agree with you totally.
what i said was the simplest definition of film noir. (i, also, suggested that
it takes years of film watching to understand it.)
my point was.............despite shadows and dark scenes and atmospheric
images, the posters of these films were often SUPER BRIGHT AND COLORFUL.
michael
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Halegua Comic Art <sa...@comic-art.com>
To: dialmbb...@aol.com; MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
Sent: Thu, Jun 10, 2010 7:25 pm
Subject: Re: [MOPO] film noir posters
but i believe noir involves so much of dark, dark camera angles, images &
shadows and shadows and shadows.
that is really just a small portion of what Noir is Michael. But seeing as it
is the visual portion, it is what people most often get from watching noir. the
basic subject matter that was present in all of the seminal noir is this:\
a subject, generally innocent but not always, who is caught in a situation that
creates a downward spiral from which there is usually no escape and results in
the death or destruction of the individual
for instance
Detour, DOA, Double Indemnity, Caged, Nightmare Alley are the premier noir
themes. In each the subject caught in a death spiral is an innocent
Detour: hitch hiking Tom Neal in a car with a guy who dies. That wasn't his
fault, but he makes all the bad decisions from this point on eventually leading
to his presumed arrest & execution or jailing
DOA: innocent accountant signed a bill of sale and is going to die because of
it (how much more innocent can you be?)
Double Indemnity: Salesman gets drawn into murder plot and leads to
destruction/death (gas house)
Caged: innocent young wife in car when hubby tries to rob a store and is
killed. she is convicted of being an accomplice which she apparently was not
and during the course of the film slowly becomes a criminal herself aka this
has led to her degradation
Nightmare Alley: reporter doing a story on carny workers gets taken in by the
carnys and eventually self degrades into that which he sees as the most vile of
all carnys - the chicken head eating drunk called "the geek" which is the total
degradation of a human being
these are seminal themes of all noirs and are the top of the class. There are
very many "so called" noirs whose only attribution to the field is camera work
and thusly, incomplete - and there are also hordes of crime films incorrectly
called noirs simply because they are crime films. In almost every "pure" noir,
nearly the entire cast is dead by the climax as in Murder My Sweet (only
Marlowe survives), Postman Always Rings Twice, the Killing. The other main
aspect of noir is that it almost entirely deals with the underbelly of humanity
- excepting for the innocent victim whom the story revolves around, the rest
of the cast are the lowliest of the low.
if camera work is the signature of noir, then we may as well say much of German
cinema of the teens and twenties are film noir (they aren't) or that the early
Universal horrors are. Can there be anything with darker camera work than
Frankenstein or the Mummy??
the base of film noir starts with the theme of the story and it is from there
that the branches grow
Rich
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