Film Noir is often tied to hardboiled detectives and gangster films. In this essay we attempt to study the history and development of film noir and how Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950) belongs to the film noir category.
HISTORY AND DEVLOPMENT
A new trend or style for American films came into France after World War II when the ban on American thriller films was lifted. Film Noir is a fresh term coined by French critics, more specifically Nino Frank in 1946 for this style. (Krutnik, 1991) The term started simply as intuition and observing the films of that time instead of a real definition. There is no specific definition for it as critics have their own interpretations and film list to back them up.
No one can really agree on one definition, as this is not really a genre, as it is not defined with specific settings or characters like western films or gangster films. It is about tones and mood and can thus be applicable to a variety of different film genres like western, horror or even musicals. It can, however be categorised with a specific period and certain themes and cinematic styles as well.
From the book Film Noir by William Luhr, film noir has been noticed by the French on how the styles of the American films had took a turn of darkness in terms of visuals - using chiaroscuro lighting - and also thematically dark as well. Film Noir is cynical, dark and pessimist with corrupted characters, fatalistic themes and feelings of hopelessness. As stated before, Nino Frank coined this new style or movement as film noir or in literal terms black film. The French saw the films as a new representation of gender tensions, social dynamics and human psychology as well. (Luhr, 2012)
From the point in time historically, men from America joined the army to fight in the war while women were pulled out from the domestic scene and plunged into the working line to support the economy of the nation. From this new experience of working in a previously male dominated sphere, women now obtained a broader perspective of what they could achieve independently without ‘their’ man. (Hayward, 2006) When the men came back from the war, shell shocked and battered, women are shoved back into the domestic sphere as men were now supposed to reclaim their roles in the working force. When they came back from the battle field there were some disturbed adjustments for them as they wondered what were the women doing back when they were fighting in the war. (Hayward, 2006) This brought about the questioning of the masculinity in the male gender and led to a question of “Who’s wearing the pants now?”. (Hayward, 2006) This proves the gender relation issue as mentioned by Luhr in noir films. This little event in history will have its place in the first phase of film noir that will be discussed later on in this essay.
Also, due to the post war image of the situation, the society is portrayed as a great bad place (Luhr, 2012). The propagandise American dream of living in the suburbs were broken as they soon realised that there is no safe haven in the country. The pessimistic theme of failure, disappointment and death no longer resided in cities in the movie High Sierra (Walsh, 1941), the pessimism spreads to the peaceful mountains leaving no safe haven. Thus the city was considered even more corrupted. This situation aggravated as the soldiers arrive back on home ground, they could not recognise the social scene around them which led to post-war paranoia. “What if the enemy wasn’t the Nazi’s or the Germans? What if our home land is being infiltrated on the inside?” Paranoia sets in, the thematically dark suspicion on characters stood, contributing to the idea of corruption found everywhere in film noir.
Due to the dark settings and theme of noir, words like ‘Dark’, ‘Night’ and ‘City’ were used frequently even in the titles like Night and the city (Dassin, 1950), The Dark Corner (Hathaway, 1946) and The Sleeping City (Sherman, 1950). Paranoia, hopelessness and fatality was approachable by the audiences at that time as it is never good after a war thus these themes were widely used in Films, such as Desperate (Mann, 1947) and Fear (Zeisler, 1946). Negativity in violence, sex and death related contents were also prominent in Kiss of Death (Hathaway, 1947) and Murder, My Sweet (Dmytryk ,1944). (Krutnik, 1991)
The original film noir can be separated to three phases, estimated around 1941-1946, 1945-1949 and 1949-1953. They are all related but focuses on slightly different issues during their time period; however, they overlap as there are exceptions to certain films. (Schrader, 1972) Some of these films were not labeled as Film noirs at first until they could see the similarities in terms of tone and mood relatable to Film Noir.
The first phase is during wartime to post war, mostly melodramas about a private investigator that stumbles upon a case brought by a women or being lured into searching answers by the women. Examples we can find with these characters and story is The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Murder, My Sweet by Raymond Chandler and Double Indemnity by James M.Cain. They are all linked by ‘film noir’ as well as being adaptations of crime novels in America – the ‘hard- boiled’ crimes.
Therefore, most of the male protagonists are “hard-boiled anti-heros’. Hard boiled made an effect on the audiences as it meant the characters are used to the corrupted world where he faces violence everyday and does not expose his emotions but we will still understand him through his narrations in despair by the end of his road on how he dealt with these situations each day. These negative films are reflecting the mood that people were having during war.
During this time, as male protagonist point of view is portrayed in the films, people were more daring to show how these men see the women as well. Women were seen as attractive and sexually luring the men but here the difference is where femme fatale comes in. Women were no more just objects for the men’s desires after exposing to the outside world during the war, thus an image of women as active instead of passive and were capable of manipulating men for themselves as women are slowly replacing men in their workplace when the men goes to war.
The second phase from 1945-1949 is more to street films. It has the same hard- boiled antihero versus femme fatale characters but is more focused on political corruptions, crimes and police routines post war. Crime rates were high and active on the streets. However, after the war law enforcers collaborated with the film makers to show more positive sides of them thus they focus a lot on how these police helps the main characters to solve street crimes. For example, The Killers (Siodmak ,1946) and The Naked City (Dassin ,1948) are the films in this category. They are filmed on location and on the streets to make it as realistic as possible in post war times to show everyday reality of violence and street crimes postwar with cars and dark alleyways.
When it started during the 1940’s, most of it is about women slowly gaining control outside of the house as they experienced the world outside when the men went to war and masculinity thus there would usually be (Diawara, 1993) detectives, bad guys and femme fatale.
Film noir is about promise and danger, during 1950s, family values and patriarchies were mentioned. This is to reassert the males and females’ position in the family. Femme Fatales not only manipulate the males but also themselves into destruction for example, Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950) the femme fatale, Norma ends up insane after shooting the male protagonist Joe.
In this third phase, despair and personal disintegration is also the focus, the characters were more self- aware and cared about themselves. Home and heart were all fake as there is no place safe in Noir. Guest in the house by Lewis Milestone has a main character who end up destroying the family who was kind enough to take her in. (Dixon, 2009)
The character, mainly the hard-boiled antihero, did narration as it brings the viewers into the character’s point of view instead of an objective one to bring out the hopelessness and pessimism. (Luhr, 2012) The narration is done by the character with great effect as they were already doomed with death, imprisonment or other situations when they start to narrate a story of their past.
Noir is broad, as it is not needed to contain all of the characteristics but merely a few to be categorized as one of the Noirs however it mainly brings out the idea that “today is horrible, tomorrow will be worse, hope is an illusion”. (Dixon, 2009)
NEO-NOIR
During the 1960s, film noir matured and developed into new noir or neo-noir. This is a reaction from the forty years of Cold War, when the threats of a nuclear war between nations, fiscal uncertainties, sexual revolution and other social issues. This leads to the American, asking questions of the society itself and furthermore ignite the feeling of pessimism. One can say that the intense social climate invoke the same feeling of hopelessness as the war and post-war disillusionment of the 1940s and onward. Hence film noir is revived and revised as neo-noir.
Neo-noir itself, is not an entirely different movement from the traditional film noir. Many of the characteristics of classic noir are still mostly intact in neo-noir such as the pessimistic feel and the morally ambiguous characters. The same goes with the visual classic noir and neo-noir which they are mostly indistinguishable from each and the other too. The main differences between the two is that neo-noir stands as a departure from the film noir traditional driving force while trying to maintain their unique noir identity. They achieved this goal by setting the social issues such as discrimination, corruption and identity crisis as the foremost theme of the film rather than the individualistic feeling of the character. As Alain Silver stated it, “the difference between classic noir and neo-noir is in what motivates the creation of the films”.
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| Neo-Noir film features similar characteristics of a classic-noir film, but the intention of the film is largely different |
Neo-noir also branches into different forms of neo-noir time, as stated by Mark T. Conard. The element that split these different forms are the timeline that the film is taking place of. The past Neo-Noir puts the character in a low tech-era and often feature a theological theme, which pitch the studies of God and religious belief as the central subject matter. Raider of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, 1981) is listed as a past neo-noir example because of the central character, Indiana Jones being an detective himself who go through all of the investigation and grave digging (which itself is not really good in moral standard, hence it is fitting the thematic approach of a noir film), also question himself of what do he believe in, science or faith.
As a contrast to past neo-noir, future neo-noir place the character in a futuristic setting with advanced science and technology. Thematically the idea of theological is still preserve but it will only be shown in a subtle way, which the central spotlight is replaced with the questioning of technological advancement and futuristic science. Another film by Steven Spielberg, which is Minority Report (2002) sees the character, John Anderton as a detective who’s trying to escape from the system he helped create because it predicted that Anderton will be committing a murder. This lead to Anderton questioning himself and his own motive of the murder.
The Present Neo-Noir is the in-between of the forms neo-noir take. In Present Neo-Noir films, the setting is of a modern society, where the character themselves are “investigator” in some way or literally an investigator who tries to figure out time, as in memories and psychology of the characters. One amnesia noir is Momento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) which uses time and memories brilliantly by placing the protagonist, Leonard Shelby as a person who suffers from anterograde amnesia, which causes him to unable to construct new memories. With this setting in mind, Leonard must retrieve his memories and battle with time.
CHARACTERISTICS OF FILM NOIR
As discussed in the previous section, film noir means black film/cinema which not only shows visually the dark mise-en-scene of lighting but thematically dark as well.
Deception, treachery and murder is very ordinary in film noir where a dark work that filled with contending, ambiguous, evil and moral forces is depicted. It is frequently features an investigator who operates just within the law as lone wolves and marginally able to relate to women. Yet, it usually shows the corruption of wealth and power. Also, crime and business are interchangeable. A carefully designed time sequence in the film noir is used to emphasise the feelings of hopelessness and lost time or in other words to emphasise that the ‘how’ is always more important than the ‘what’. A good example is with the use of flashbacks.
The majority of scenes in film noir are lit for night. It is mainly focusing on the principle of contrastive lighting which is chiaroscuro. These criteria are meant recreate the protagonists psychology of pessimism, social malice, suspicion and gloom.
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| The high contrast lighting helps audience to associate the psychology of pessimism and malice into the character |
These settings or locations are shot with high contrast lighting or low key lighting and the surroundings are dimly lit to show that city is always connected with danger and corruption while the blurred moral and intellectual values are hidden in the shadowy ill-lit streets that causes difficulty in revealing the truth with the purpose of creating a fatalistic and hopeless mood in film noir.
A protagonist must be put in the shadow by making an equal light emphasis at both the protagonist and setting or by making the environment brighter than the protagonist. This also shows the existence of moral ambiguity in the character with the feeling of claustrophobia, evoking the emotion of inner panic and suspicion. After all, if a person in real life (if at all) is righteous, there is no need to hide in the shadows.
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| Placing the character in a tight space will induce a claustrophobic mood. |
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| The shadow represent the moral ambiguous plans of the character. |
Besides that, the style of film noir is characterised by the presence of oblique, vertical and horizontal lines as found in German expressionism. Shapes and lines are created by using light and shadows. One might think that the filmmakers created the lines by shining light through card boards with slits cut through them by knives. (Schrader, 1972). According to Paul Schrader in his “Notes on Film Noir”, film noir is hot with tightly framed shots with extreme camera angles, compositional tension is mostly shown rather than physical action and the shot would move the scene cinematographically around the actor than have the actor control the scene by physical action (p.57).
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| Lines from the shadow of the windows can also shows the feeling of the character being trapped inside a situation |
Film noir is thematically shown with the existing of hard-boiled antihero and femme fatale. The film noir’s antihero is psychologically passive, masochistic, morbidly curious and is physically mature, almost old and not very good-looking while femme fatale is characterized as active, intelligent, powerful, dominant and in charge of her own sexuality. In film noir, femme fatale is the mastermind to an intrigue and who becomes the object of the male’s investigation. The femme fatale exerts power on the antihero with her sexuality and threatens the antihero to go for investigation and get a resolution. Femme fatale manipulates antihero’s weak desires for her own benefits to guarantee her independence. The feeling of lost or unsure of himself leads an antihero to let femme fatale to be on his top. However, this antihero is often obsessive, neurotic and equally capable of betrayal of his femme fatale (Susan Hayward, 2006).
Money and power attraction would usually cause the antihero to blindly choose the path to his own destruction. The obsession of financial and material prosperity would cause an antihero to have a degraded moral and would betray everyone around him even if they were his good friends. Not only that, the thirst of truth and knowledge also leads antihero to carry on the investigation requested by the femme fatale.
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| Norma Desmond and Joseph C. Gillis (Sunset Boulevard, 1950) is one of the perfect pairs of femme fatale and anti-hero of a film noir. |
A highly stylised visual style is matched by a stylised narrative and in turn matched by a stylised stereotype (Susan Hayward, 2006). Particularly, femme fatale is the diegetic logic and visual strategy of film noir, then it is reflected by the narrative strategies in it issued by the woman, the police and the private eye and lastly a proliferation of points of view which is the voice-over of the antihero ends up controlling the image of the woman. For the closure of film noir, guilt is not easily ascribed to one character because the lack of clarity in this film.
ANALYSIS
Film that will be used in discussion is “Sunset Boulevard” (Billy Wilder, 1950).
The story describes an ageing silent film actress Norma Desmond who refuses to accept the end of her stardom. She hires a struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis as he stumbles upon her mansion by accident to be her script doctor. Joe thought that he could manipulate her, but finds out that he couldn’t. She falls in love with him as he shows contradicting feelings of their relationship. As he finds out that he is trapped in the relationship prison, he decides to leave, leaving no choice for Norma but to murder him. In the end she is driven insane.
Film Noir features a dark side of the world, which contains evil, violence, greediness and fear. It seldom portraits human mentality and reflects society reality. We can identify a film through its semantic and syntactic approach. In terms of semantic, it’s about the visual. Film noir has a lot of high-contrast lighting, the film makers often favor to use strong lighting to cast larger shadow on the actors. It illustrates the bad intentions form of the character in the film. Another specific characteristic of the lighting is partial high light, only hits the light on part of the bodies and casts a shadow on remain part. This kind of lighting can show the idea of human’s complex mindset, having good and bad side at the same time. Some of the scene in Sunset Boulevard, the light falls on Norma Desmond, to indicate the mentality of her inner mindset.
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| Large shadow produced in the film, portraits the inner mindset of the character. It shows the complex thought of Joe Gillis toward his life, between Betty and the reality he is currently situated in. |
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| Light cast on the actress shows the inner mindset of the character. It seldom portraits human's bad side as well. This scene has shown the greediness and overpowered of Norma herself towards Joe. |
Next, the settings of the story are mostly city-bound, comprising of rain-washed roads. The scenes are usually lit for night. We can see that a lot of the scene are during the night, because a lot of crimes take place during the night in reality. On New Year’s Eve, Joe runs out from Norma’s mansion and it’s raining heavily. Joe always goes out at night to work with Betty. From a different angle, it also looks familiar with German Expressionism, the oblique vertical and horizontal lines. It indicates being trapped, limited, jail in some way.
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| Oblique vertical and horizontal lines can be created by casting the light towards a gates or window covers. The shadows falls on the actor can portraits the sense of being locked, limited freedom. |
As for themes, the main character are usually an anti-hero. Although they are smart, hard-boiled but they are always being controlled by the force above them. They don’t have the idea of justice or righteous, they can do anything to achieve their ultimate goal. Even it means all the benefit they can gain from, they can used all the dirty methods as they like. Joe Gillis is in desperate situation, car is being seek by repossession men, can’t possibly find a job for a living. To change this situation, he works with Norma Desmond, as she is rich and even willing to give what he wants. Although he lives with Norma, he still has the courage to go out and work with Betty, and even show the secret of his way of living to Betty so that she will hate him and go with Artie for a better life.
Furthermore, most film noir are circulated with plots and themes that associated with crime and thriller stories with character such as detective, black widows, gangsters and a lot of corrupted characters. The art movement with theme of madness, primitive and sexual savagery are quite common in these film. For example, the murder that committed by a black widow who is crazy with a man and her long-forgotten dream.
The narration of film is often complex and convoluted. The lead role will be put under the situation of an unsolved puzzle or difficult situation that leads him to expand what he wants to change the situation. Joe Gillis narrates himself all the time to show his mindset and the thought towards everything around him.
Besides a corrupted protagonist, another character that usually signifies film noir is the female main character, a femme fatale. They are smart and beautiful, often exhibit suggested sexual behaviour that titillates men’s desire on woman. They will manipulate the men who are interested in them to get what she wants. The scene during New Year’s Eve is a very good example. When Joe tries to let Norma down gently, being slapped, she cuts her wrists with his razor. This causes Joe to return to Norma, and it achieves Norma’s goal of not letting him get away from her. “I am rich”, “I can buy you anything you want.” Money is the power she has to control Joe. In this case it was not just sexuality that attracted Joe but also monetary power.
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| Monetary is one of the power that allows Norma to manipulate the man she loves. She is willing to spend everything to achieve her love. This reflects the bad side of humanity, greediness and doing anything to achieve her goals, even it's in a wrong path. |
However, Film Noir may also have a complete opposite female character from femme fatale. She is naïve, honest and easy trust another person. In this case, Betty Schaefer is the character mentioned here. She is naïve for working at the Paramount office during the night, as it is dangerous to work at night alone, furthermore with another man that isn’t her lover. She trusts Joe easily, and even falls in love in him.
Common themes in film noir are including sex, greed and corruption. It explores the very dark side of human mentality. Factors that lead human to commit crime, greediness and sexuality are taking a big percentage as the main factor. Unlike most film that has a justice hero, this film tells us that, even hero could do something that’s opposite to justice and morality. They only work for their own self-satisfaction and interest. They portray the reality of society with the sense of realism of human behaviour, instead of a ‘hero’ that saves the world at the end of the day.
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| Sad and weak expression are the most significant behavior of a femme fatale. Norma cries, use sexuality intention and even nearly suicide in order to control over Joe. |
CONCLUSION
We find that film noir is a realistic film movement in the depiction of characters. We are often used to the pure and just hero in shining armour that defies the standard qualities of a human being. But in reality, even boy scouts fail too. Gone are the days of the good qualities of Superman in film noir as our protagonists are flawed too. Film noir allows us to embrace the darker side of ourselves as we all acknowledge at most points in our lives we were never pure. Malicious intent were always the core nature of human beings.
This allowed the development of more dynamic characters in our films. To portray and weave a story of inner struggles in protagonists, realistic characters with darker selves.
Aside from that, the introduction of the femme fatale also brought about stronger roles for women to portray in the films to come. Women are no more restricted to be a mundane 'one-type' character but allowed stronger roles.
References
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References
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Dixon, W. W. (2009). Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. Rutgers University Press.
Diawara, M. (1993). Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema. African American Review , 525-537.
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Hayward, S. (2006). Cinema studies:the key concepts. (3rd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 149-152). Oxon: Routledge.
Luhr, W. (2012). Film Noir. Wiley- blackwell.
Mark T. Conard. (2007). The Philosophy of Neo-Noir (pp. 1-19)
Schrader, Paul (1972). Notes on Film Noir. Schroder Film Noir. (pp.53-63).
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