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FILM NOIR: Outline beginning noir: genre, series, mode noir: red guts noir: stylistics the Code! lit. origins women in film noir a critique & revival Film Noir (1941 ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: FILM NOIR:


1
  • FILM NOIR

2

Article by John Belton Presentation
by Evan Mays

3
Outline
  • beginning
  • noir genre, series, mode
  • noir red guts
  • noir stylistics
  • the Code!
  • lit. origins
  • women in film noir
  • a critique
  • revival

4
Film Noir (1941-1958) Black film.
  • Uniquely American term coined by 2 French film
    critics. Noirs roots are pulp fiction the
    wartime postwar despair n alienation
    that arose as America adjusted
    to a new social
    political reality.
  • Unsettled audiences by violation
    of traditional narrative stylistic
    practices which orient stabilize
    spectators. Dominated by crime,
    corruption, cruelty a
    seemingly unhealthy
    interest in the erotic.

5
Film Noir as Genre
  • Genre (from the French) kind, type or category
    of phenomenon or particular thing in cinema used
    to designate various categories of motion picture
    production.
  • A of recent scholars approach noir thus,
    discussing it in terms of iconography, fixed
    character types predictable narrative patterns.

6
Film Noir as Series
  • Certain characters, narrative situations,
    thematic concerns appear repeatedly in noir, but
    these elements play against audience
    expectations also, noir crosses over traditional
    genre boundaries. Because of this some critics
    see film noir as a series or cycle, like an
    aesthetic movement.

7
Film Noir as Series
  • Producers, directors
    screenwriters of 40s
    50s noirs, unlike
    genre filmmakers, do
    not deliberately set out
    to make noir as
    no body of set
    convention exists
    to follow.
  • The audiences who see films noirs do not view
    them as they do conventional genre pictures. That
    is, they do not look at them in relation to a
    fixed system of prior expectations.

8
Film Noir as Series
  • Noirs rely upon identifiable
    character types
    conventionalized narrative
    patterns. But that which is
    generic in film noir is
    that which is not noir.
  • A schizophrenic nature
    noir is not a genre, yet
    every film noir is also a
    genre film. What makes these films noir
    is the similar, transgeneric attitude they take
    towards any particular genre.

9
Film Noir as Mode
  • Noir as specific emotional reaction produced by
    certain films noir as affective
    phenomena. Noir for a moment is film
    noir.
  • Noir as a description of tone,
    attitude, moodnot so much a genre as a
    modea particular way in which genre
    information is conveyed.
  • However, traditional modes do not
    have temporal boundaries.

10
Film Noir as All?
  • Both a style a bundle of thematic concerns,
    film noir initially seems to be a phenomenon that
    could appear at any moment in time. But, as an
    aesthetic movement, it is necessarily grounded in
    a particular historical periodthat of wartime
    postwar America.
  • Noir is part genre, part series, part mode.
  • P.S. Its all about disturbance in the end

11
Red Guts of Film Noir
  • Aesthetically, noir relies on
  • shadowy, low-key lighting
  • deep-focus cinematography
  • distorting, wide-angle lenses
  • sequence shots
  • disorienting mise-en-scene
  • tension-inducing, oblique vertical
    compositional lines

12
  • jarring juxtapositions between shots involving
    extreme changes in camera angle/screen size
  • claustrophobic framing
  • romantic, voice-over narration
  • a complex narrative structure, characterized
    by flashbacks and/or a convoluted temporal
    sequencing of events

13
  • Thematically, noir grapples w/existential issues
    of
  • the futility of individual action
  • the alienation, loneliness isolation of the
    individual w/in industrialized, mass society
  • the problematic choice between
    being nothingness
  • the absurdity, meaninglessness
    purposelessness of life
  • the arbitrariness of social justice, which
    results in individual despair, leads to
    chaos, violence paranoia.

14
Red Guts of Film Noir
  • Noir heroes do not need to be detectives. Often,
    they are merely antisocial loners. But even the
    gainfully employed are subject to a certain
    deadpan, existential angst, especially given
    their relatively faceless anonymity w/in a
    larger, dehumanizing work environment.
  • Why do you think some scholars consider the most
    existential of all film noir heroes to be the
    amnesiac?

15
Noir Stylistics Shadow of the 30s
  • Narrative linearity of C. H. C. gives way to
    narrative disjunction, fragmentation,
    disorientation.
  • Soft, evenly distributed high-key lighting
    yields to harsh, low-key lighting obscures the
    action, deglamorizes the star, reduces actors
    to shadowy formal elements embedded within
    overall design of the noirs composition.

16
Noir Stylistics Shadow of the 30s
  • Carefully constructed sense of space disappears
    replaced by wide-angle cinematography distorts
    space, disorients viewer.
    Conventional eye- level camera
    positions give way to extreme
    low-/high-level perspective assaults the
    viewers complacency.
  • Every violation of norm marks an
    intrusive intervention between
    spectator, exposition foregrounds
    narrative form making it visible.

17
Noir Stylistics Shadow of the 30s
  • When the staple of the industry the film most
    frequently identified with everyday motion
    picture entertainment, the genre film, developed
    psychotic tendencies, audiences of the time new
    something was wrong more so, they felt it.

18
Noir and the Production Code
  • American films of mid- to late 30s rarely dealt
    with taboo subjects. Noir frequently does,
    resulting in amazing displays of narrative
    contortions in order to allude to prohibited
    material w/out directly violating the Code!
  • Violence takes place off screen its intensity
    amplified by disjunctive edits /or sound
    effects.
  • Homosexuality prominent plot motive for a of
    novels turned noirs onscreen, motive displaced,
    desexualizedlays bare deep cultural fears of it.

19
Noir and the Production Code
  • Relaxation of Code in late 1950s advent of
    ratings system in late 1960s paves way for a new
    era of explicitness in 1970s.
  • Subject matter sensational, presentation
    neither disturbed nor disturbing as classically
    direct as any of Hollywoods 1930s films.
  • Ease w/which once taboo material dealt w/in
    liberated climate of 70s distinguishes
    authentic film noirs of the 40s 50s from
    pseudo-noirs of the 1970s onwards.

20
Noir and the Production Code
  • Remember !!! The Production Code played a crucial
    role in creating noir. Subsequent changes in this
    Code result in the production of films that are
    decidedly less noir.

21
Literary origins of Film Noir
  • In postwar era mistaken belief arises that
    simple world of prewar America could be
    recreated. Realization that this was a delusion
    influences world-weary cynicism of film noir,
    the sense of frustration experience of
    disempowerment at its center.
  • Americas innocence was lost. Noir suggests it
    was lost long before war, that it was more than
    , jobs that were lost during Great Depression.

22
Noirs Literary Origins
  • Unlike English detective fiction, features
    proletarian tough guy living on fringe of
    criminal world. Relies only upon animal
    cunning, dogged perseverance, physical stamina
    brute force to solve his cases.
  • Noir heroes, detective or not, are weak
    intellects. They attempt to make up for
    this failing with verbal wit. The writer of
    detective fiction the detective hero both
    control their worlds by controlling language.

23
Literary origins of Film Noir
  • Content style of American hard-boiled novels
    introduced new tradition of realism to genre of
    detective novel. Characterized by shift in
    detectives class technique, milieu, language.
  • Contemporary America an urban, industrialized
    landscape of those bound to naturalistic drives.
  • Boys in the back room, as Edmund Wilson called
    Black Mask school of writers of pulp detective
    fiction, inspired by Émile Zola, other 19th
    Century naturalists matter-of-fact depiction of
    decadence corruption.

24
Women in Film Noir
  • All weakness is associated with the feminine.

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26
Women in Film Noir
  • Women the feminine a threat on two
    frontssocioeconomic psychoanalytic.
  • Socioeconomic (1) changing status of American
    women during war/postwar period challenges
    patriarchy entry into workforce takeover of
    trad. male roles further violates fundamental
    order of sexual relations.

27
Women in Film Noir
  • Changes threaten traditional values
    centered in the institution of family.
  • Noir registers this anti-feminist
    backlash by providing pictures of a
    postwar America where there is no
    family or where
    family exists chiefly as a
    (-) phenomenon characterized as a claustrophobic,
    emasculating trap or a bankrupt system of
    perfunctory relationships, featuring murderous
    wives corrupt children.

28
Women in Film Noir
  • Leaving the private sphere (home family) to
    enter the public sphere of work, women, it is
    assumed, have abandoned the domestic needs of
    sweethearts, husbands, children.
  • Noir dramatizes the consequences of this neglect,
    transforming women into willful creatures intent
    on destroying both their mates the sacred
    institutions of the family.

29
Women in Film Noir
  • C. H. C. was at great pains to shield the
    family from the world of crime. Traditional
    genre films routinely oppose the sacred
    space of the family to that
    of the world outside.
  • In noir, the world of crime
    that of the family overlap.
    Crimes moved from outside
    the family to within, the
    impetus for crime
    comes as often from
    women as men.

30
  • Psychoanalytic (2) the image of women on-screen
    functions to recall, for the male spectator, the
    castration anxiety he experiences on first
    perceiving sexual difference as a child (Mulvey).

31
Women in Film Noir
  • C. H. C. supports male dominance its attempts
    to alleviate castration anxiety by
    disavowal the females castrated
    status is denied.
  • This disavowal achieved by fetishization
    and/or devaluation of female a way to erase her
    threat.

32
Women in Film Noir
  • Fetishization image of
    women is overvalued
    thru use of techniques
    that transform her into
    spectacle lack which
    she signifies is in this
    way filled in,
    replaced by her
    objectification.
  • Devaluation women seen as guilty objecther
    castration is a symbol of her punishment.

33
A Critique of Populism
  • Destabilization of sex. relationships in
    noir symptom of larger social disorder.
  • Prior to WW II, American society held together by
    various myths that structured a national identity
    rested upon principles of Jeffersonian
    democracy.
  • Democratic promise of cheap or free land
    motivation for western settlement, which became a
    realization of Americas manifest destiny.

34
A Critique of Populism
  • Closing frontier, exhaustion of free land,
    rapid industrialization of America in latter 19th
    Century begins slow process of social change.
  • By 1920, for first time in American history, more
    people in urban than rural areas. Millions of
    laborers white-collar workers live new reality
    but subscribe to old, preindustrial-era myths.
  • Only after Depression do myths begin to waiver.

35
A Critique of Populism
  • Film noir reflects transitional stage in American
    ideology as American identity shifts from 19th
    Century, preindustrial, agrarian prototypes to
    20th Century models, which acknowledge the
    nations transformation to a mass, consumer
    society the industrialized corporate state.
  • As a movement, noir reflects a chaotic period
    where old myths begin to crumble no new myths
    exist to take their placethe period in which
    national identity is in a crisis.

36
A Critique of Capra

37
A Critique of Populism
  • Example of old myths in Capra films epitomize
    classicism, order of pre-noir wood cinema,
    celebrate 19th Century agrarianism. Stalwart
    protagonists fight the 20th Century evils that
    threaten populist spirit of small-town America.
  • Nightmare inversion of Capras ideal American
    community in Its a Wonderful Life illustrates
    noirs subversive
    relationship to C. H. C. which attempts to
    repress the very forces to which noir gives
    voice. However, turns out It was just a dream. .
    .

38
Film Noir the Undercurrent ends
  • Noir does not dismantle American myth or identity
    in the 40s proves only one current in flood of
    films reaffirming traditional values. By the late
    50s, advent of TV virtually destroys low-budget,
    B-film industry (provided bulk of noirs). New
    mood reflects postwar prosperity at decades end
    Americans turn from depressed thoughts of
    technological blight to utopian visions of
    machine-age paradises, filled w/labor-saving
    devices.
  • Film noirs cease to speak to the needs some feel
    for films that address their existential malaise.

39
Vietnam, etc. Noirs Revisited
  • Trauma of Depression shell-shock of war
    years has been treated, cured. Supposedly.
  • However, in the 70s Americans rediscover
    noir of the 40s 50s becomes the source
    material that prompts new understanding
    of postwar American reality.
  • In rediscovering it Americans locate a more
    modern body of myths thru which they might come
    to terms with contemporary American experience.

40
End (remember)
  • Film noir emerges as a cycle or series of films.
    It consists of a finite group of motion pictures
    made during a specific historical period which
    share certain aesthetic traits thematic
    concerns.

41
  • By Evan Mays
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