Conventional Film Noir: The Rebirth To A Genre

The Rebirth to a Genre

Conventional film noir has been disputed since its establishment of whether it is a genre, a period of films, or just aesthetic elements in certain scenes. These disputes have come to no avail, as no consensus has ever been reached. During the 1940’s film noir was a core audience draw and produced majority of the titles until the mid 1950’s. Writers and directors such as Paul Schrader and Raymond Borde suggest that film noir “fulfilled its role in 1955” and ultimately “died in 1959” (EBSCO WILL.) I will argue that neo-noir is a collection of films, post 1964, that replicate the themes found in investigative crime films previously known as noir. Neo-noir films contain new visual elements such as color movies, and

Violence is an extremely emphasized theme in this film, but especially with any noir film. Most of the classic noir films would show the violence off screen and had to follow very strict guidelines and rules set by the Production Code or the Hays Code. For many directors, especially noir directors, the guidelines “tried to stretch the code to its limits, if not defying it outright, especially in their use of sexual innuendoes, risqué costumes, and implicitly immoral characters” (UND.) After the 1960’s many directors didn’t follow this code, and by the time the Coen brothers made their film the rules were, to the 1940’s standard, nonexistent. For the neo-noir film, the hard-boiled character of the past is now thrown into many different perspectives. Starting with the pure hard-boiled villain. In No Country for Old Men, Chigurh is a hitman who is “the personification of morality and violence” in the film (eds.) He is a character who portrays from the outside a cold, confident, and collected person. The oly difference from a traditional hard boiled