History of Noir

What is Film Noir?

Film Noir was highly popular in the 1940s- late 1950s. The name Film Noir was made in 1946 roughly by a French Cineaste Nino Frank, it best described the films coming from Hollywood after World War Two. However these weren’t the first Film Noirs to be made after then, Film Noirs were started in the early 1940 but because of World War Two there was no chance of getting them over to France for people to watch. When Nino Frank started to watch the films that had only just came across he and maybe others. He noticed the darkness in the films, that’s where Film Noir got its name from the darkness in the films. World War Two influenced Film Noir quite a lot because of the horrid things the Nazi’s and Hitler were doing at the time, this put some of the depression into Film Noirs. Not only did the War help with Film Noir’s but it also caused some of the politics happening at the time helped also, these helped set the characters and the moods of the films. Because of World War Two we have the Femme fatale a female character that is always has a powerful control over the leading man. World War Two helped because at the time when men were at War they needed someone to take over their jobs and that’s where the females came into plan. At the end of a Film Noir the Femme Fatale normally has something bad happening to her in. Another thing the World War Two had influence over was some German directors and film makers escaped to America where they brought different things over to America. America didn’t have such as stylistics on ways of working. The ways of how shadows and shades and light helped set a good film came over with it, these are a few things Film Noirs have. They also brought mistrust, the mood of darkness, anxiety and pessimism. This all came from being subjects from the Nazi’s. Most Film Noir’s started off as B-movies, things that use to come on before a better high budgeted film. B-movies were low budgeted, emerging stars, reflect more into real life then a movies and also were sneakier and changed a lot of things. Film Noir was also influence by ‘hard boiled’ a lot of which were based on seedy private eye crime books of pulp fiction authors. This is where femme fatales and anti heroes were used a lot to make the film more interesting and more like real life. They often used the same sets of crime and gangster movies, loads of people still argue that film Noir isn’t a genre because it seems as if it was taken from these two genre’s and it’s still in both of these. This Film Noir is where it wasn’t the criminals making the crime it was the dodgy private eyes with their femme fatales. In Film Noir the usual relationship is a male character who is normally a private eye, cop, journalist, government agent, war veteran or a criminal. The lowlife has normally go two choices of women. The beautiful and the dutiful one. So in all Film Noir is a film which is full of darkness, depression, corruption, Femme Fatales making the male to choose the wrong decision. Streets full of rain and shadows, minimal light at most of the times. Film Noir is a mood set across well because of all of these things makes it that way.