What is noir genre

Film noir is a style that goes back decades, and has persisted into the modern era. Multiple big-name directors have tried their hand at film noir, with varying degrees of success. It's mostly been associated with American cinema, but its popularity has influenced filmmakers from all over the world. Over the decades, it's been blended with several other genres.

Here's what you need to know about film noir. Film noir had its beginnings in the s, but didn't really take off until the s. Its origins are often attributed to attitudes of pessimism and anxiety that arose from World War II, but film noir wasn't inspired by any one cultural event. One contributing factor was literature. At the time, hardboiled detective stories and crime mysteries written by novelists like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were in high demand.

Adapting these books into movies is part of what created the framework for film noir. In , French critics came up with the term "film noir" to describe the dark mood of these new films, and the name stuck, even though it didn't become widely used until years later. Film noir became one of the most popular genres in the s, and this continued into the s. The s and s are still regarded as the high point of film noir. What made telling these stories so difficult was the Motion Picture Production Code , a set of moral guidelines that affected all American movies beginning in The Production Code forced all films to obey the same rules.

Under the new rules, there was so much that movies weren't allowed to show. A person couldn't be killed on-screen, kissing scenes couldn't be too long, bad guys could never get away with their crimes, and so on. While some movies avoided these problems by telling different kinds of stories, others viewed the Production Code as a challenge, and found ways to subvert the rules using suggestive dialogue, new lighting techniques, shadows, and more.

It seems like almost anything David Lynch does echoes noir. Mulholland Drive's look and feel was surely influenced by film noir.

Noir has a touch of a madness in each scene. The stark lighting and heavy use of flashbacks all capture the headiness of the era, and the frequent murderous plots only heighten the pessimism.

There are specific lighting techniques that build these grave worlds, read our up next article. Interested in going deeper? Maybe darker? Our next post comes just a little southeast of our French friend noir, and explains this Italian lighting technique and how its used to create the noir style. Learn about chiaroscuro below.

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Skip to content. Watch: Chiaroscuro Lighting Explained. Subscribe on YouTube. Define Noir What is film noir, exactly? Noir Genre Film noir originated in a time of angst This style of filmmaking was characterized by a painful time in history. Readers were disillusioned and no longer believed in clean, happy endings. It became clear that not every crime could be neatly solved, and not every hero could be squeaky clean, and noir fiction reflected that reality for readers.

For similar reasons, there was a resurgence of noir fiction in the s, when America was once again in a tumultuous moment in history: the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. The classic noir crime book, much like the hardboiled crime fiction that came before it, was also hyper-masculine, often in a heavily performative way. Women characters were traditionally just victims or pawns for the more complicated male storylines.

Now that contemporary readers have a more nuanced idea of gender and identity, the concept of gritty and dark mystery stories needing to be hyper-masculine in order to be believable has faded. And noir stories that read as hyper-masculine have begun to feel a little dated. And while classic noir fiction focused on flawed white male characters, contemporary readers are more interested in reading about women and people of color who are flawed and complex. Contemporary noir fiction has therefore moved towards stories that are more inclusive and present anti-heroes of different genders and racial backgrounds.

This new inclusivity in noir fiction means the new noir can boldly critique issues of race, class, gender, and corruption. Recent years have also seen noir fiction branch out into subgenres.