24 Facts About Film noir

Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic Film noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Great Depression.

Whether film noir qualifies as a distinct genre or whether it is more of a filmmaking style is a matter of ongoing debate among scholars.

Hirsch, as one who has taken the position that film noir is a genre, argues that these elements are present "in abundance".

Alain Silver, the most widely published American critic specializing in film noir studies, refers to film noir as a "cycle" and a "phenomenon", even as he argues that it has—like certain genres—a consistent set of visual and thematic codes.

Aesthetics of film noir were influenced by German Expressionism, an artistic movement of the 1910s and 1920s that involved theater, music, photography, painting, sculpture and architecture, as well as cinema.

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An important, possibly influential, cinematic antecedent to classic Film noir was 1930s French poetic realism, with its romantic, fatalistic attitude and celebration of doomed heroes.

Primary literary influence on film noir was the hardboiled school of American detective and crime fiction, led in its early years by such writers as Dashiell Hammett and James M Cain (whose The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared five years later), and popularized in pulp magazines such as Black Mask.

Thematically, films noir were most exceptional for the relative frequency with which they centered on portrayals of women of questionable virtue—a focus that had become rare in Hollywood films after the mid-1930s and the end of the pre-Code era.

Where Altman's subversion of the film noir mythos was so irreverent as to outrage some contemporary critics, around the same time Woody Allen was paying affectionate, at points idolatrous homage to the classic mode with Play It Again, Sam.

Detective series, prevalent on American television during the period, updated the hardboiled tradition in different ways, but the show conjuring the most Film noir tone was a horror crossover touched with shaggy, Long Goodbye-style humor: Kolchak: The Night Stalker, featuring a Chicago newspaper reporter investigating strange, usually supernatural occurrences.

An acknowledged masterpiece—in 2007 the American Film Institute ranked it as the greatest American film of the 1980s and the fourth greatest of all time—it tells the story of a boxer's moral self-destruction that recalls in both theme and visual ambiance noir dramas such as Body and Soul and Champion (1949).

Neon-Film noir can be seen as a response to the over-use of the term neo-Film noir.

Lynch's Mulholland Drive continued in his characteristic vein, making the classic Film noir setting of Los Angeles the venue for a Film noir-inflected psychological jigsaw puzzle.

Cynical and stylish perspective of classic film noir had a formative effect on the cyberpunk genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1980s; the film most directly influential on cyberpunk was Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, which pays evocative homage to the classic noir mode (Scott subsequently directed the poignant 1987 noir crime melodrama Someone to Watch Over Me).

Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit develops a noir plot set in 1940s L A around a host of cartoon characters.

The question of what constitutes the set of Film noir's identifying characteristics is a fundamental source of controversy.

The shadows of Venetian blinds or banister rods, cast upon an actor, a wall, or an entire set, are an iconic visual in Film noir and had already become a cliche well before the neo-Film noir era.

Latter-day noir has been in the forefront of structural experimentation in popular cinema, as exemplified by such films as Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and Memento.

Films noir tend to revolve around heroes who are more flawed and morally questionable than the norm, often fall guys of one sort or another.

The characteristic protagonists of Film noir are described by many critics as "alienated"; in the words of Silver and Ward, "filled with existential bitterness".

Classic film noir has been associated by many critics with the American social landscape of the era—in particular, with a sense of heightened anxiety and alienation that is said to have followed World War II.

Tone of film noir is generally regarded as downbeat; some critics experience it as darker still—"overwhelmingly black", according to Robert Ottoson.

Influential critic Paul Schrader wrote in a seminal 1972 essay that "film noir is defined by tone", a tone he seems to perceive as "hopeless".

Music of film noir was typically orchestral, per the Hollywood norm, but often with added dissonance.