Film Noir
I have always been fascinated with the dark side. That is not to say that I bow down to Beelzebuub, or Darth Vader for that matter; but as an adolescent immersed in horror movies and thrash metal music, it became apparent to me that the dark side was infinitely more interesting. I mean, how much fun is it to be sweetness and light all the time! As time went by, my maturing tastes turned to more subtle forms of artistic expression and I began to find more appreciation for the nuances of film noir, than for the shock tactics of the splatter movie. Film Noir affirms the notions that there is a dark side within us all, and that the human mind has a capacity for evil that far outweighs the threat from monsters under the bed. The Noir world is enveloped by darkness. It’s streets exude a kind of underlying menace and it’s characterisation confirms this notion. In Noir, the bad guys are bad, but the good guys aren’t much better. It is a world for the tough and the streetwise and there is no room for emotion. The motivation is greed and it does not matter who gets stepped on in the process. Film Noir seems to me to be a realists view of the world. In real life, the good do not always triumph and the bad co . . .
There is much debate over the true origins of Film Noir. Film Noir questions “the narrative function of the woman as an object of the male hero’s desire; this desire may result in the hero being drawn into criminal or self destructive activities without the woman herself being in any way duplicitous”. “The Film Noir hero is a man, struggling with other men, who suffers alienation and despair, and is lured by fatal and deceptive women”. There are also several narrative strands which are common to a good proportion of Noir movies, such as the lone detective and the femme fatale. Women in Noir are not reliant on the strength of the male characters, but instead draw on their weaknesses to further their own position. “Expressionism is officially convoked in the name of the strong opposition between black and white - an opposition which is valid not only in terms of light contrasts but also in terms of the relation between the expanse of dark areas and the scarcity of strongly lit areas - in the name of the disproportionate shadows accompanying the characters, and in the name of the oblique lines that dominate the composition (the famous impossible camera angles of Film Noir)”. Whatever the result of this debate, it is evident to me that the Film Noir is alive and well and will continue to survive, so long as the cinema goer longs to walk on the dark side of the street. “Those responsible for generating such stylistic techniques were not in general attempting to make a critique of the system, but were in fact seeking to advance their own positions in it”. Copjec refers to “Hersch’s image of women as amoral destroyers of male strength” and Hirsch writes of “the three major noir character types - the sleuth, the criminal, and the middle class victim / scapegoat (who) all inhabit a treacherous urban terrain filled with deceiving women and the promise of money, easily and ill gotten”. Films such as Paul Verhoven’s “Basic Instinct” and John Dahl’s “Red Rock West”, although diverging from the classic Noir narrative, certainly contained many of the elements of Noir. It is accepted that the classic examples of Film Noir existed in the Forties and Fifties, but the continuing appeal of Noir is plain to be seen. The detectives are more streetwise than ever before but are still not a psychological match for the modern day femme fatale. He used the term to describe a new narrative and visual style within some Hollywood movies during the Second World War. Frank connected films like “Double Indemnity” and “The Maltese Falcon” with the ‘hard-boiled’ school of writing, as exemplified by James M.
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Acceptance Essays
