Film Noir Analysis

Film noir encapsulates a two decade cycle of formalistic style Hollywood film making; mass producing detective crime movies with seedy themes that reflect the depressed mood of post World War II America. Billy Wilder's 1944 classic, “Double Indemnity” epitomizes this cinematic cultural genre and mirrors the modernist crisis of cultural alienation, disorientation and disengagement articulated in both artistic narrative and film form. Others view film noir more as a movement in film rather than a genre of stylish Hollywood movies that stretched from the early 1940’s through the late 1950s.
Simply put, film noir is a cinematic phrase in Hollywood that describes a genre of crime movie film-making characterized by low budget, low-key lighting,

Such contemporary color films cast in the classical noir mode are termed “neo noir.” Those who ascribe to this belief of noir as a movement, negate narrowing “descriptors” of noir as only characterized by black and white movies rife with crime plots and femme fatale cast in urban settings. Thus we can venture to conclude that cinematographic Noir, black and white film or in color, is more reflective of a mood, a dark mood that symbolizes themes of moral degradation rather than a specific set of descriptors.
The name noir, which was not popularized in America until the 1970’s, was coined from the French word ‘black’ by French film critics who had sensed a conspicuous change in the nature of American films just after World War II. This change manifest in the post-war gloom that marked America and Europe’s bleak pessimism during and after the war was projected in dark, harsh unforgiving films. No longer did cinema halls showcase the happy-ever-after optimistic feel-good musicals and movies of the pre-war