HISTORY OF FILM NOIR.

Film Noir is a world of villainous women who can achieve anything they want, ruthless romantics crave power and money more than life itself, crime is glamorized and pays just as well. Grab your .45 and your trench coat but do us all a favour, don't turn on the lights.

During pre-war Hollywood, when people went to watch movies, the cinemas would play two films. There was your big blockbuster film with the greatest stars and largest budget, the A film, then your B movie which usually had up and coming stars and a budget not so great as the A films. The B movies usually reused sets from the A films, the directors also had more artistic freedom because the studios kept the A pictures their main priority. This allowed the directors full control without having to worry about the man up stairs. This made the B movies push boundaries within the genre. People were not used to viewing the angles or scenes that were included, this is what gave noir an uncomfortable feel.

A classic Femme Fatale.

When the Second World War ended, a torrent of films from America reached Europe. Upon seeing these films, critics noticed that most of them had similarities. They were very pessimistic, a lot of the story lines involved crime, murder, double crossings. In 1946 a French man, Nino Frank, gave this genre of films the name “Film Noir”, which in French means Black Film.

Film Noir typically involve stories based on criminal activity. Even the good guys are bad.  Be it killing your lover’s husband for a fat packet or escaping your lover for the job you once loved, you're bound to get it in the back, the femme fatales end up on top.  Low lighting is key in these films to give of a negative paranoid image of how the characters usually feel, large shadows swamp the scenes and make both us and the actors alert to every detail. Thick or thin.

The Femme Fatale is another French word, meaning “Fatal Female”, these became increasingly popular around the time of the end of the war. I think this is because during the war all the men were off over seas fighting and it was a very female world home side.  They took over a lot of the male roles and come 1945 when the men returned, they saw their women in a different light, all of this created super confident women. It was no longer a mans world.

A comic book warning about communism.

It is hotly debated if Film Noir is actually a genre or not. Film Noir developed from the early 20’s gangster movies and is based on the hardboiled novels wrote during the great depression. Film Noir reached its pinnacle around 1940 to 1950, producing big hits such as:  Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, all of which, (besides The Third Man) were filmed in America, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago were popular places to film.  When people started fleeing Germany and the surrounding countries to escape Hitler’s reign, so did the film makers, they bought with them German Expressionism which used shadows to their fullest effect. When the atrocities of the Second World War became more and more public there developed a growing hate for right wing fascism, the kind Hitler imposed upon Germany. This changed a lot of peoples minds back home in America, there was now a growing increase in left wing liberalism, this greatly effected Hollywood. Many people in the creative community were liberal and when America went to war with Russia there was a fear of communism and it spreading to America. People in Hollywood began ratting each other out, this led to some of the directors fleeing America for foreign soils, and all of this perfectly reflects film noir, paranoia.