Film Noir

One of the most potent and influential film styles has been labeled the film noir by certain French critics who noticed a stylistic shift in American films in the 1940s. As Paul Schrader notes with reference to a statement by Raymond Durgnat, film noir is not a genre and is not defined in terms of conventions of setting and conflict. Instead, it is defined by the subtler qualities of tone and mood and is also defined by its time period:

In general, film noir refers to those Hollywood films of the forties and early fifties that portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption (Schrader 170).

Of course, there is more to the mood of the film noir than the external evidence of wet city streets and crime, and film noir actually derives from the sense of displacement and angst during and after World War II. 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. A film that evokes the time and place as well as the mood is Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974).

Actually, Chinatown is set slightly before the era of the classic film noir, but it makes use of the same sense of fate gone awry. Cawelti rightly points out how the film evokes the genre of the hard-boiled mystery in a variety of ways, a formula that has been much used and that says something key about American popular culture:

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gain is left with a sense of terrible loss and the inability to do anything about it. The hard-boiled detective usually manages to set things right, at least to the limits of human ability. In the film noir, the hero rarely can set things right and is instead left with a sense of the indifference and basic unfairness of the universe. Justice is what human beings can wrest from one another and not a universal moral truth. Schrader notes that one of the major influences on the film noir was postwar disillusionment, though he also rightly notes that the impetus for this kind of film started earlier with the appearance of darker crime films at the end of the 1930s (Schrader 170-171). Chinatown is set in this later period, but it is clearly a film built on the disillusionment of the main character and on a certain image of the California version of the American Dream as something that has been tarnished by the machinations of big money interests like those of Noah Cross. jake asks Cross at one point how much more money he needs and what he would do with it if he had it, and Cross answers that it is not money as such that he wants but power. Power relations are key elements in the film noir, often because the central characters

Category: Film - F