Hello folks! This blog post shall relate to a genre of film that I enjoy and that ladies and germs is Film Noir! but before I get into all of that, I'm going to squeeze in some shit to start out on!
First off, I just played the game World of Goo and it's pretty fun, it's a physics based puzzle game where you have to build structures with goo balls. I may be behind on it but it'd would be a good app to get on an iPad or iPhone I'm sure. Another one is Plants vs. Zombies it may be lame but I really dig this game, you plant a bunch of plants that work like guns to kill invading zombies and then the last one, as everyone knows, is Angry Birds, which is also pretty fun. ANYWAY, there are some apps for you if you want games and shit...
Also, there's this youtube channel, dunno why, but I call it Shit Cats! You'll see... http://www.youtube.com/user/KimKwitter
Next in the line are my recommendations (as usual). For the film, I'm going to be super lame and let you see a side of me that I'm not proud of and say Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007). That's right, this incredibly stupid comedy film that satirizes music documentaries like Walk The Line and The Doors. I thought the film was actually hilarious and great if you want a mindless, lowbrow sort of comedy. For the album today, I'll go with Surfer Rosa from Pixies. This is a great piece of alternative rock, it's great.
Okay, now onto the good stuff, film noir. If you don't know what a film noir is, it's generally a hollywood crime drama. Classic film noir lasted from the 1940s to the 1950s and had a black and white style that was similar to German expressionism. Film noir came out of the pulp crime fiction of the Depression. It is a very difficult genre to classify due to the fact that it could span and include many different subjects. One reason for the rise of the noir style in America was due to German expressionist film makers, like Fritz Lang, fleeing to America in the 30s and 40s to get away from Nazi control of Germany and bringing that style with them. Classic noir generally had a low budget and lacked a well known star. They were essentially B-movies that didn't always get the recognition they deserved until after they were released. Many of these films revolved around strong women, generally with questionable intent, which was uncommon at the time. The femme fatale was a common character archetype in noir, along with the brooding and hardened detective. Many of the popular and beloved noir films were A-list endeavors also, many of the noir directors that may have started off doing b-list movies eventually went onto direct A-list films also.
Noir is generally seen as an American film form, however, there are noir films from all over the world. France, Britain, Italy and Japan are just a few of the international entities that produced classic noir films.
The popularity of noir carried on into the 60s and became a style that is generally classified as neo-noir. Generally these new takes on the genre either revived or reworked the conventions of the classics and at times amplified the classic standards. Even as the new payed homage and revitalized the old, it also critiqued it. It took the standard archetypes and made then laughable at times , made them over-exaggerations of themselves but largely it took what classic noir had begun and relaunched it's importance in society.
Neo-noir continued into the 80s and 90s, becoming grittier, more sexually charged and more acclaimed. Some directors who relaunched and changed the noir style for the new decade were Martin Scorsese, The Coen Brothers, David Cronenberg and David Lynch, who all mixed aspects of noir into different styles and genres. A perfect example of the new noir of the 90s was Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, the name alone describes where it's influence came from, the same place that influenced many noir films.
Noir has become popular in the 2000s also crossing into genres such as comic based movie even (such as with The Dark Knight), and sci-fi.
There are many noir staples such as the detective, the crime boss or the femme fatale. Common occurrences in noir films are murder (or some other form of crime), heists, false accusations of crimes, amnesia, and alienated characters. The setting is generally always urban and usually in a big city at night or during storms. Casinos, bars and nightclubs are also common locales in a noir. They generally always either question morality or include characters on the negative end of the morality spectrum. They usually include flashbacks, disrupted or obscure narrative, voiceover narration, and can be told in third-person but is generally first-person.
The lighting of noir films is very low and provides a lot of light/dark contrast and a lot of shadow. Many camera angles are common in noir such as the Dutch angle, low angle shots, wide angle shots, and skewed angle shots. Another noir staple is the use of mirrors, seeing characters in mirrors is common. On-site shooting is also common in noir and night-for-night shooting which means that night scenes are actually shot at night instead of in the daytime.
Noir is so popular that they even have video games in the style such as L.A. Noire or the noir section of Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions.
I would enjoy doing a noir style film some day in my hopeful career as a director, but we'll see if that all works out... anyway, I hope this was informative for you and check you later.
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