Film Noir as Post-war American Film Genre

Screening:  Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944, 106 min)

What is Film Noir?

Film noir, unlike other genres of American films, was not an industrially-defined type of American cinema. Typically, American film genres were coined by the industry to identify a film within a certain type during a marketing campaign. Genres which were industrially defined include Musicals, Westerns, and Women’s Films. On the other hand, film noir was critically defined by a number of French cinephiles after the war, in reference to a number of films that had been made during World War II (including films like Citizen Kane and Double Indemnity). Due to World War II, French filmgoers could not see American films between 1940 and 1945. Thus, a flood of American films saturated French film audiences immediately after the war. Unlike late 1930s films, the last American films that these audiences had seen, war-time and immediate post-war American films featured an aesthetic, narrative, and thematic "darkness" (expressionist lighting, stories of death and murder, and thematics of existential angst) that was a revelation to French critics used to tame Classical Hollywood stylistics and narratives. These critics coined the phrase, film noir, or dark film, to label these films.

An Industrial History of Film Noir

The kinds of films that the French critics eventually labelled noir emerged out of the economic conditions produced by World War II. As Hollywood studios were forced to conserve on sets and lighting costs, they produced a modified Classical Hollywood style in which high-key three-point lighting was replaced by low-key, shadowy lighting strategies designed to hide the sparse mise-en-scene. In addition, narratives responded to a world at war by producing pessimistic stories about death and betrayal.

The Aesthetic Features of Film Noir

1. Mise-en-scene

• Rain-swept streets depict a moral climate in need of purgation.
• CLIP: The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944): rain-swept streets after the murder

2. Lighting

• Expressionist, low-key lighting strategies hides sparse sets and contributes to the presentation of a world gone horribly wrong.
• CLIP: Scarlett Street (Fritz Lang, 1945): Edward G. Robinson hearing dead victims’ voices in his head causes him to go insane

3. Camerawork

• Aggressive camera angles and movement emphasizes a threatening and chaotic world.
• CLIP: Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946): Opening (Ballan meets Johnny)

Narrative Features of Film Noir

1. Labyranthine Narrative Structure

• The films typically feature a set of flashbacks designed both to activate viewer interest in the solution of the crime, but also to reveal a world that doesn’t quite make sense.
• CLIP: The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946): Opening (the murder of the Swede)

2. Round-about Dialogue

• The films often highlight double entendres which reference sex and violence. In doing so, the films often overcame the Production Code. For example, in Mildred Pierce, Wally Fay’s line-- "I’ve never been [Veda’s] father’--as he knocks on wood, would never have been allowed under a literal application of the Production Code, and yet it’s meaning (that Wally and Mildred did have sex while she was still married to Bert) is clear.
• CLIP: Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944): The Anklet Scene

3. Existential Endings

• The films often feature nihilistic endings which invoke the inevitibility of fate over human free will.
• CLIP: The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946): Ending (John Garfield set free for the murder he did commit and executed for the one he didn’t)

Ideological Features of Film Noir

1. Film Noir is an incredibly unstable ideological phenomenon.

• In some respects, noir is extremely conservative. For example, noir works to vilify the empowered women through the femme fatale stereotype.
• CLIP: Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954): Gloria Grahame tries to convince Glenn Ford to murder husband

2. Noir as Progressive:  Violent Masculinity Critiqued

• On the other hand, noir films, especially from the later, baroque period, offer devastating critiques of a culture built upon a masculinity whose hyper-violence is horrifically destructive.
• CLIP: The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953): Coffee scalding scene

3. Noir as Progressive:  Global Violence Critiqued

• This destructiveness is often linked to larger cultural issues, such as the ability of atomic weaponry to erase all of humanity.
• CLIP: Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955): Ending (the destruction of the beach house)
• This is a perfect example of noir’s nihilistic, existential vision. Such late noirs foresee destruction as the only legacy of the post-war world.

Screening:  Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1949, 80 min)

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This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman