The film Blade Runner (1982) makes deliberate use of the 1940s film style known as film noir, a name given to the approach by French film critics who saw in American movies an emerging social, psychological, and stylistic point of view after World War II. The use of the style in Blade Runner brings two different generic sensibilities into conflict: the science fiction film which looks to the future, and the film noir which finds meaning in the dark and decaying urban world of the 1940s. Director Ridley Scott deliberately plays the two styles against one another, with the high-tech world of the future shown not as a brave new world of progress and light but as an extension of the urban decay of today, a theme highlighted by the stylistic link to films of the past.
American films in the 1940s were dominated by the film noir, so much so that "it came to identify both the narrative-cinematic style of those films and also the historical period during which they were produced." The style would have an influence long after that historical period ended. Indeed, it continues to have an influence today, though the underlying social dynamic that produced it in the first place changed long ago. Yet, there is something in the film noir that appeals to and expresses darker aspects of the human soul and so has a resonance still. Film noir is more properly called a style rather than a genre:
Film noir was itself a system of visual and thematic conventions which were not associated with any specific genre or story formula, but rather with a distinctive cinematic style and a particular historical period.
Schatz's insistence on noting the relationship to a historical period is important because it indicates that film noir was a social, psychological, and aesthetic response to a certain sense of societal angst that developed first in the uncertainties of World War II, a period of world tensions manifested in the psychological ambiguit...