During the 1940’s and 1950’s, a new film genre called Film Noir became popularized. Film Noir translated from French means “black film” which is what these movies were. Some of the characteristics movies in this genre shared were that they were shot in black and white, there was no happy ending, the protagonist was often a war veterans, the plot was ruled on fate, emotions were usually raw, and the theme dealt with the darker side of human nature. One of the most popular film noir’s that was ever created was called Detour. Detour was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer in 1945. The film focuses on the protagonist Al—played by Tom Neal—who plays the piano for a local club in New York with his girlfriend Sue. Sue moves to Hollywood to pursue a career in acting while Al decides to hitchhike his way down to California in order to be with her. …show more content…
While hitchhiking to Hollywood, Al runs in a series of unfortunate events. First, he is picked up by a millionaire named bookie Charles Haskell Jr.—played by Edmund MacDonald—who usually gives hitchhikers rides. On the way to Hollywood, Haskell Jr. pops some pills in his mouth and lets Al drive his car while he sleeps. When it starts to rain, Al pulls over to put the roof on the car and he discovers that Haskell Jr. is dead. Fearful of the police, Al tosses Haskell Jr. on the side of the road and takes his identification and keeps driving until he meets another hitchhiker.
Al picks up another hitchhiker named Vera—played by Ann Savage—who recognizes the car and realizes that Al is not Haskell Jr. whom she got a ride from early from the same car. At the apartment that Vera rented for the both of them in Hollywood, she tries to blackmail Al by threatening to turn him in to police. As she runs to the bedroom, she wraps the phone cord around her neck while Al attempts to stop her from making the phone call by ripping apart the phone cord. When he opens the bedroom door, he realizes that he accidently strangled Vera by trying to rip apart the phone cord which was placed around her neck. He realizes that he has two murders on his hands, the second one being his fault. Detour fits into the film noir category because it contains many of the similar characteristics of other films in this category. This films cinematographer was Benjamin H. Kline, and to make this movie, he utilized natural light. Unlike in The Gold Rush by Charlie Chaplin, Kline did not use a spot light to make other characters seem lighter or
more important than other characters. Instead, Kline made all characters in the same lighting and took advantage of the shadows to make certain scenes more suspenseful. An example of this was when Al was banging Vera’s bedroom door; you could see Al’s shadow on the wall and could see how much force he was using to knock down the door and how erratic he was being. Also, in the final scenes when he finds out that he is responsible for two murders now, the camera zooms into his face and because of the shadows, all you can see if his eyes filled with sorrow and despair. Another reason why this film fits the film noir category is because one of its themes are the darker sides of human nature and uncertainty which is a true reflection of post-World War II. Detour focuses on the unfortunate events of Al. Al was just an ordinary man trying to go meet his girlfriend in Hollywood when he gets a ride with an man who falls ill and dies, and a girl he accidently strangles. Both of these events highlight that fact that Al was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and no matter what, he could not control the outcome of these events. This saying of “being in the wrong place at the wrong time” correlates to the general public’s opinion regarding World War II and many other wars; many wondered if our involvement in the war was really worth it since many of soldiers were getting killed. A minor detail that I noticed that could possibly show relationship between this film and post-war would be Al’s personality. In the film, Al was portrayed as an on-edge and an uncertain character. He would jump to conclusions like when he found Haskell Jr. dead, he assumed that the police would think that he was guilty, so he dumped the body. Another scene that stood out to me was when Al was in the diner and he was acting erratically when the other customer was playing music on the juke box and he told him to turn it off. Al’s personality could be related to the personality of returning war veterans. Often time, war veterans had PTSD which made they act suspicious or act erratically which was highlighted by Al in several scenes. Another scene that worked for me was the scene leading up to Vera’s accidental death. In this scene, we can see Vera being sweet and seductive to Al, and then switching to her drunk and destructive alter ego. She tricks Al into opening up the window while she runs to her bedroom with the phone and cord around her neck. In this scene, a cross cut is utilized to show what is occurring within the bedroom and outside the bedroom. Inside the bedroom, Vera lies on the bed with the phone cord loosely around her next. Outside of the room, we seen Al’s shadow dancing on the walls and his pounding the door frantically. At this point, the music score becomes louder to add more drama. Also, the camera zooms in to see Al really struggle to pull the phone cord from under the door. He then pushes down the door and enters when he hears no response from Vera. The music slows down as Al and the audience realize that Vera is dead. The audience would assume that Vera was strangled to death by Al pulling the phone cord from under the door, but according to the screenplay, it says that Vera was electrocuted. The audience would not have known this if they had not read the screenplay. While in the room, the camera scans Vera’s desk and goes in and out of focus as if the audience were looking through Al’s eyes and that he knows that too much of his evidence is in the room. The last shot taken of Al is him in a tavern where light is shown just on his eyes as if he were hiding in the darkness. I believe that the use of shadows, natural light, music, camera angles, and screenplay all contributed to making this scene extraordinary. Each of these tools helped create drama and helped add to the plot.
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.
Racist characteristics in films and stories are something that can be perceived in this generation, but was something that was normal and expected in the 1930’s. Sexuality and raciness were items that made films a commodity in the 30’s and King Kong uses both of these to attract a wide audience. These qualities are also a factor as to why King Kong remains a classic throughout the generations.
While there are many different ways to classify a Neo-noir film, Roman Polanski’s, Chinatown captures many. The 1974 movie consists of many of these elements, including both thematic and stylistic devices. One of the main themes of neo-noir film that is constant throughout the film is the deceptive plot that questions the viewers’ ideas and perceptions of what is actually happening in the film. Every scene of Chinatown leads to a twist or another turn that challenges the practicability of the film’s reality. All of the never-ending surprises and revelations lead up to the significant themes the movie is trying to convey in the conclusion of the film.
Films that are classified as being in the film noir genre all share some basic characteristics. There is generally a voice-over throughout the film in order to guide the audience's perceptions. These movies also involve a crime and a detective who is trying to figure out the truth in the situation. This detective usually encounters a femme fatale who seduces him. However, the most distinctive feature of the film noir genre is the abundance of darkness.
Alfred Hitchcock presents’ One More Mile To Go and The Twilight Zone’s The Hitch-Hiker share many similarities between their narratives. The most noticeable similarity would be the theme of their stories. Both of them involve characters who are driving alone, for the most part, along deserted roads, and who are afraid of something. However, these stories not only share a similar theme but also the elements that were chosen to represent these stories are very similar as well. I will be comparing and contrasting among the two film for the elements that support the narrative.
Film Noir is a genre of distinct and unique characteristics. Mostly prominent in the 40s and 50s, the genre rarely skewed from the skeletal plot to which all Film Noir pictures follow. The most famous of these films is The Big Sleep (1946) directed by Howard Hawks. This film is the go to when it comes to all the genre’s clichés. This formula for film is so well known and deeply understood that it is often a target for satire. This is what the Coen brothers did with 1998’s The Big Lebowski. This film follows to the T what Film Noir stands for.
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.
Janey Place and Lowell Peterson article “Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir” establishes noir as a visual style and not a ...
The film, Out in the Night documents a 2006 case in which a group of young African American lesbians were accused of gang assault and attempted murder. The film portrays how unconscious bias, institutional discrimination and racism contributed to the convictions of seven African American lesbian women. Three of the women pleaded guilty to avoid going to trial, but four did not. Renata Hill, Patreese Johnson, Venice Brown, and Terrain Dandridge maintained their innocence and each were charged with several years in prison. I cried through out the documentary because it dawned on me that it’s not safe for women, especially gay women of color. The four-minute incident occurred in Greenwich Village where Dwayne Buckle sexually and physically harassed
The French term, ‘Noir’ translates to ‘Black’ in English however we also use it describe a genre of film
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.
Film noir (literally 'black film,' from French critics who noticed how dark and black the looks and themes were of these films) is a style of American films which evolved in the 1940s. " The Internet Movie Database LTD. Film noir typically contains melancholy, and not so moral themes. Another characteristic of film noir is just because the main character has the title hero, that does not mean that he will always be alive at the end of the book, or that the hero is always "good." Marlowe in The Big Sleep is a prime example of this concept.
While all this was taking place on the other hand in France a new movement was surging of blanket term devised by critics for some of the French filmmakers of the late fifties and sixties who were impacted by the Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood films. It initially was never a movement which was officially planned, but the up surging filmmakers were being connected to it because of their self-conscious dismissal of classical filmmaking methods and their spirit of young iconoclasm which was a sample of the European art movies. Many filmmakers were involved with their work as they tried to involve the social and political turmoil’s of the era.
Moonlight is a motion picture with a tender, heartbreaking story of a young man's struggle to find himself, told across three chapters in his life as he experiences ecstasy, pain, and the beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality and dealing with his more difficult past. Moonlight describes a touching way of those moments, people and unknown forces that shape our lives and make us the way we are. A major theme of Moonlight is the black male identity and its interactions with sexual identity. The motion picture combines acceptance and love with pain and narrow-mindedness. In it’s simplicity the movie is a chronicle of the childhood, adolescence and burgeoning adulthood of a young black man growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami.
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...