While the traditions of classicism dominated the studio era in America, some filmmakers working within the industry attempted to subvert those traditions by turning to different kinds of stories. They were a part of the system, but they created films that undermined the classical tradition because they embraced stylistic intervention and denied audiences one of the most important of classical features: the happy ending. Though many different kinds of films attempted to subvert norms, some of the most important fall into a single category: film noir.
Film Noir
Because iconography can be hard to distinguish from genre conventions, it seems worth studying it in the context of another controversial subject in film history—the place of film noir. A label used after the fact to refer to a collection of films released between 1941-1959 (these are rough, but useful dates that nonetheless are imperfect), some critics believe that noir is a genre, carrying the typical conventions of both form and content that one might associate with more overt examples like musicals and Westerns. Others believe that noir is not a genre at all, but a style of filmmaking that individual directors can turn on and off at will. Still others believe that noir is less a genre or a style and more of a mood, a sensibility, a tone that infects films rather than a cohesive set of conventions and norms. In general, the noir-is-a-genre folks think there aren’t very many film noirs (maybe about twenty or twenty-five); the noir-is-a-style critics suggest there are somewhere around 300; and the noir-is-a-feeling people see noir just about everywhere. A study of its iconography, especially because noir is strongly associated with its visual sense, might help us understand both more fully.
Wherever you come down on it, one thing that can’t be disputed is that film noir was not considered a genre by its practitioners at the time they were making them. The term film noir was not applied by directors, studio chiefs, writers, or critics for much of the 1940s and early 1950s. It is not until the French critics Nino Frank (who coined it), and then Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, started using the term to describe the collection of dark films produced in Hollywood during that period that the phrase comes into common usage. Even after the term film noir became more common, few filmmakers actually used it themselves, preferring instead to think of their films as crime pictures, thrillers, or even dark melodramas. In essence, film noir is a critical term that was applied to these films after the fact. The classic period of noir is generally considered to have died out around 1959, but you can find films made after that date that certainly look and feel like noir. Here are some images from the classic noir tradition that offer a glimpse at how these films looked and felt, from The Maltese Falcon (1941, Huston, top left), Out of The Past (1947, Tourneur, top right), Criss Cross (1949, Siodmak, bottom left), and Kiss of Death (1947, Hathaway, bottom right).
Neo-Noir
However, noir was extraordinarily influential over later generations of filmmakers—indeed, noir is among the most influential film movements in history, despite its rather loose definition and disconnected filmmakers. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many filmmakers working in America begin to look back at the genres that proliferated during Classic Hollywood, taking their conventions as inspiration. In addition to Westerns, musicals, and other genres, many filmmakers draw upon noir films from the classic period; in these updates, usually called neo-noir, filmmakers are more consciously thinking about their films as belonging to that tradition. According to noir specialists Alain Silver and James Ursini, “From the late 1970s to present, in a ‘neo-noir’ period, many of the productions that again create the noir mood, whether in remakes or new narratives, have been undertaken by filmmakers cognizant of a heritage and intent on placing their own interpretation on it.” They overtly reference earlier film noir conventions, including high contrast lighting, dark themes, violence, urban settings, and several of the other characteristics that dominated noir films in the 1940s and 1950s. However, these filmmakers are working much more deliberately, self-consciously placing their work in conversation with noir itself. Many filmmakers directly remade noir classics, and others simply adopted their look, feel, and pessimistic worldview, perfectly suited to the cynicism that proliferated in New Hollywood after the Vietnam War and Watergate, among other socially divisive moments in then-contemporary American history. These images from Klute (1971, Pakula, top left), Body Heat (1981, Kasdan, top right), Thief (1981, Mann, bottom left), and To Live and Die in LA (1985, Friedkin, bottom right), show neo-noir at work.
The iconography of noir can help us bind the classic period (the 40s and 50s) to its neo-noir period (the 70s and 80s). Notice that many of these filmmakers adopted the shadowed look of classic noir, but their color photography also introduced neon lights and bright palettes into the image, a neo-noir update that took advantage of contemporary norms. Some filmmakers make a color-drenched world into a near black-and-white one, and others embraced color film stock, exaggerating the color to the point of near saturation.
One of the most prevalent images throughout film noir is the use of vertical and horizontal lines, often sourced to a light shining through prison bars or venetian blinds, which cast a pattern into a physical space. As iconography goes, this repeated use of the bars/blinds pattern is essential to manifesting the noir’s theme of imprisonment. Many noir characters are destined to die or go to jail, their morally dubious choices leading them to the end of a bad road. They live in a world that has trapped them, a nightmare which they are unable to escape. The imprisonment suggested by the visual pattern of shadows helps to establish the theme, and makes it pervasive throughout individual films; however, the theme also exists across noir, which, if you consider it to be a genre, contributes to its iconography. Here are some representative images from both noir and neo-noir films that use this visual pattern, suggesting continuity between the two eras and something essential about noir as a genre/style/mood.
It’s too easy to say that noir relies on shadows in its visual design. In order to consider noir a more coherent genre, it is important to understand how filmmakers working in the tradition (unconsciously at first, but now among the most highly self-conscious of all film styles) operationalize shadowy mise-en-scene. How are shadows used? What are they supposed to communicate? Shadows alone are not enough to express the themes that many noir films seem to be interested in; they have to be used to convey something specific, especially if we are to elevate them to the level of iconography. Shadows in noir not only reflect the theme of imprisonment, but in many filmmakers’ tendency to shoot actors only half-lit, with one side of their faces cast in shadow, they also suggest duality. Many noir films are about the separation between public and private personae, that ordinary-seeming people can hide their evil impulses from the judgment of others. Characters drawn into crime find themselves suddenly capable of shocking violence, a theme underlined by the visual approach that many filmmakers take. Order and chaos, fidelity and lust, honesty and lies, work and theft—these are among the themes placed in opposition to one another throughout noir films. Here is yet another collection of images from noir and neo-noir films that demonstrate how filmmakers rely on shadows to illustrate characters ripped apart by these opposing values and desires.
Another important piece of noir iconography is the cigarette; seemingly ubiquitous in Classic Hollywood, the cigarette takes on special importance in noir. When lit, they offer a small light in the overwhelming darkness of the noir environments; however, when burning, they also release clouds of smoke into the space that underline the cloudy morality of noir. Cigarettes hanging from noir characters’ mouths suggest their fear, their calm, their anxieties, their confidence—filmmakers and actors use cigarettes to express how characters respond to the crushing terror imbued by the hostility of the worlds they inhabit.
Noir films clearly announce their visual style in a way that was often out of pace with Classic Hollywood movies, which sought, in general, to subordinate their visuals to the narrative. Noir style is enunciated, made obvious through the clear intervention of the filmmakers, who design worlds dependent on a complex negotiation between realism (location shooting) and artifice (heavy manipulation of light and shadow). Watch the video commentary at right on Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, which is replete with noir iconography.
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Noir relies on a variety of defining visual symbols to express its ideology. Though the question of noir—genre, style, or mood—will likely remain unresolved, this movement remains influential for its willingness to speak to anxiety, especially in the postwar period, but not exclusively then.
clip quiz - film noir
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
DETOUR (1946, Ulmer)
In noir, you can almost never escape your fate. How does this clip from Detour express that sense of dread? |
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THE BIG SLEEP (1946, Hawks)
The private detective was one of the key male characters who appeared in film noir, inspired by the fiction of writers like Raymond Chandler. Based on this clip from The Big Sleep, based on one of Chandler’s novels, what are the major characteristics of the private detective? |
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THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946, Garnett)
The most common singular type of female character in noir films was the femme fatale, a woman who lured the hapless male protagonist into a scheme of murder or robbery with the allure of sexuality. How does the femme fatale in this scene from The Postman Always Rings Twice illustrate those ideas? How is she both desirable and dangerous? |
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I WAKE UP SCREAMING (1941, Humberstone)
One of noir’s most important features is its visual style, which you can see on display in this climactic scene from the murder mystery I Wake Up Screaming. What features of the visual style do you see in this clip? What relationship do the visual choices have to the themes of the story? Be specific about individual shots. |
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Noir - Kiss of death
In American cinema, film noir spoke to the darker aspects of life in the 1950s; taking root in the 1940s war years and really flourishing in its aftermath, noir offered a competing myth that depicted a counterpoint to the American Dream. Instead of peace and prosperity, noir provided violence, betrayal, failure, and above all, a sense of unease that captured a national undercurrent—this was an American Nightmare.
One way that noir films communicated that was in their examination of the corrosion of American institutions, especially in urban environments. Few noir themes resonate more across the history of the genre/style than corruption. In noir films, it runs rampant, infecting everything about the society that they depict. Institutions are hopelessly compromised, serving to perpetuate their own power no matter what; individuals betray their principles and leave ethical and moral concerns behind as they pursue their own selfish aims, striving for money, sex, or advancement.
Director Henry Hathway’s noir Kiss of Death (1947), made for Twentieth Century Fox, presents this kind of fallen, corrupt world from its very outset; there are no heroes in this film. The protagonist is Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), a jewel thief who has the bad luck of getting caught in the act during a heist in the opening sequence. He shares a cell with the psychopathic killer Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), a notorious gangster with a penchant for sadism, which he punctuates with a staccato laugh that sounds like a machine gun. Bianco’s happenstance proximity to Udo and his deep attachment to his two young daughters, orphaned after his wife commits suicide, makes him of particular interest to Assistant District Attorney Louis D’Angelo (Brian Donlevy), who wants Bianco to befriend and entrap Udo on his behalf.
Bianco is not a noble character; he eventually agrees to help D’Angelo get Udo in exchange for his release, but he is only doing it to be a father to his girls. He has no love for the law, and if the children’s mother had still been alive, the last thing that Bianco would have done is “turn stoolie,” which occupies a special position of contempt in the criminal underworld.
The world that Bianco occupies is no better; D’Angelo wants to bring Udo to justice, but his tactics for getting Nick’s cooperation are little better than extortion. He has compromised his own morality, justifying to himself that the ends, putting a sadistic criminal behind bars, justifies the means. The other side of the legal ledger is even worse, as the corrupt defense attorney that Nick uses, Earl Howser (Taylor Holmes), enables his clients to get away with all sorts of crimes in exchange for lucrative payoffs. He gets a cut of the loot from various heists, and in exchange, his guys get lighter sentences.
But the real star of Kiss of Death is Richard Widmark as Udo, making his film debut in a role that would come to define his career. Every moment that Widmark is on screen, the energy of the film shifts. He’s truly dangerous, seemingly capable of absolutely anything. He’s unpredictable and wild, his demeanor shifting from violent menace to hysterical laughter in the blink of an eye. The pinnacle of Udo’s sadism comes when he pays a visit to the apartment of a crook suspected of blabbing to the cops; when he finds the goon’s wheelchair-bound mother there instead, he ties her up and pushes her down a staircase, laughing his head off all the while.
This kind of psychopathic character really is new in Hollywood cinema after the war. The gangsters of the early 1930s films were often a little crazy, but their criminality was rooted in social circumstances like poverty or alienation. Udo is just plain bad; not only is he unrepentant, he actually enjoys inflicting pain on others.
As a stylist, director Henry Hathaway merged two separate traditions that dominated in noir; in this postwar period, noir films accommodated both an increased attention to realism, with many of its films shot in real urban locations, and a highly expressionistic approach to light and shadow. In Hathaway’s hands, the city is both the real place (the film even boasts about its use of locations in the opening) and a nightmare version of an urban environment hostile to its characters. The stark black and white photography makes both of these things possible.
Noir and neo-noir have been important sites of subversion of dominant traditions throughout the history of American and international cinema. Though many genres slip into decline (Westerns and musicals, most notably), noir seems to have endless life; its conventions are visible in mainstream contemporary films and on the most formulaic of procedural television shows. In this way, it reveals the shared fate of many subversive movements in cinema history, which is to become a part of the classical system, which absorbs them and makes them mainstream.