Film Noir: Shadow, Style & Fatalism

What Is Film Noir?

Film noir is less a genre than a mood — a cluster of visual, narrative, and thematic tendencies that emerged in Hollywood during the 1940s and persisted, in various mutations, through subsequent decades. French critics, watching a wave of American films that had been withheld from Europe during the war years, coined the term in 1946. They were struck by the darkness: the shadowed cinematography, the cynical worldview, the fatalistic plots in which characters were driven by desire toward destruction.

The canonical noirs are crime films, but their concerns extend far beyond crime. They are meditations on guilt, desire, deception, and the impossibility of escaping one's past. Their protagonists — hard-boiled detectives, desperate men lured by dangerous women, ordinary people caught in extraordinary moral situations — inhabit a world where the social contract has broken down and where individual will is perpetually overwhelmed by circumstance.

The visual language of noir was formed by the confluence of two traditions: German Expressionism (many noir cinematographers and directors were European émigrés who had fled fascism) and the American hard-boiled crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. From Expressionism came the extreme contrasts of light and shadow, the claustrophobic framings, the distorted perspectives. From hard-boiled fiction came the vernacular poetry of the voice-over narration, the world-weary detective, and the femme fatale.