Things Noir
A brief reflection on my love of Film Noir, and even a film recommendation.
For several years way back when, I taught a college course on film noir, and a few years later, I offered it as an elective at an arts-magnet high school. This after taking one graduate course on the topic and becoming obsessed with the period.
Film noir was arguably the most significant period in U.S. film history (1940-1950s) on numerous levels. Noir directors going for the look of cinéma vérité took their cameras outdoors, shot night scenes at night (rather than layering screens in front of lenses to (poorly) simulate darkness—“night on night shooting”), were the first to use “tracking shots”—placing their massive cameras on rails outdoors, large dollies indoors. They were the first to cut the backs out of moving vehicles (Gun Crazy) to film in an actual moving car rather than use those cheesy studio shots where a car moves in front of a large screen, film crew laying on the ground shaking the suspension to (poorly) give the impression of the car moving. They did new things with editing (or lack thereof). Orson Welle’s 3:20 opening tracking shot (no editorial cuts) of Touch of Evil (and all the other camera calisthenics of that film—holes cut in floors, hand held cameras squeezed into tiny elevators, crane shots of speeding cars….) represents the epitome of the ways noir directors conceived of the relationship between the camera and the subject. Perhaps most identifiable and consistent to the genre is the way they used light and shadow—films noir abound with half-lit faces, the sharp shadow of a man running down an alley, his fedora and trench coat clearly cast on the grungy brick walls, the straight lines of Venetian blind shadows cutting across the lovely face of a femme fatale, so we only see her sparkling, devious eyes and luscious mouth.
As film noir upended the visual, normative expectations of film viewers—before noir, film was conceived of more like a play, each shot on a stage, the viewer at eye level or slightly lower than the actors—it also upended many other expectations. The endings of films noir find their heroes (or, rather, anti-heroes) shot down in a spray of bullets, hiding out in mist-bound swamps, caught and arrested, shot and near death, confessing their sins, wandering through haunting, abandoned oil refineries, shot dead and floating alongside garbage in putrid rivers…. If there is a happy ending in a film noir, it is always deeply sarcastic and equally unsettling.
WWII (and the detonation of the first atomic bombs) played a big part in the onset of film noir. In addition to the overarching existential dread of nuclear annihilation, it also brought to Hollywood a crop of German artists who had fled Nazi Germany and were deeply influenced by the pre-war, Expressionist movement. In response to Impressionism, which still held that the artist’s job was to capture the impression their eyes drank in, Expressionist painters and artists inverted that thinking, showing that you could (and perhaps should) paint/depict the world as an outward expression of one’s internal emotions. Hence, Ludwig Kirchner’s purple skies and jagged, “unrealistic” landscapes. Hence the crazy, jarring sets of the remarkable silent film masterpiece, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which to this day feels fresh and original and disturbing (serving as a watershed film not only for noir but for the modern horror film as well).
Arguably the first ever film noir, Stranger on the Third Floor, (1940), made a full year before The Maltese Falcon—is worth a watch…if you’ve never seen a classic film noir, or even if you have and don’t know this one, or if you know it but haven’t seen it in awhile, or if you’ve seen it dozens of times and just want to experience it one more time (like listening to a favorite song, looking to a favorite painting) (my reason for re-watching it recently). The film establishes nearly all the major elements that would define classic noir. You’ll find steep, dizzying staircases, cameras going where no camera had gone before, shadows that appear to be painted on the walls, cunning use of VoiceOver, a hypnotically strange dream sequence, a shadowy, mysterious, half-real bad guy (Peter Lorre—those eyes!), murder, chaos, mayhem, fear, loathing…. The only thing missing is a femme fatale. You can rent the film HERE for 3 bucks.
I love these films so much because they so expertly and engagingly use all of the elements available to the artist. It’s what I love about contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, too. The experience of watching these dark, unsettling melodramas reminds us of the power and purpose of storytelling, the non-verbal impact of visual art. I’d urge you while watching the film (or just about any good film noir) to pause it at nearly any point, and what you see will look like artistic photography, like the still photo from Stranger on the Third Floor at the top of this post—every figure placed intentionally, each line and shadow pulling your eyes exactly where the artist-director/cinematographer wants them to go.
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You can watch my introduction to my YouTube series on Film Noir HERE
One more thing: it’s worth noting that many films in the Noir genre were directed and edited by immigrants from Eastern and European countries whose jaundiced vision of human behavior had already been formed by the troubled history of the European continent they had escaped, in order to come to the “land of opportunity”.
One more thing: it’s worth noting that many of the films in the Noir genre were directed and edited by immigrants from Eastern Europe and Germany, whose jaundiced vision of human behavior had already been formed by a troubled history from which they escaped.