Film Noir: Semantic And Syntactic Conventions

Film noir, also known as “black film” in French, was a trend in films at around the 1940s to the late 1950s. Noir films were usually filmed in black and white with stories based around crime featuring characters such as a detective and a femme fatale. Film noir mixed these stories with filmic elements such as expressionistic lighting, shadows and odd camera angles to create dark and mysterious environments. However, some say today that film noir is not a genre but a type of style of film, which one it is a matter of debate. First of all, what is genre? Genre is created around certain conventions within a film to create an emotional response. Genre can be defined in three different ways and this is through the semantics, syntactic and pragmatic

Simply put the semantics of a film are elements such as costume, acting, cinematography etc. Whereas syntactic focuses more on the narrative elements of the film by putting the semantics together. Through these conventions we can determine if a certain film is indeed a film noir. Trying to choose a genre for a film can be limiting however and can sometimes limit the creativity of a film due to guidelines genres can create. Giving a film a genre can sometimes help with determining what elements need to be thought about when creating the film. However, because of this, filmmakers might be forced to stay away from new concepts and can limit what creativity filmmaker’s may have. This case study will go over those problems and discuss how they can specifically affect the film noir

This can either be seen as a good or bad thing. There are many classic noir films out that to be watched and films of today take the conventions used in film noir to help make their films great. Through the use of semantic and syntactic conventions of genre we can create films with guidelines to help make sure an audience will know what they are going to watch. However, this can impact the creativity of the maker. There are people out there wanting more noir films but unfortunately they aren’t as popular as they once were. Perhaps the standard of filmmaking today has looked past the older techniques used in film noir. In the end, filmmakers learnt a lot from the genre and are putting them to good use and the classics will always be