Film Noir NOTES Flashcards
film noir means
(literally ‘black film or cinema’
film noir coined by
French film critics who noticed the
trend of how dark and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective
films released in France following the war
film noir period
evolved in the
1940s, became prominent in the post-war era, and lasted in a - classic period - until about
1960.
The criminal, violence or greed elements in film noir
are a
metaphoric symptom of society’s evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict.
Noirs were rooted in
German Expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s
moods of classic film noir
melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment,
disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt and paranoia.
classic noir characters
detectives or
private eyes, cops, gangsters, government agents, crooks, war veterans, petty criminals, and
murderers.
Film noir films (mostly shot in gloomy grays, blacks and whites) show
the dark and inhumane
side of human nature with cynicism and doomed love, and they emphasize the brutal,
unhealthy, seamy, shadowy, dark and sadistic sides of the human experience.
compositions often used
unbalanced
compositions
period that redid noir
’80s noir pirated previous movements and styles to build a new code of noir
style.
blue velvet & reestablished status quo in ’80s
The
reestablished status quo in ’80s noir included understanding, like Jeffrey’s suburban haze in
Blue Velvet, as states of living with corruption.
face-mask motif used in 80s noir
The mask is “revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the
mythical being it represents–even though everyone knows that a man made the mask and that
a man is wearing it”
80s Noir & the viewer
If the viewer “gets” the film, he or she
is not returned to the status quo of Reagan’s America because the viewer understands the
masks worn by the characters.
80s Noir & the femme fatale
The femme fatale was not prominent in ’80s noirs. She was a prominent character in soap
operas of the time, especially on primetime soaps
80s Noir replaced the broad-shouldered she-wolves of the forties and fifties (a bit threatening to men) w/ the
innocent, vulnerable sexuality of child-women
