Film Noir

The ‘dark film’ Source: http://www.bighousefilm.com/noir_intro.htm

The word ‘noir’ is literally French for ‘black’, giving us the concept of ‘dark film’. French film critics coined the term soon after the end of WWII. In the early part of the 1940s France was occupied by Nazis, making it enemy territory forbidden to receive Hollywood product. By war’s end there was a half-decade backlog of American movies which hit French viewers suddenly in one rush, rather than gradually over the years as usual. From a Hollywood point of view, they’d been an audience asleep for half a decade.

The French noticed with surprise after the war how a gloomy, pessimistic worldview had replaced much of the formerly sunny optimism of can-do U.S.A. America’s movies were growing darker in the 1940s - not just visually, but also in terms of theme and content. There were numerous reasons for this, springing from changes both in consciousness and practicalities. The world had become a darker place and the more word seeped out of atrocities of war, the deeper the shadows grew over human nature.

America at that time felt powerless to avoid enigmatic conflicts in foreign climes. This was mirrored in movies with doomed heroes whose fate seemed pre-ordained, and immune to free will. Also the popularity of Freudianism brought psychological concerns into common discourse as the world turned inward. Films reflected this introspection through the use of voice-over to describe interior states. Thrillers of the 1940s (and horror flicks of the time like Val Lewton’s RKO series) often took on the ‘otherworldly’ feel of a waking dream. These and other elements (described below) came together in a fortuitous accident of cinematic history to express the mood: film noir .