WHAT IS FILM NOIR?
It was created on the critic’s page, not the sound stage. American movies were scarce in World War II Europe. Suddenly, a backlog of productions from the early 1940s crowded French screens, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1944). Post-war French critics were stunned. These were dramatically different from the productions Hollywood had been churning out. The content was somber, steeped in fatalism and sensuous cravings. Characters were complex, morally compromised and unpredictable. Urban nightscapes served as backdrops. Shadow-heavy cinematography created gloomy tones. A far cry from the polished optimism or one-dimensional crime sagas associated with standard Hollywood fare.
In 1946, critic Nino Frank published an article in L’Écran français where he used the term “film noir” - literally “black film” - to describe this body of American work. French critics embraced the intuition, emphasizing the fatalistic bleakness and psychological tension, which blended well with the existential angst of leading French literati. Many regarded the cinematic style as uniquely American and a critique of its own society. While not anointing a new genre, European intellectuals defined a distinct tonality and style of storytelling - a way of seeing the world. “Film noir” was a critical interpretation, not a self-conscious movement. "I never heard that expression film noir when I made Double Indemnity,” said Director Billy Wilder. “I just made pictures I would have liked to see." Marie Windsor, a “femme fatale” actress in many a dark movie including The Narrow Margin and The Killing, remarked: “I didn’t know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting."
The style generated an action-set of archetypes: the tough-as-nails detective, the femme fatal, the anti-hero, the innocent bystander swept into Kafkaesque nightmares, the corrupt official, sinister gangsters, and hardened cops, all wandering through a maze of fate, betrayal, ambiguity, and, as always, lust.
It was not until well after noir’s classic heyday that American film writers, who were still apt to call these works “melodramas” or “hard-boiled” crime stories or “horror” thrillers, embraced the concept. Writer/Director Paul Schrader’s seminal 1972 essay "Notes on Film Noir" is considered a critical milestone. Not only was the idea of film noir a retrospective, but a delayed one in its own birthplace.
The movement had its early origins in “German Expressionist” cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, regarded as “proto noir.” With the nation reeling from defeat and destruction after the First World War, avant-garde filmmakers there produced narratives simmering with emotional turmoil and social indictments. Their “civilized” world was ambiguous, ominous, hanging by a thread. Expressionism as an artistic movement urged artists to channel deep emotions, not strive to replicate reality. Add to that subversive idea the equally subversive idea that an unpredictable and sinister “subconscious” can control behavior. Film became a dynamic new medium to channel all this dark energy. Reality could be depicted from inside the mind. Dream sequences and flashbacks were woven into narratives. Shadowy cinematography, called chiaroscuro, used lighting techniques to cast moody, suspenseful atmospheres.
Films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ (1920), Nosferatu (1922), Dr Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and M (1931) presented a warped world of doubts and dreams, a volatile cityscape haunted by depraved characters hiding behind social veils. A culture where ordinary people could be dangerous, even killers. The epic Metropolis (1927) gathered all this dissonance in a dystopian spectacle of the future. During the growing Nazi threat in Europe, some of the best German Expressionist film makers and technicians fled to Hollywood, including Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Otto Preminger, and Robert Siodmak. They brought the cinematic style with them.
The Germans invented it, the French defined it, but Americans made film noir a national symbol.
