Noir Notes

Bordwell's Hollywood Paradigm

Linear Narrative - avoids self-consciousness
Invisible editing style - avoids excess [except when generically motivated]
Transparency of mise-en-scene
Simple motivation of characters
Character motivation drives plot
Moves from harmony to disruption to resolution

Film Noir
Film Noir - retrospectively applied label, coined in 1947 by post-WWII French critics, who:
Noticed homogeneous elements in American movies, which they had been unable to see during World War II.
Concluded that cynicism, darkness and pessimism creeping into the jollier tendency of American films they remembered from the 1930's.

Analytical Approaches:
1. Reflective - film as a reflection of dominant ideology; themes exploring and providing evidence of worry over social conditions, political concerns & anxieties.
2. Aesthetic - 'new' stylistic & visual elements express post war disillusionment.
3. Psychoanalytic - both of above contribute to expression of universal truths of inner reality, the human condition.

1. Reflective Approaches
Women - represented outside domestic settings, reflecting their move to factories while men away. Seen as danger by:
Male Anxiety - of returning soldiers reflected in unstable identities of drifters, unable to settle & at mercy of:
Fate - reflecting a loss of power & control over events. Investigated through:
Flashbacks - reflect an attempt by America to understand how it had moved from a non-interventionist position to World Power with:
Responsibility - plots reflected debate over legitimacy & who had power and authority. Explored relationship between:
Law vs Individuality - reflected in plots which explored underworld protagonists, private detectives, or just ordinary guys caught up in the moral ambiguities of:
Contradiction - of post-war America.
In sum - these elements added up to a new realism for Hollywood film, an expression of disillusionment in their STYLE.

2. Aesthetic Approaches
Mise-en-scene - darkness and shadow defined everything; if outside sets were not simply lit for night-time scenes, then gangsters sat with drawn shades at midday.
Sets & Actors - given equal lighting, foregrounding texture & composition.
German Expatriates - i.e. Lang, Siodmak, Wilder, Preminger, Ophuls, Dieterle etc.
Urban Location - linked to consideration of mise-en-scene, this element reveals the origins of this style of film as the European expressionist project, which locates the dark side of humanity in the concentration of humanity that occurs in the city. This element provides a bridge between the 3 approaches outlined here.

3. Psychoanalytical Approaches
Location as mindset - "Thus, in noir, homes are given to us only in glimpses - as something lost or something fragile and threatened." [Vivian Sobchack. 'Lounge Time', in "Refiguring American Film Genres" ed. Nick Brown. University of California Press. 1998]
Urban spaces are masculine spaces, defined by the absence of domestic (female) spaces.
Anxiety and Paranoia - operating as both male and [split?] female identity crises. How can she get back to domestic safety? How does he restore authority & stability?
Oedipal Dynamic - the struggle between the monstrous id, the good and bad mother figures as the main engines of the plot.

Three Phases of Noir (Schrader)
Phase I (1941- 46) - focusing on the private eye, the lone wolf figure. Tending to be more talk than action, with a romantic sub-plot.
Phase II (1945- 49) - the realism of post-war America involves looking unflinchingly at crime and corruption, on both societal and personal level. Romance now a curse.
Phase III (1949-53) - psychotic impulses, shedding the romantic conventions of earlier phases and lamenting the loss of public honour and heroic integrity. These texts are more self aware than earlier films, and rife with end-of-the-line heroes, who ultimately embrace their fate.

Out of the Past (1947)
"You're no good and neither am I. We deserve each other!"

"Characters keep attempting to escape their specific biography or the particulars of history, and they live in fear of the revelation of shady and individual pasts to those in their amorphous present." (Vivian Sobchack)

Film Noir: Undermining the Paradigm by:
1. Refusing an upbeat resolution and thus interrogating the ideology of the paradigm.
2. Complicating the linearity of plot (i.e. with flashbacks).
3. Giving us complex, tortured protagonists.
4. Focusing excessively on composition, texture of the image, editing and camera angle (i.e. FORM rather then content).