![]() What these authors and films have in common is a cynical and bleak outlook with a tough main character. Cain wrote many books that were eventually turned into film noir. Writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. They brought along expressionist lighting, which used artificial studio lighting to create shadows, oblique and vertical lines, and irregular light patterns.įinally, Schrader says that the fourth element was the hard-boiled tradition. Their main influence in film noir is with aesthetics. During the 1930s, especially after the rise of Nazism, many German and Eastern Europeans immigrated to the United States and helped influence the American film industry. ![]() The third element was the German influence. They wanted to be watching actors in actual locations, such as Norma Desmond's mansion (which unfortunately was demolished in 1957 for the headquarters of the Getty Foundation) and Joe Gillis' apartment in Sunset Boulevard. In addition, ordinary Americans were not as interested in seeing the studio built streets they had been watching since the 1930s. Americans wanted a harsh view of society from the perspective of everyday people on the streets. Post-war Americans wanted an authenticity that was lacking in earlier high-class melodramas. ![]() These films, such as The Blue Dahlia, where a sailor comes home to find his wife kissing another man and their son died due to her drunkenness, showed the cynicism felt by some Americans. The films of the 1940s reflected the disillusionment felt in the country, especially with the soldiers returning home and women losing their jobs at the end of the war. It was beginning in the early 1940s, that film noir, such as The Maltese Falcon and Laura, began to appear. Many of the films during the 1930s and early 1940s were propaganda-type films that were designed to cheer people's bleak outlook during the hard times of the Depression and World War II. As Paul Schrader points out in his essay Notes on Film Noir, "film of urban nightlife is not necessarily a film noir, and a film noir need not necessarily concern crime and corruption." So then how can someone identify a film noir? Schrader contends that there were four elements present in Hollywood in the 1940s that resulted in film noir and that those four elements can also describe or define the topic.Īccording to Schrader, the first element was World War II and post-war disillusionment. In addition, film noir cannot be defined only by characteristics in the film, because while there are certain traits that are present in many films, they are not necessarily. Some argue that it is a genre, while others contend that film noir is more of a tone or mood in the film, and some contend that film noir is more of a visual style. In the literature about film noir, you will have as many descriptions about the topic as there are critics and film historians writing about it. These movies included The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1944). ![]() The actual words come from French and mean "black cinema." It was in France during the post-war years that the term was used to describe a certain set of Hollywood films that were saturated with a darkness and cynicism that was not seen before.
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