· Early 1940’s to late 1950’s
· Low-key black-and-white visual style
· Fear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia are readily evident in noir, reflecting the 'chilly' Cold War period.
· Most American film noirs end up with the ‘wrong-doer’ being caught
· Key Aspects- Femme Fatale, Anti-Hero, Venation Blinds, Dark Theme, Dutch Angles, Mirrors, Cigarettes, Alcohol and Voice Overs.
· Whoever went to the movies with any regularity during 1946 was caught in the midst of Hollywood's profound postwar affection for morbid drama. From January through December deep shadows, clutching hands, exploding revolvers, sadistic villains and heroines tormented with deeply rooted diseases of the mind flashed across the screen in a panting display of psychoneurosis, sex and murder most foul.
-Donald Marshman, Life (August 25th 1947)
· Common Plots: A cynical, delusional male who gets caught up in the machinations of the femme fatale (a seductive, double-dealing) who manipulates him to become the fall guy.
· Binary Oppositions: Innocence vs. Corruption, Male vs. Female, Light vs. Dark, these are all opposites and are seen in all film noir films.
· Film Noir is one of Hollywood’s only organic artistic movements. Beginning in the early 1940s, numerous screenplays inspired by hardboiled American crime fiction were brought to the screen, primarily by European directors who shared a certain storytelling sensibility: highly stylized, overtly theatrical, with imagery often drawn from an earlier era of German “expressionist” cinema.
· Two of film noirs greatest actors where Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart became household names in their first movie together ‘The Big Sleep’. They later became married and stared in many other film noir films with Humphrey being the anti-hero and Lauren being the femme fatale.
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