Week 16

Question 1

What is Film Noir?

Answer 1

-sometimes designates a period in American cinema history, from the early 1940s through the late 1950s
-The phrase also often refers to a cinematic genre or subgenre
-Also used to denote a cinematic style

Question 2

Where did “film Noir” first get its name?

Answer 2

The label was applied in hindsight; it emerged first not among filmmakers but critics, first in France, and later in USA.

Question 3

Paris 1946, and Film Noir

Answer 3

-Sudden availability of American films in postwar France
-Hollywood producing roughly 450 films per year around 1940
-French cinephiles given unprecedented opportunity to view many US films all at once
-Began to recognize recurring patterns and structures.

Question 4

Formal and Thematic Characteristics

Answer 4

-Most are crime films (but other genres use the noir style)
-Moral ambiguity
Structural complexity
-Flashbacks, voice-over narration common
-Sexual suggestiveness (within the bounds of the Production Code)

Question 5

Stylistic Characteristics

Answer 5

-Urban settings are typical
-Dark, shadowy streets
-The city as place of danger, corruption
-Visual techniques meant to create a sense of anxiety, claustrophobia or entrapment
-Night-time cinematography
-High contrast (low-key lighting)
-Deep shadows
-Oblique angles
-Snappy, ironic dialogue

Question 6

Film Noir’s Literary Antecedents

Answer 6

-American “hard-boiled” fiction

Question 7

Film Noir’s Cinematic Antecedents

Answer 7

-German Expressionist cinema
-Effects of lighting and shadow
-Oblique camera angles
-Style conveyed dread, anxiety

Question 8

The Noir Hero/Anti-Hero

Answer 8

-Morally ambiguous figure
-Often half-lit, a shadow figure
-Frequently mistreats or ignores the women in his life
-Becomes involved with dangerous “Femme Fatale”

Question 9

The Noir Heroine/ Anti-Heroine: The Femme Fatale

Answer 9

-Contributes to distinctive noir eroticism
-Beautiful, powerful, destructive
-In charge of her own sexuality
-Often wields phallic symbols (guns, cigarettes) with confidence, typical of male characters
-Active not passive

Question 10

Noir & Postwar America

Answer 10

-A crisis of masculinity
Men, returning from war, trying to adjust to a new male identity.
The Cold War
-suspicion, fear, paranoia

Question 11

Noir & Existentialism

Answer 11

-The world is ambiguous, indifferent, and absurd
-No absolute meaning or moral standards
-We must create meaning through our choices and actions- through how we choose to exist.
-Moral ambiguity
Perceptual ambiguity
-no “all knowing witnesses”
-Human actors defined by fate