![]() ![]() Lots and lots and lots of different ideas, images, icons, symbols, characters and so on can appear in a film noir.go look for a strong positive black character in a noir film!) If this sounds like a struggle going on today, bingo! (One of the biggest tenets of American Communism that motivated the witch hunts was the belief that Black Americans deserved equality with white Americans. society that lasted until the Cold War shifted the citizenry into a more rigid, conforming country that longed to stamp out social mobility and put everyone back in their pre-War place. In many ways, the chaos and violence of film noir crime dramas reflected the chaos going on in U.S. But things could never be the same: women and people of color had gotten a taste of social mobility, liked it, and wanted to hold onto it. When the vets returned, they longed to come back to the world they thought they were fighting to preserve. The main glut of films noirs appeared after World War II as almost a cinematic version of PTSD: America had, to a large extent, come together to sacrifice for the war effort, with every necessity rationed (so everyone was on relief) and with women and people of color taking positions at home to fill in for the soldiers abroad.Whatever you believe about them, they’re not what we’re talking about here. In the mid-‘70’s, films like Chinatown began something called Neo-Noir to me, these films, many of them wonderful, betray the noir code with their big stars, big budgets, and saturated color. There are films that look like noir from the 30’s (German Expressionism dates back to the Silent Era), and there are stragglers into the late 50’s. It began around 1940 and ended around 1955. (In perhaps the last official noir film, the Maguffin is a suitcase containing pure nuclear energy, which pretty much blows up everybody and everything in the end.) Some films noirs (that’s the plural!) were out and out whodunnits, although the tendency of a classic mystery to restore order and happiness after the killer was revealed gave way to a more permanent social devastation. Mostly, however, the style was applied to tales of crime. There are “ noir” Westerns and “ noir” romances, even “ noir” musicals. Film noir is a style that can be found in many different genres. There was no meeting of minds that said, “Let’s invent a new genre.” Instead, directors – a great many of them expatriates from Europe, allowed the surreal visuals and dark mood of German Expressionism to affect the look and feel of the films they made. It’s a style that nobody set out to invent.Here’s what I think I know about film noir.
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