Film Noir

When we think of American detective movies from the mid 1900’s, we automatically have a general idea of what this film is going to look like. We expect a world where the colors are only black and white and everything is covered in shadows. We all have an image in our minds, but most of us with no film background have any idea what this type of genre is called. This genre is called film noir and it is a “visual legacy” that transformed from German expressionism, a movement in the 1910’s – 1920’s in drama and film, into what we know of today. However at the time that these films were being created, the directors did not actually know that they were creating a completely new genre of film.
Aside from the visual aesthetics of the film, an audience usually has a decent idea of how the plot is going to begin and unfold. The plot focuses on a detective who is a man of honor and integrity who will always fight for true justice, even though it means they never move socially upward. He encounters many things throughout the film, especially the attention of a mysterious female character who is deeply implicated in the conspiracy. The film usually ends with the detective being able to solve the case, but is not changed by it in anyway. He returns to his life of obscurity, waiting for his next assignment.
When we first look at the film Chinatown, a film set in the 1930’s that was actually shot in 1974, we automatically start think that the film is going to follow the prototypical outline that all films of this genre are going to follow. All of the qualities are there, besides the fact the film is in color. You have the detective, the darkness, the ambiguity, and a crime. However, Chinatown is not like any film of this type of genre. Both the characters are nothing like prototypical archetypes of the genre. The characteristics of the character played by Jack Nicholson are different from what you expect a private eye to be. Instead of being a moral gentleman at the end, he instead does not solve the crime in the end. The female character, played by Faye Dunaway, is also different from what we expect. Instead of being an independent and courageous woman, she is someone that puts up a visage to hide anguish and ambiguity.
I believe that these evident characteristics are not a mistake made in the film, but are an updated view of film noir. When the prototypical characteristics for film noir were made, society was at a completely different place than where it was when Chinatown was made. The sexual innuendos that were said in the 1920’s and 30’s were something that has become common in films in the 70’s. The depth of character is change that resembles the change of the film from the archetype of black and white to color. The characters in Chinatown are infinitely more complicated than the characters in most of the films that were made in the 1920’s and 30’s. This juxtaposes the depth of characters in the black and white films where distinguishing between the characters was as easy as looking at things in black and white.
As film technology starts evolving, so well the genres of film. No longer will one genre of film be able to tackle certain ideas. An action film will no longer just be seen as an action film. A thriller will now be able to touch on ideas that are pressing issues in our society. A slasher film could potentially make political critiques. As far fetched as this seems, one could only imagine how far fetched the ideas of the future of cinema people had in the 1920’s.

Seeing What We Don't Want to See

Films went through a huge transformation throughout history. When films first appeared, they were nothing but short clips of people moving. But this amazed everyone! No one could believe that the static images that they were seeing were no moving. After D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, films began to take a different form. Instead of short clips, films were now feature length and expressive. They were expressive in the way that they were trying to evoke an emotion in an audience. Films began to create worlds instead of just replicating the world we already lived in. The most important figure of this time in film was Sergei Eisenstein, who saw the true potential of film as a form of expressive art. Eisenstein’s main method was to use a specific type of editing, known as montage, to evoke an emotion in the audience. As he saw it, combining two shots would cause the audience to think about what they saw and force them to think about how the two shots were interrelated. Eisenstein’s masterpiece was the film The Battle Ship Potemkin, a film that tried to evoke the feeling of revolution in the audience. Eisenstein’s had perfected the method of montage, which is now used in all types of moving image media we use today. All the highlight shows we watch, we have Eisenstein to thank for. All the time we spend getting riled up by a compilation big hits in football and amazing goals is all thanks to him.
However, as film kept developing, the exclusive use of montage in films was disappearing. Now the technique of mise-en-scéne was being used in films. This technique dealt with how the objects in a shot were located. This strayed away from the thought that just editing shots together was enough to evoke emotion from an audience.


We think of language as just words assigned to objects that allow us to communicate amongst ourselves. Films also have the same basic concept of language. It, however, uses it much differently. The different techniques, such as montage and mise-en-scéne, are what films uses as language to tell the audience a narrative. Icons and objects in shots are also used to tell the audience things. Icons have connotations attached to them. The symbols of superheroes, such as the symbols of Superman and Batman, are automatically recognized by an audience as belonging to someone. Directors know this, so putting something on the screen that has an obvious connotation would obviously evoke a bad response from the audience.
Even though every film uses different techniques to try to tell a story, films have one thing in common: the presence of a narrative of some sort. Every single film has characters that progress that progress the story. There is always some sort of conflict and then resolution. But what if we watch a film that does not have closure or some sort of resolution at the end. How are we supposed to feel? We are used to the language of film and are completely thrown off by anything that strays away from this. The film Cache by Michael Haneke does just this. Shots in this are completely different than what we are used to. Some of the shots are much longer than what we are used to. While watching the film, you are looking at all the empty space on the screen, waiting for something to happen. However, when you realize that what you were watching was nothing but a very long establishing shot followed by a tracking shot, you feel a bit cheated. We, as a society, have become to accustomed to quick cuts that lead to immediate action. When something different is thrown at us, we don’t know how to react at all.