Research into Film Noir (Noir movies)

As i have to do The editing for the Video clips that we will shoot, i thought it would be best for me to do research into the Film Noir genre and get some insight into it so that i may use this for my own work.

Film noir is a term given by French critics (and adopted into English) to a genre of Hollywood films made between the 1940s and the 1950s. Film noirs were usually set in an urban criminal underworld. Typical characters are private detectives (like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart) and femmes fatales. The visual style of film noirs is dark or high-contrast and shadowy. The tone is cynical, pessimistic, and even fatalistic.

Film Noir (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics (first by Frank Nino in 1946) who noticed the trend of how 'dark', downbeat and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France following the war

Many sources have claimed that director Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) was the first full-featured film noir
The primary moods of classic film noir were melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt, desperation and paranoia


Film noirs have recently been released in the modern era and have been refashioned for present-day sensibilities. A number of them in the 70s were hard-boiled policeman-hero films that contained film noirish characteristics. Most neo-noirs attempted to re-establish the moods and themes of classic noirs. Some examples are:


Writer/director Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) was a confounding, mind-bending tale told in backward-jumping reverse, featuring a hero (Guy Pearce) without short-term memory, and Carrie Ann Moss as a potential femme fatale

co-director Robert Rodriguez' monochrome R-rated Sin City (2005) with computer-generated visuals was based on Frank Miller's comic book tale about a corrupt seedy metropolis with rain-slicked streets, and all the noir requisites: a voice-over narration (by Josh Hartnett), a tough-guy hero/ex-con named Marv (Mickey Rourke), a sexy and manipulative femme fatale named Gail (Rosario Dawson), an aging policeman named Hartigan (Bruce Willis) protective of exotic stripper/dancer Nancy (Jessica Alba)

http://www.filmsite.org/filmnoir4.html