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    Film Noir Characteristics

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    Debra Green
    The document discusses the film genre known as film noir. Film noir emerged in the late 1930s and 1950s as a reaction to the hardship of the Great Depression and World War II. It was influenced by German Expressionist films of the 1920s, which featured stark lighting schemes, dramatic shadows, and dark subject matter depicting crime and corruption. Like German Expressionism, film noir is typified by a low-key black-and-white visual style with high-contrast lighting that casts shadows on actors' faces. It also uses disorienting camera techniques and convoluted narratives involving flashbacks. Crime, especially murder, is a common plot element in film noir, which often depicts seedy urban settings.

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    Film Noir Characteristics

    Uploaded by

    Debra Green
    163 views2 pages
    The document discusses the film genre known as film noir. Film noir emerged in the late 1930s and 1950s as a reaction to the hardship of the Great Depression and World War II. It was influenced by German Expressionist films of the 1920s, which featured stark lighting schemes, dramatic shadows, and dark subject matter depicting crime and corruption. Like German Expressionism, film noir is typified by a low-key black-and-white visual style with high-contrast lighting that casts shadows on actors' faces. It also uses disorienting camera techniques and convoluted narratives involving flashbacks. Crime, especially murder, is a common plot element in film noir, which often depicts seedy urban settings.

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    The document discusses the film genre known as film noir. Film noir emerged in the late 1930s and 1950s as a reaction to the hardship of the Great Depression and World War II. It was influenced by German Expressionist films of the 1920s, which featured stark lighting schemes, dramatic shadows, and dark subject matter depicting crime and corruption. Like German Expressionism, film noir is typified by a low-key black-and-white visual style with high-contrast lighting that casts shadows on actors' faces. It also uses disorienting camera techniques and convoluted narratives involving flashbacks. Crime, especially murder, is a common plot element in film noir, which often depicts seedy urban settings.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    163 views2 pages

    Film Noir Characteristics

    Uploaded by

    Debra Green
    The document discusses the film genre known as film noir. Film noir emerged in the late 1930s and 1950s as a reaction to the hardship of the Great Depression and World War II. It was influenced by German Expressionist films of the 1920s, which featured stark lighting schemes, dramatic shadows, and dark subject matter depicting crime and corruption. Like German Expressionism, film noir is typified by a low-key black-and-white visual style with high-contrast lighting that casts shadows on actors' faces. It also uses disorienting camera techniques and convoluted narratives involving flashbacks. Crime, especially murder, is a common plot element in film noir, which often depicts seedy urban settings.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
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    Film Noir

    This term you will begin to study film genre. Film genre refers to a style of film that has a particular look or characteristics. The first film genre that you will study is Film Noir. Film Noir literally means film black. It come about as a reaction to the Great Depression and the 2nd world war. Two periods of time of great hardship and sadness.
    Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the late 1930s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography. German Expressionist films were prevalent in the 1920s. Amongst the best remembered are films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Weiner, 1920), Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922), Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927). These films were united by highly stylized visuals, strange asymmetrical camera angles, atmospheric lighting and harsh contrasts between dark and light. Shadows and silhouettes were an important feature of expressionism, to the extent that they were actually painted on to the sets in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
    The story lines of German expressionist films matched the visuals in terms of darkness and disillusionment. Often sombre in mood and featuring characters from a corrupt underworld of crime, the films dramatic effects produced motifs of claustrophobia and paranoia. The same words could be used to describe 1940s Hollywood film noir, a genre hugely influenced by German expressionism. Film noir is typified by Bogart and Bacall in films such as The Big Sleep. Fritz Lang himself also went on to make notable film noirs such as Fury and You Only Live Once. German Expressionism: The World of Light and Shadow Movie List ...

    Click on this link to read about and view many of these films.

    Visual Style. This refers to the look of a film.


    The low-key lighting schemes of many classic film noirs are associated with stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterninga style known as chiaroscuro (a term adopted from Renaissance painting). The shadows of Venetian blinds or banister rods, cast upon an actor, a wall, or an entire set, are an iconic visual in Film Noir. Characters' faces may be partially or wholly obscured by darknessa relative rarity in conventional Hollywood filmmaking. While black-and-white cinematography is considered by many to be one of the essential attributes of classic Noir. Film noir is also known for its use of low-angle, wide-angle, and skewed, or Dutch angle shots. Other devices of disorientation relatively common in film noir include shots of people reflected in one or more mirrors, shots through curved or frosted glass or other distorting objects (such as during the strangulation scene in Strangers on a Train), and special effects sequences of a sometimes bizarre nature. Night-for-night shooting, as opposed to the Hollywood norm of day-for-night, was often employed. From the mid-1940s forward, location shooting instead of shooting in a studio became increasingly frequent in noir.

    Structure and narration devices


    Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster were two of the most prolific stars of classic noir. The complex structure of Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) involves a real-time framing story, multiple narrators, and flashbacks within flashbacks. Film noirs tend to have unusually convoluted story lines, frequently involving flashbacks and other editing techniques that disrupt and sometimes obscure the narrative sequence. Framing the entire primary narrative as a flashback is also a standard device. Voiceover narration, sometimes used as a structuring device, came to be seen as a noir hallmark as well.

    Plots, characters, and settings.


    Crime, usually murder, is an element of almost all film noirs; in addition to standard-issue greed, jealousy is frequently the criminal motivation. A crime investigationby a private eye, a police detective (sometimes acting alone), or a concerned amateuris the most prevalent, but far from dominant, basic plot. In other common plots the protagonists are implicated in heists or con games, or in murderous conspiracies often involving adulterous affairs. False suspicions and accusations of crime are frequent plot elements, as are betrayals and double-crosses. Film noir is often associated with an urban setting, and a few citiesLos Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, in particularare the location of many of the classic films. Bars, lounges, nightclubs, and gambling dens are frequently the scene of action. The climaxes of a substantial number of film noirs take place in visually complex, often industrial settings, such as refineries, factories, trainyards, power plants.

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