FILM NOIR
SHADOWS. SECRETS. SEDUCTION. MURDER. WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE OF THE SILVER SCREEN.

Genre: Film Noir / Crime / Mystery / Thriller / Psychological Drama
Primary Era: 1940s–1950s
Origins: American crime fiction, German Expressionism, French poetic realism, Depression-era and postwar American culture
Signature Elements: Moral ambiguity, crime, corruption, obsession, betrayal, fatalism, psychological darkness, dangerous attraction, hard-boiled dialogue, chiaroscuro lighting, deep shadows and compromised heroes.

AIN STORY
The streets are wet.
The room is dark.
Venetian blinds slice the light into shadows.
Somebody is lying.
Somebody has a gun.
And somebody has just walked through the door who absolutely should have stayed home.
Welcome to FILM NOIR.
Few cinematic styles are as instantly recognizable—or as endlessly seductive.
Film noir takes us into a world where good people make bad decisions, bad people occasionally do good things, love can be considerably more dangerous than murder, and trusting the wrong person may be the last mistake you ever make.
The term film noir—literally “black film” or “dark film”—was applied by French critics to a group of American movies whose dark visual style and equally dark subject matter distinguished them from conventional Hollywood entertainment.
But the filmmakers creating many of the original movies weren't walking onto sets saying:
“Today we're making a film noir.”
They were making crime pictures.
Detective stories.
Melodramas.
Psychological thrillers.
Murder mysteries.
Stories about desperate people.
History eventually gave those movies a name.
NOIR.
And what a magnificent world it became.

WELCOME TO THE SHADOWS
Film noir doesn't require a private detective.
It doesn't require a femme fatale.
It doesn't even require a murder.
Noir is something deeper.
It's a worldview.
In noir, the universe feels slightly tilted.
The past refuses to stay buried.
Money corrupts.
Desire blinds.
Institutions fail.
People reinvent themselves.
And almost everybody has a secret.
Sometimes the protagonist is a detective trying to discover the truth.
Sometimes he's a criminal trying to escape it.
Sometimes he's an ordinary person who makes one catastrophic decision and spends the rest of the movie discovering exactly how expensive that decision was.
Noir understands something frighteningly simple:
You don't have to be a criminal to end up in a crime story.
You just have to open the wrong door.

THE LOOK OF NOIR
You can sometimes recognize noir before anyone speaks.
Black and white photography.
Low-key lighting.
Deep shadows.
Fog.
Rain.
Smoke.
Staircases.
Alleys.
Fire escapes.
Cheap hotel rooms.
Nightclubs.
Neon signs.
Mirrors.
Bars.
Train stations.
Long corridors.
And those glorious Venetian blinds casting prison bars across someone's face before anybody has actually gone to jail.
The visual language of noir owes an enormous debt to German Expressionism and to European filmmakers and cinematographers who brought dramatically stylized approaches to light and shadow into Hollywood.
The darkness wasn't simply decoration.
It became psychology.
Characters could literally disappear into shadow.
Faces could be divided between light and darkness.
The environment itself could tell us that something was terribly wrong.
Noir made darkness beautiful.

THE HARD-BOILED WORLD
Film noir also owes an enormous debt to American crime literature.
Writers including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain helped create the hard-boiled world from which many noir stories emerged.
Hammett gave us Sam Spade.
Chandler gave us Philip Marlowe.
Cain gave us desperate people discovering that sex, money and murder can form a particularly unfortunate combination.
Their worlds were populated by detectives, criminals, crooked cops, corrupt businessmen, dangerous women, desperate husbands, private eyes, con artists and people trying to outrun mistakes that were gaining on them.
Hollywood turned those pages into shadows.

THE PRIVATE EYE
Then there is the detective.
The office isn't impressive.
The pay isn't great.
The client isn't telling the truth.
And somewhere in the desk is probably a bottle.
The noir detective became one of cinema's defining character types.
Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep helped establish the screen image of the hard-boiled private investigator: intelligent, skeptical, verbally quick and accustomed to navigating a world where everybody wants something.
The detective may bend rules.
He may insult the police.
He may become involved with exactly the wrong woman.
But somewhere underneath the cynicism is usually a personal code.
Noir heroes aren't always innocent.
They're simply trying not to become as corrupt as the world around them.

THE FEMME FATALE
She enters the room.
The movie changes.
The femme fatale became one of noir's most famous figures: intelligent, seductive, mysterious and frequently dangerous.
But the best noir women are far more complicated than the stereotype.
Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity doesn't merely tempt a man.
She recognizes exactly what he wants to believe about himself—and uses it.
Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice and countless others created women who refused to remain passive decorations inside male-centered crime stories.
Some were predators.
Some were survivors.
Some were trapped.
Some were manipulating the only power available to them.
And sometimes the supposedly dangerous woman wasn't the most dangerous person in the room at all.

THE WRONG MAN
One of noir's most powerful stories begins with an ordinary person.
No detective.
No gangster empire.
No criminal mastermind.
Just someone who makes a mistake.
Maybe he needs money.
Maybe he's lonely.
Maybe he falls in love.
Maybe he gets into the wrong car.
Maybe he meets the wrong person.
And suddenly—
He's in noir.
Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour may be one of the purest examples of this idea.
A man hitchhiking across America encounters a chain of circumstances that grows increasingly impossible to escape.
Was he unlucky?
Was he guilty?
Is he telling us the truth?
Noir doesn't always answer.
That's part of the fun.

CRIME DOESN'T ALWAYS PAY
Classic Hollywood operated under Production Code restrictions that frequently demanded criminal behavior ultimately receive punishment.
Noir filmmakers became remarkably creative about getting audiences emotionally invested in compromised characters while still satisfying those requirements.
We know Walter Neff shouldn't murder anyone.
We watch anyway.
We know Fred MacMurray's insurance salesman is walking directly into disaster in Double Indemnity.
We can't stop him.
That's noir.
Sometimes suspense isn't wondering what will happen.
It's knowing exactly what will happen and desperately watching someone continue toward it.

POSTWAR AMERICA GOES DARK
Noir flourished during and after World War II.
The world had changed.
Men returned from war.
Women had experienced new independence.
Cities were changing.
Traditional ideas about security, masculinity, marriage, authority and the American Dream felt less certain.
Noir absorbed those anxieties.
Its heroes were often veterans, drifters, detectives, criminals or displaced people.
Its institutions couldn't always be trusted.
Its cities could feel anonymous and hostile.
Its characters frequently wondered whether there was any way to start over.
Sometimes there was.
Usually there wasn't.

BOGART WALKS INTO THE SHADOWS
Humphrey Bogart became one of the faces most permanently associated with noir.
As Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, he gave audiences a detective who could operate among thieves, killers and liars without becoming one of them.
As Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Bogart navigated Raymond Chandler's labyrinth of corruption with Lauren Bacall at his side.
And in In a Lonely Place, Bogart turned the noir gaze inward.
The question wasn't simply whether Dixon Steele committed a crime.
The frightening question became whether love could survive his capacity for violence.
Bogart didn't just look good in noir.
He understood its moral temperature.

BARBARA STANWYCK: NOIR POWER
Few performances define the femme fatale as completely as Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity.
She doesn't need a gun when she enters Walter Neff's life.
She has Walter Neff.
Stanwyck's intelligence makes the character dangerous.
Phyllis understands weakness.
She understands desire.
And she understands how easily a man can convince himself that someone else's plan was his idea.
That is noir at its most deliciously dangerous.

EDWARD G. ROBINSON: THE MAN WHO KNOWS
And then Double Indemnity gives us Edward G. Robinson.
Not as a gangster.
As Barton Keyes.
An insurance investigator whose instincts tell him that something doesn't add up.
Keyes represents another noir archetype:
The person who knows the truth is hiding somewhere inside the details.
No gun.
No fedora required.
Just a mind that refuses to stop working.

JOHN HUSTON OPENS THE DOOR
John Huston's The Maltese Falcon helped establish many elements audiences would later associate with film noir.
Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled world.
Bogart's Sam Spade.
Mary Astor's mysterious Brigid O'Shaughnessy.
Peter Lorre.
Sydney Greenstreet.
Murder.
Greed.
Deception.
A priceless object everybody wants.
And virtually nobody telling the truth.
The result became one of the essential bridges between American hard-boiled fiction and cinematic noir.
BILLY WILDER TURNS OUT THE LIGHTS
Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, adapted from James M. Cain with a screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, became one of noir's defining achievements.
The ingredients are almost ridiculously perfect.
Barbara Stanwyck.
Fred MacMurray.
Edward G. Robinson.
Murder.
Insurance fraud.
Sexual obsession.
Voice-over narration.
Venetian-blind shadows.
And a protagonist telling us about his own destruction.
If you wanted to explain film noir to someone with one movie, you could do considerably worse.

NOIR DOESN'T END
By the late 1950s, the original classic noir cycle was changing.
But noir didn't disappear.
It evolved.
Neo-noir carried its DNA into later generations of filmmaking.
Color replaced black and white.
The Production Code disappeared.
Violence and sexuality became more explicit.
But the essential noir universe remained.
Corruption.
Obsession.
Moral ambiguity.
Dangerous desire.
The past returning.
The wrong decision.
The wrong person.
The wrong night.
Movies including Chinatown, Body Heat, L.A. Confidential and countless others demonstrate that noir is far more than a historical category.
It's cinematic DNA.
Once filmmakers discovered the shadows, they never really left them.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
The filmmakers responsible for many classic noirs did not necessarily describe their films as “film noir” while making them. The category was identified and developed retrospectively by critics and historians.
The French term film noir translates literally as “black film” or “dark film.”
French critic Nino Frank is closely associated with early critical use of the term in 1946 when discussing American crime films.
German Expressionism profoundly influenced noir's visual language, particularly dramatic lighting, distorted compositions and the use of shadow as an emotional element.
Many European filmmakers, actors, cinematographers and craftspeople who came to Hollywood before and during World War II helped bring European visual traditions into American filmmaking.
Hard-boiled American fiction supplied noir with another essential ingredient.
Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich became enormously important literary voices behind noir storytelling.
The Maltese Falcon was adapted from Hammett.
The Big Sleep came from Chandler.
Double Indemnity came from Cain.
Woolrich's stories and novels inspired numerous suspense and noir films.
Noir's famous voice-over narration often creates another wonderful problem:
Can we trust the person telling us the story?
Unreliable narrators fit perfectly into a genre built around deception.
Double Indemnity begins with a doomed man essentially confessing his story.
Sunset Boulevard goes even further—the narrator is dead.
Film noir and the gangster film overlap, but they aren't identical. Gangster movies frequently focus on organized crime and criminal rise-and-fall narratives; noir more often emphasizes psychological entrapment, moral ambiguity, fatalism and personal corruption.
Likewise, not every black-and-white crime movie is noir.
Noir is about more than photography.
It's the shadows inside the characters that matter.
The femme fatale remains one of noir's most recognizable archetypes, but noir also contains loyal women, victims, investigators, survivors and women whose complexity challenges the label entirely.
Low budgets sometimes helped noir.
Filmmakers could use darkness, limited locations, nighttime photography and economical production design to turn financial restrictions into visual style.
Now THAT is an AIN lesson.
Limited resources don't automatically limit creativity.
Sometimes they create the look.

AIN NOIR TREASURE CHEST
Enter noir through Humphrey Bogart, and you find Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John Huston, Lauren Bacall, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet.
Enter through Barbara Stanwyck, and you find Billy Wilder, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson and James M. Cain.
Enter through Edward G. Robinson, and you can travel from gangster films to noir to Fritz Lang.
Enter through Orson Welles, and the road leads toward psychological noir, corruption, visual experimentation and some of cinema's most extraordinary use of light and shadow.
Enter through Detour, and you discover what a fiercely inventive independent filmmaker can accomplish without a studio-sized budget.
That's why noir belongs so naturally inside Absolutely Indie Network.
It is simultaneously movie-star cinema, writer's cinema, director's cinema, cinematographer's cinema and independent-filmmaker cinema.

Follow one shadow and another one appears.