Please, Please Tell Me Noir..
- Thread starter Dubversion
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gsv said:
You're a muppet
trabuquera
Modesty Bag
Just watched One Nite in Mongkok on FilmFour last night and was surprised at how noir-y it was. Very urban indeed (Mongkok in Hong Kong being apparently the world's most densely populated place), almost everyone dies in the end, noone trusts anyone, bullets fly and there's no love lost.
i was actually quite surprised at how noir, and how un-Hong-Kong-actiony it really was. Not quite as cynical as the Western style, but all the same....
For really good modern neonoir, haven't yet seen The Last Seduction on anyone's list yet - Linda Fiorentino in that is about the definitive example of the motivelessly malevolent femme fatale.
eta: (sorry about the above mistake). Another for the list, and another question to spark flaming:
NINE QUEENS is an excellent and arguably noir film set in modern Argentina - it has most of the ingredients (and definitely the worldview) of noir, but not the contrasty lighting scheme. Would it count?
Finally: free Media Studies PhD (handwritten on the back of a cereal packet) to anyone who can coherently explain why The Usual Suspects either is or is not noir.
i was actually quite surprised at how noir, and how un-Hong-Kong-actiony it really was. Not quite as cynical as the Western style, but all the same....
For really good modern neonoir, haven't yet seen The Last Seduction on anyone's list yet - Linda Fiorentino in that is about the definitive example of the motivelessly malevolent femme fatale.
eta: (sorry about the above mistake). Another for the list, and another question to spark flaming:
NINE QUEENS is an excellent and arguably noir film set in modern Argentina - it has most of the ingredients (and definitely the worldview) of noir, but not the contrasty lighting scheme. Would it count?
Finally: free Media Studies PhD (handwritten on the back of a cereal packet) to anyone who can coherently explain why The Usual Suspects either is or is not noir.
Louloubelle
Well-Known Member
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Great film, definitely focusing on the sinister side of human nature, but is it Noir?
Is Sunset Boulevard Noir? It feels more like it is as it has a central male character, can you have Noir centered around the relationship between 2 sisters or do you have to have men in macs and fedoras smoking in dark corners (IYKWIM)?
Great film, definitely focusing on the sinister side of human nature, but is it Noir?
Is Sunset Boulevard Noir? It feels more like it is as it has a central male character, can you have Noir centered around the relationship between 2 sisters or do you have to have men in macs and fedoras smoking in dark corners (IYKWIM)?
Reno said:
Reno is right to point out the historical specificity of these films and the visual influence of German Expressionist cinema. Unlike other genres, what makes a film "noir" is to a larger extent the photographic aspect and not so much the story. The films first called "noir" by French critics were a particular type of Hollywood films made in the thirties and forties and suddenly imported into post-war France when the Occupation ban on American films was lifted. They copied the use of shadows, lighting, framing, angles and sets previously known only in Expressionist films. During those years, a considerable number of established directors (and artists, writers, actors etc) had left Germany and Austria and found work in the States, and cinema as we know it would be very different if it hadn't been for their involvement in Hollywood.
Otto Preminger for example (who made the absolutely brilliant Laura among others), Fritz Lang (whose noir Hollywood films include the great unfairly neglected first Fury--with echoes of M--, The Ministry of Fear, Scarlet Street ...), Robert Siodmak (Spiral Staircase, The Killers ...), Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard ...), Rudi Mayer (a.k.a. Rudolph Maté, who made D.O.A., Gilda ...), Wilhelm Dieterle, Douglas Sirk and several other well-known people arrived in the States and brought their own style of filmmaking which they adapted to the demands of the studios. The use of predominantly interior sets for example was a good working solution for the tight budget they were prescribed.
In many cases the plots were taken from pulp novels which explains the mystery and crime elements and why so many characters are detectives or gangsters. However, in addition to the pulp origin and depending on the skill of the director many of these films also reflected the general pessimism and anxieties of the time, and criticised aspects of North American post-Depression society from the perspective of an outsider. Expressionism as a tendency emerged from the First World War so in a sense it is not surprising that some of its elements were used by the people who already mastered as a style to express the post war atmosphere.
There is a second wave of noir cinema in the late forties and fifties that includes the films directly influenced by the earlier ones, such as the Welles, Aldrich and Hitchcock films already mentioned, The Postman Always Rings Twice, White Heat, In A Lonely Place, The Third Man, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, Jules Dassin's The Night and the City, even Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog to name just a few out of many more.
It is perhaps reasonable to argue that there is also a third wave of films in colour that are descendants and in some cases creative remakes of the black and white ones, such as Chinatown, Body Heat, DOA, The Grifters, the fantastic Last Seduction, even Basic Instinct*, and also a number of European films made along the same lines.
Bomber said:
You don't need a degree or an ability to memorise Sight & Sound in order to know what a genre is, provided you like films and you have an amount of visual sensibility and awareness of history.
As for those who question Night of the Hunter, Reno has posted on another thread some stills that convey better than any description the Expressionist influence (in fact that thread has stills from several films mentioned here).
*Basic Instinct 2 in particular (I know it is not exactly popular on the boards) goes around in a full circle and references Expressionism with a print/quote and elements of plot borrowed from Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck.
Bomber
The Oatcake Kid !!
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