Film noir is a hotly contested genre, if you even believe that it is a genre. The debates surrounding film noir cannot confirm whether film noir is a genre, a style of filmmaking or storytelling, or a type of film found exclusively between the 1940s and about 1958. For the sake of this article we will assume that film noir is a sub-genre of the larger mystery/detective genre and is not only confined to the period in which it was invented and developed. To reduce this genre to the 1940s and 50s, is to ignore all of the great modern films noir. Recently, films like ‘Sin City’ and games like BAFTA award-winning ‘Max Payne’ have made the noir style exciting again. These new films are often labeled neo-noir and seem to continue to find an audience. Only relatively recently have filmmakers and writers been able to create self-aware film noir because the French term was only exposed to cultures outside France much later than the canonical period of film noir. The classic noir filmmakers of the defined period of 1941-1958 were unaware at the time that they were creating a new and distinctive style of filmmaking. To define film noir we need to look at the more classic stylistic features of these films. Not all of these features apply to all films of this genre. Generally a film noir will be occupied with the story of a flawed man, an anti-hero, who finds himself in a dark and alienating world. Often he is confronted with a femme fatale who will manipulate him by seduction in order to get him to obey her illegal and immoral desires such as murder. Film noir tells the underground stories, the stories of gangsters and criminals, of those people living below the mainstream. Humphrey Bogart is probably the most well known American actor of the genre. His career was going well before 1940 but he was not a movie icon until director John Huston’s 1941 film ‘The Maltese Falcon’. This was the real beginning of film noir history and hence Bogart will forever be recognised as the face of film noir. He also represented a shift in the portrayal of detectives in film, presenting a stark contrast from the respectable faces of Sherlock Holmes, Philo Vance or Nick Charles. Sam Spade (Bogart’s detective character in ‘The Maltese Flacon’) is a self-serving, disloyal and unfriendly character, not in any way the ‘good’ person audiences had come to expect of movie detectives. Film noir then, changed the way we create fictional detective characters. Gone is the black and white of good and evil. The detectives of this genre are complicated men with emotional baggage. They are flawed and they don’t always do the right thing. Film noir takes viewers to the seedy urban streets, dark places with dodgy people. Stories of betrayal, seduction, crime, passion and corruption gives film-goers an insight into fictional underworlds and the down-trodden, fatalistic and bitter folks who reside there.
Copyright Katie Rose Allen.
