Film Noir: A Style Spanning Genres Essay

The setting of film noir is usually quite cheap. This is used effectively to actually show the dark tacky parts of society where film-noir usually takes place. There is not a lot of light in these films and they are often set on location. A seedy underworld is often present in film-noir movies, where all the bad or undesirable parts of society are exposed. Things like drugs, alcohol, murder and corruption.

     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.

Chinatown is based on Roman Polanski’s lifeworks. Polanski’s goal is to emphasizes the meaning of how cinematography is made, and how it inspires by understanding the concept of setting, lighting, and how the image is captured. This film was released in 1974 by director of Roman Polanski to focus on private investigator J.J. Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson to investigate the elements behind the truth. Polanski’s goal is to emphasize the audience to give an ominous feeling of the main character, J.J. Gittes and his point of view by showing in color instead of black and white pictures. Due to these reasons, Polanski wanted to use Panavision to give a flawed vision about the past, which the story is set in the years of 1937. Polanski states, “a traditional detective story with a new, modern shape” for Paramount picture. (1) This paper focuses on the film Chinatown which is neo-noir, not only because of the setting, but the concept of cinematography that connects duplicates occurrences together that describe three categories: background of the cinematographer, point of view of the main character, and the interpretation of the ending scenes.

Film Noir was extremely trendy during the 1940’s. People were captivated by the way it expresses a mood of disillusionment and indistinctness between good and evil. Film Noir have key elements; crime, mystery, an anti-hero, femme fatale, and chiaroscuro lighting and camera angles. The Maltese Falcon is an example of film noir because of the usage of camera angles, lighting and ominous settings, as well as sinister characters as Samuel Spade, the anti-hero on a quest for meaning, who encounters the death of his partner but does not show any signs of remorse but instead for his greed for riches.

David Bordwell wrote his article ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film’ in an effort to convey the main idea that “art cinema” can be considered as a distinct mode of film practice, through its definite historical existence alongside other cinematic modes, set of formal conventions, and implicit viewing procedures. Rather than searching for the source of the art, or what drives the art in film, Bordwell compares art cinema to the classical narrative cinema, and highlights the differences in narrative structure. Bordwell makes the assumption that it defined itself against the classical narrative mode; especially with the way it deals with space, time, and the cause and effect link of events.

In contemporary film making, “Hollywood-ization” generally refers to the re-creation of a classic work in a form more vulgar and sexually explicit than the original in an effort to boost movie attendance. After all, sex and violence sell. However, from the mid-1930’s to the 1950’s, “Hollywood-ization” referred to the opposite case where controversial books had to be purified to abide by the Production Code of 1934.[1] This occurred to many of James Cain’s novels as they moved from text to the genre of “film noir.” As has been said about Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, “The property, bought several years ago, was kept in the studio’s archives until now

Film Noir, a term coined by the French to describe a style of film characterized by dark themes, storylines, and visuals, has been influencing cinematic industries since the 1940’s. With roots in German expressionistic films and Italian postwar documentaries, film noir has made its way into American film as well, particularly identified in mob and crime pictures. However, such settings are not exclusive to American film noir. One noteworthy example is Billy Wilder’s film Sunset Boulevard, which follows the foreboding tale of Joe Gillis, the desperate-for-success protagonist, who finds himself in the fatal grips of the disillusioned femme fatale Norma Desmond. Not only does the storyline’s heavy subject matter and typical character

Film Noir was a result of it's time - The war had just ended and It was time where prohibition had influenced an abundance in crime and corruption. Film noir serves to highlight the darkest aspects of human beings. ‘Society is making the machinery of it's own destruction.

This paper will discuss various elements of mise-en-scene, specifically; character development, lighting, performance, costume, makeup in the film "Casablanca".(Michael Curtiz,1942) The setting of the story sets the tone for the entire film. Shots of tanks and planes show the violence of war that coincides with the cutthroat city that is Casablanca. From there, those sentiments are reinforced when a man is shot in the street while another man pick pockets someone whom is distracted. The mood of the movie stays on the dark side of things when we enter Rick's Café, where we meet our protagonist played by Humphrey Bogart. In this scene we are treated to the jaded portrayal of night club owner. We see his utter disregard for a French woman

Being one of the world’s most popular art forms, it was inevitable that these archetypes would find their way into film as well. In this essay I will argue that the

audience) that he will wait in a café until he finds her. The café he

What makes for a classic Hollywood film? Increasingly, films have evolved to the point where the standard by which one calls a “classic Hollywood film” has evolved over time. What one calls a classic film by yesterday’s standards is not the same as that of today’s standards. The film Casablanca is no exception to this. Although David Bordwell’s article, “Classical Hollywood Cinema” defines what the classical Hollywood film does, the film Casablanca does not exactly conform to the very definition that Bordwell provides the audience with in his article. It is true that the film capers closely to Bordwell’s definition, but in more ways than not, the film diverges from Bordwell’s definition of the typical Hollywood film.

The film is about a group of 5 people fighting to find and keep the

The romantic idea of the auteur is described by film theoretician, André Bazin, observing the film form as an idealistic phenomenon. Through the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard reference, Bazin primarily refers to an essential literary and romantic conception of the artist as central. He considers the relationship between film aesthetics and reality more important than the director itself and places cinema above paintings. He described paintings as a similar ethical creation to film stating a director ‘can be valued according to its measurements and the celebrity of the signature, the objective quality of the work itself was formerly held in much higher esteem.’ (Bazin, 1967: 250). Bazin contemplates the historical and social aspects that indeed hinder a director’s retribution to their own personalised film, thus en-companying their own ideological judgement upon the world ‘more so in cinema where the sociological and historical cross-currents are countless.’ (Bazin, 1967: 256)

Film Noir as a genre is set in a specific period of time. It is also a genre that is considered to be related to a specific society - that of America from 1940-1958. Film Noir as a genre is a term that French critic Nino Frank coined to describe the new “film movement” emerging from Hollywood in the 1940’s, which appeared to be black and white, crime and detective films. But these two prominent characteristics do not form the genre alone. Stylistic film features such as mood, style and tone are very eminent in Film Noir however it was not always considered as a film genre, but this is what makes the film genre so distinctive. Film Noir was a “new movement” or cycle of films as it consisted of expressionistic lighting techniques such as low