references the common noir archetype of “femme fatale”, a lying, seducing female character who brings men to their destruction. He also nods to the common belief of the time, that men are strong and powerful heroes looking to find truth. However, because it falls into a more modern, “neo-noir” category, Chinatown brings the roles of women to a new light, and draws attention to the problems in society of the time when it comes to gender, both male and female.
In contemporary film making, “Hollywood-ization” generally refers to the re-creation of a classic work in a form more vulgar and sexually explicit than the original in an effort to boost movie attendance. After all, sex and violence sell. However, from the mid-1930’s to the 1950’s, “Hollywood-ization” referred to the opposite case where controversial books had to be purified to abide by the Production Code of 1934.[1] This occurred to many of James Cain’s novels as they moved from text to the genre of “film noir.” As has been said about Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, “The property, bought several years ago, was kept in the studio’s archives until now because of [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s] “inability to clean it up.””[2] The sanitation of Cain’s novels greatly took from the strong themes of female emotional and financial independence that were rarely addressed at that time as they were adapted for the screen.
Beginning the mid 1920s, Hollywood’s ostensibly all-powerful film studios controlled the American film industry, creating a period of film history now recognized as “Classical Hollywood”. Distinguished by a practical, workmanlike, “invisible” method of filmmaking- whose purpose was to demand as little attention to the camera as possible, Classical Hollywood cinema supported undeviating storylines (with the occasional flashback being an exception), an observance of a the three act structure, frontality, and visibly identified goals for the “hero” to work toward and well-defined conflict/story resolution, most commonly illustrated with the employment of the “happy ending”. Studios understood precisely what an audience desired, and accommodated their wants and needs, resulting in films that were generally all the same, starring similar (sometimes the same) actors, crafted in a similar manner. It became the principal style throughout the western world against which all other styles were judged. While there have been some deviations and experiments with the format in the past 50 plus ye...
while his wife Bunny and daughter Maude are reminiscent of the two Sternwood daughters, Vivian and Carmen” (Bergan 201). These two women also provide that all-important aspect of the femme fatale. Bunny is the impulsive, sexualized woman who acts without thinking, and lives by the charity of the elderly husband who just can’t tell her no. Maude is the dark, intelligent, manipulative woman. She works in the background, accomplishing what she wants, only telling others what they need to hear for her to get what she wants.
In the classical Western and Noir films, narrative is driven by the action of a male protagonist towards a clearly defined, relatable goal. Any lack of motivation or action on the part of the protagonist problematizes the classical association between masculinity and action. Due to inherent genre expectations, this crisis of action is equivalent to a crisis of masculinity. Because these genres are structured around male action, the crises of action and masculinity impose a crisis of genre. In the absence of traditional narrative elements and character tropes, these films can only identify as members of their genres through saturation with otherwise empty genre symbols. The equivalency between the crises of genre and masculinity frames this symbol saturation as a sort of compensatory masculine posturing.
Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder 1944) is a film about an insurance sales man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) that falls for a highly sexual, scandalous woman, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) who attempts to kill her husband. Even though Walter dismisses Phyllis attempt to purchase life insurance policy for her husband; he is unable to stay away from Phyllis for long. In the time they spend together, Walter and Phyllis try to hatch a fool-proof plan to get rid of her husband and get a double indemnity from the insurance company. Walter Neff boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is a man of skill and knowledge, and has been working in the same job for twenty-six years, and has always been able to tell who is a cheater and who is an honest man. Barton ability to tell who is being honest by consulted the ‘little man’, and does so throughout the film. Walter later finds out that Phyllis has been involved in another ‘accident’ prior to her involvement with her husband Mr. Dietrichson (Tom Powers).When both Walter and Phyllis are about to be found out by Barton, Phyllis attempts to kill Walter and escape with the cash. The scene in which both Barton and Walter are together in the office and are later in the hallway in which the male characters Walter and Barton both find themselves together on the ground highlights and suggest gender noir in the film. The film Double Indemnity uses the stylistic qualities of film noir to illustrate the homo-erotic relationship between Barton and Walter with the use of lights, shadows, and oneiric qualities which also suggest and emphasize the importance power of gender in noir.
destructive, exotic and a self-determined independent who is cold hearted, immortal and less of a human. The females portrayed in the noir were primarily of two types - either projected as ethical, loyal loving woman or as ‘femme fatales’ who were duplicitous, deceptive, manipulative and desperate yet gorgeous women. In
This paper has attempted to investigate the ways in which Alfred Hitchcock blended conventions of film noir with those of a small town domestic comedy. It first looked at the opening scenes of the film in which the two conventions were introdruced. It then went on to analyse the film with the aid of Robin Wood's article Ideology, Genre, Auteur. From these two forms we can see that film noir and small town comedy were used as a means of commenting on the contradictions in American values.
With films “from dusk till dawn 1996”, where violence is frequently one of his themes, this is a present concept in Tarentino’s films especially, ‘Kill Bill 2003’ and ‘Pulp Fiction 1994’. Another theme, which will be shown throughout most of tarentinos films, is the mis-en-scene. The lighting in particular will often be very dark, and most will begin with a black and white opening scene, which can often be gruesome, just like in “Kill Bill”. An example is at the beginning of the film ‘Kill Bill’ where the bride is covered in blood and even has a black eye, and “From dusk till dawn” begins with a shoot out between a sheriff and the shop owner with Richard and Seth gecko in “From Dusk Till Dawn”.
Classic film noir originated after World War II. This is the time where post World War II pessimism, anxiety, and suspicion was taking the world by storm. Many films that were released in the U.S. Between 1939s and 1940s were considered propaganda films that were designed for entertainment during the Depression and World War II. During the 1930s many German and Europeans immigrated to the U.S. and helped the American film industry with powerf...
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
Film Noir, a term coined by the French to describe a style of film characterized by dark themes, storylines, and visuals, has been influencing cinematic industries since the 1940’s. With roots in German expressionistic films and Italian postwar documentaries, film noir has made its way into American film as well, particularly identified in mob and crime pictures. However, such settings are not exclusive to American film noir. One noteworthy example is Billy Wilder’s film Sunset Boulevard, which follows the foreboding tale of Joe Gillis, the desperate-for-success protagonist, who finds himself in the fatal grips of the disillusioned femme fatale Norma Desmond. Not only does the storyline’s heavy subject matter and typical character structure suggest the film noir style, but also Wilder’s techniques of photography and empty, worn-down settings make for a perfect backdrop for this dark approach at filmmaking.
The genre film noir has some classical elements that make these films easily identifiable. These elements are displayed in the prototypical film noir, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. These elements include being filmed in black and white, a morally ambiguous protagonist, and a prominent darkness. However, the most striking part of a film noir is the femme fatale, a woman who craves independence through sexual and economic liberation. In his film, Chinatown, Roman Polanski uses many of the classic elements of a film noir, however he twists many of them to reflect the time period. This is particularly evident in his depiction of his “femme fatale,” Evelyn Mulwray.
The noir style is showcased in Sunset Boulevard with its use of visually dark and uncomfortable settings and camera work, as well as its use of the traditional film noir characters. In addition, the overall tone and themes expressed in it tightly correspond to what many film noirs addressed. What made this film unique was its harsh criticism of the film industry itself, which some of Wilder’s peers saw as biting the hand that fed him. There is frequent commentary on the superficial state of Hollywood and its indifference to suffering, which is still a topic avoided by many in the film business today. However, Sunset Blvd. set a precedent for future film noirs, and is an inspiration for those who do not quite believe what they are being shown by Hollywood.
Film Noir is a fairly self-explanatory name. French for “Dark” or “Black Film”, this style (not genre) of film is pretty much summed up in those two words. These films started being made in a 1940’s, Post WWII paranoia, with the threat of nuclear missiles looming over the heads of all United States citizens, Hollywood included. This paranoia led to disillusioned attitudes and existential feelings, which in turn were reflected in Film Noirs through things such as characters, with the two most prominent types being hardened male protagonists and femme fatales. Also, the “Darkness” of Film Noirs was not just a metaphor for the content of the film, but also a fairly literal description of the visual style was like. Taking influence from German Expressionism, among other things, the visuals of film noirs were often of gritty city streets, dark alleys, or smoky, cramped-looking rooms. To add to the dark appearance, the lighting included heavy use of chiaroscuro, a style that is characterized by a dark environment with single-source, high contrast lighting on the subject. While many film noirs fall into the crime genre, as well as detective, there are some exceptions, such as the drama/black comedy Sunset Boulevard. Despite it’s setting and characters being a bit unconventional for the Film Noir style (the film was a fairly realistic account of what goes on behind the scenes in Hollywood), Sunset Boulevard is definitely a Film Noir, due to it’s use of an archetypal Film Noir hero, a femme fatale, and conventional film noir cinematography and storytelling.