Lecture Eleven:
Noir's Visual Style
11/1/2005

Film noir has been defined as a genre, a movement, a visual style, even as a prevailing mood.

Film noir as genre

A genre film is a recognizable type of movie, characterized by certain pre-established conventions. Common American genres are westerns, gangster films, and musicals.

Film noir as a movement

Film movements occur in specific historical periods —at times of national stress and focus of energy. They express a consistency of both thematic and formal elements which makes them particularly expressive of those times

Film noir as a style

Most people call film noir a style of filmmaking, which means that it gains its coherence and meaning from its visual elements

Visually, film noir is fluid, sensual, and extraordinarily expressive. Its visual characteristics can be classified as follows:

1. Low-key lighting. Unlike the even illumination of high-key lighting which seeks to display attractively all areas of the frame, the low-key noir style opposes light and dark, hiding faces, rooms, urban landscapes—and by extension, motivations and true character—in shadow and darkness which carry connotations of the mysterious and the unknown.
2. Chiarascuro lighting. Above all, it is the constant opposition of areas of light and dark that characterizes film noir cinematography. Small areas of light seem on the verge of being completely overwhelmed by the darkness that now threatens them from all sides
3. Also prominent is an extreme attention to depth of field and a frequent use of wide-angle lenses.
4. Iconography. trench coats, fedoras, excessive make-up, jewelry, deserted streets, neon signs, mist, fog, rain, cigarettes, venetian blinds, guns, staircases
5. An antitraditional mise-en-scene. Film noir typically employs a mise-en-scene designed to unsettle, jar, and disorient the viewer in correlation with the disorientation felt by the noir heroes.

Noir’s Visual Style and the Femme Fatale:

In film noir, women are no longer wives, mothers, girls next door—they are dangerous women who use their sexuality as a means of gaining money and power. Consequently, most film noir women wind up being killed or otherwise punished.

But though the narratives of film noir movies may try to harness, discipline, or punish the transgressive woman, the cinematography of these films reveal a fascination with her. The strength of these women is expressed in the visual style by their dominance in composition, angle, camera movement, and lighting. They are overwhelmingly the compositional focus, generally center frame and/or in the foreground, or are pulling focus to them in the background. They control camera movement, seeming to direct the camera (and the hero’s gaze, with our own) irresistibly with them as they move.

Films from which clips were taken this week:

• Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice  (Tay Garnett, 1946)
• Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
• Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
• The Lady from Shangai (Orson Welles, 1948)