Film Noir and Neo Noir

Film Noir and Neo Noir

Film noir is a term used to define Hollywood films which contains elements of crime drama. It mostly emphasizes on the cynical attitude and sexual behavior of people. They basically underline either realistic portraits of actual, real life criminals or imaginary evil criminal minds showing their devilishness through smart crimes. The origin of film noir can be said to have its roots in cinematography, having German expressionism, the number of movements that began in Germany just before the Second World War, peaking in the 1920s. Most of the stories in film noir are the reflection of crime fiction which appeared in the US during the Great Economic Depression following the Second World War. The period of film noir dates between the early 1940s and the late 1950s. The term film noir was first invented by a critic in 1946 but was adopted by the filmmakers several decades later. Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Out Of the Past, and The Big sleep are some of the famous Noir films.

On the other hand, neo-noir combines the basic idea of film noir but with updated content, visual element, theme, and style lacking in noir films. The presence of neo-noir films started in the 1960s, but it was not until after 1970 that they were seriously taken as a separate kind. Basically, films from the post-noir period were called neo-noir films but then the term expanded. Mostly in time including both post-war films and the expanding phenomenon that is neo-noir. With slight differentiation of noir film features, they can be considered as a reproduction of noir films. The changes in British society were less dramatic than what was posed in the films, but they can be considered just a step ahead of the actual circumstances of that time. Prominent neo-noir films include Blade Runner, Basic Instinct, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Sin City, and Max Payne.

Noir – Neo-Noir: Features

The visual style of film noir can be defined as one having low-lights and more shadows, all to add more drama to the story. The concept of shadows was such a cliché that in most scenes, the face of the character is unrecognizable. This concept was changed with neo-noir films. The scenes in most neo-noir films have shots of cameras placed at low angles, wide angles, and Dutch angles to increase this added drama elements. Shots were also taken in single or multiple mirrors or in any other reflecting object, adding more suspicion to the character. Neo-noir also paid more attention to details as seen in The Man Who Wasn’t There where Ed Crane is shown to be smoking in most of the scenes, which is true for the 1940s, the time this story is supposed to represent.

The story line of noir disrupted the normal narration sequences. They combined flashbacks or voice-over narration of the whole story as observed In Double Indemnity and Out Of The Past where Walter Huff is telling the story in flashbacks and Jeff Bialy tells most of the story of his dark past to Ann in flashback separately. On the other hand, neo-noir took a bolder path and incorporated both flashback and voice-over narration which is shown in The Watchmen where both is combined, Rorschach’s voiceover and the flashbacks about the watchmen’s past.

Most of the Film noir plots show murder which can be emerged from jealousy, betrayal, and greed. The murder is investigated by the police, private detective, or some close relative of the victim. Other plots include robberies, con-games, changed or stolen identities, and obviously amnesia, one of the leading cliché of the film noir world. The story line normally revolves around a “villain hero” who had received an ill-moral path derived by a certain tragedy as seen in Out Of the Past where Jeff Bailey is the protagonist. He is a former private investigator in search of a way out. He wants to confront his past once and for all in order to be at peace with it. But there’s something within him that, added to unhappy circumstances, made that wish impossible. “Plot of film noir is divided in these 11 categories as claimed by Durgnat: crime as social criticism, gangsters on the run, private eyes and adventures, middle class murder, portraits and doubles, sexual pathology, psychopaths, hostages to fortune, black and reds, Guignol, horror, fantasy” (Durgnat). The presence of a sexually attractive lady who is a danger magnet for anyone who dares to come close to her, that is a femme fatale, is also present at times. In the film, Basic Instinct, Catherine kept committing crime after crime, still managed to fool Nick and convince him of her innocence. The stories of deception, seduction, and corruption in bright day light with a shooting effect of the desert or open water is a feature of neo-noir. In The Man Who Wasn’t There, the story runs around a barber who kills out of greed and jealousy and then had no regrets of doing what he did. At the time of neo-noir, America started fighting a different war so the character of the people also changed in films. The protagonist became a man blurring lines between good and evil as seen in the character of Nick in Basic Instinct.

Film noir was during a time of mass disappointment, economic crash, and hopelessness. Therefore, these movies convey essentially a pessimistic message. It normally paints a picture of a world where characters are caught in between unwanted drama and crime, from which they cannot figure a way out no matter how hard they try. It shows that people in this world are doomed with fate and are helpless. As shown in the movie Out Of the Past where the protagonist Jeff is doomed to his past and tries to figure a way out of his situation to live a peaceful life with his love Ann. He got killed in the end by the femme fatale Kathie. Hopelessness is the key feature of movies of this genre. Only few movies, such as Double Indemnity directed by Billy Wilder in 1944, are known to be filled with humor contrary to the normal film noir style.

, Differences,

However, there are very few differences between noir and neo-noir films. The main difference is the considered time period. As mentioned earlier, noir films include Hollywood crime dramas from the early 1940s to late the 1950s, while neo-noir includes films from the 1970s onwards. Therefore, the content of the movies changed due to the different time periods because society had to deal with different issues.

Noir movies are mostly black and white due to the lack of technologies in that era such as The Big Sleep while neo-noir movies are shot in color such as Blade Runner. Due to the omission of censorship and lack of restrictions by the government, neo-noir films are sexually much bolder with absence of sensitivity at all the parts of the villain. Noir films shows the same ideas but in a conservative manner and with some element of sensitivity.

Another main difference between noir and neo-noir is that in noir films, the main character is the protagonist who is an anti-hero, a person who by fate or due to the femme fatale is pulled in the world of crime. This kind of plot helps viewers develop a relationship with that person and the story. As seen in Citizen Kane, the viewer cannot help but feel bad about the burning of the sled, the memento of the only moment of happiness of Charles Foster. While in neo-noir films, unusual camera moments and a unique way of plot progression keep reminding viewers that they are only watching a film.

Noir films emerged in the 40s, gained all the fame it can, and died in the 60s; then this strange nostalgia reemerged in the 70s. The question is why did it reemerge? Why did people of modern times felt a need to re-create a cinematology of the era which they were not even a part of? The answer to this question is that neo-noir can be considered a way to recall the exotic, transgressed aura of film noir. The same film techniques are used, with emotional disturbances shown in a more graphic manner, and made with more aesthetic techniques to touch the heart of today’s audience in a way comparable with the film noir and audience of that time.

Similarities

It is hard to compare noir and neo-noir because this depends on the perspective. The things which were supposed to be exciting, uncomfortable, and shocking for older audiences would merely seem to be something very normal for a viewer of today as we got use to the older aspects. In Double Indemnity, when the couple comes to the car after committing murder and the car does not start, this most probably created tension between the couple and most probably the viewer of that time but this scene will have no effect on us as we have experienced this twist a thousand times. The differences made between noir and neo-noir called to give the viewer of today the same experience as the viewer from the noir film era. As seen in Sin City, the scene where a woman is standing on a terrace with a man approaching having a cigarette in his hand, speaking in a low dreamy voice, immediately catches the attention of the viewer. The plots, main ideas, and characters are all same in noir and neo-noir (KCM).

Use of Gender, Urban, and Space

Gender

Film noir and neo-noir seems to highlight the idea of a femme fatale who is a sexually attractive woman in black clothing with a tainted heart and evil mind conspiring against everyone and mostly the main criminal behind the scene. A femme fatale is a woman who refuses to play the role of devoted wife and loving mother that mainstream society prescribes for women. A point to be noted is that they are really the offender or the actual victims who are in a struggle to be free from the restrictions placed by the men. They end up destroying not only themselves but also become the reason of the downfall of the protagonist (Mckenzie).

Phyllis in Double Indemnity is married to a man who does not even like her. Her circumstances lead her in inviting Walter Neff to come in her home to kill her husband. Out of the Past provides a classic example of film noir as well, especially in its portrayal of women. Kathie who is the ultimate femme fatale, forces the action toward disaster. First, trying to escape from her relationship with Whit, then by manipulating the two men who would try to love or control her. Ann, on the other hand, acts as the idyllic but featureless traditional woman, standing by her man even when he tells her that he is mixed up with murder and another woman.

Harvey says that film noir also shows a disabled man, in particular a male-female relation as seen in The Big Sleep, which does deny a common narrative convention of the film noir genre by allowing the story to conclude with the successful relationship between Marlowe and Vivian.

It also portrays a male victim whose story of a doomed life will leave the viewer with irrational fears of everything going wrong in his life. Film noir as compared to Western romantic comedies or coming-of-age films do not paint a picture of an idealistic life with happy endings, rather it tends to tell the tragic story of hopeless half-dead people and the unfair fate driven chain of events that forced them to stand in such a place. A perfect example of this type of gender expression is Double Indemnity which starts with a silhouette of a man on crutches approaching, holding the attention of the viewer from the very beginning. The opening lines show the glimpse of overwhelming panic and crushing failure, building inside Walter Neff through his voice as he confessed murdering his lover and her husband. Even without the actual horror scenes, film noir’s sterilization, gender expression, criminal conspiracies/plots, and social injustice are sure to invoke dark ideas from within the viewer (Luhr).

Neo-noir has portrayed gender in a different way. The best example of this is Sin City. In this movie, the male characters have quickly went to the rescue of their respective women, be it a noir neurotic or sadomasochistic bondage-clad dominatrix prostitute as Jin.

Urban

Another feature of noir and neo-noir is its shooting locations in mostly urban settings. The urban locations can be defined with the reference of Out Of The Past. It has unclouded High Sierra Country sites in the beginning which does not feel consistent with the noir idea at first but later, shady, rainy streets are seen. The story gives a unique combination of the sunny urban site of Bridgeport and dark corrupt streets of San Francisco (Eifert).

To understand the scenes, the best example is movie Blade Runner. This post-modern film mixes the scenes with architectural designs of different periods. The buildings have characteristics of skyscrapers but the overall look of a temple with the sign linguistics from some other world mixes the past, present, and future. Although these kinds of movies are not clearly defined, the voice-over narration, idioms, and tones give an idea of the characteristics of film noir (Strinati).Conclusion

Although gender, urban, and spaces are almost the same in noir and neo-noir with slight differentiation, neo-noir is considered better. There are two main reasons for it. Firstly, at the time of noir filmmaking, filmmakers had no idea that the group of these films will be later labeled as noir due to their common plot. Some movies deviated from the typical noir definition. On the other hand, filmmakers of neo-noir knew exactly what they are reproducing, so the movies of this era are better according to noir definition with a slight touch of technology. Secondly, lack of government restrictions and censorship of Hay’s office, which abided noir films to not leave any crime unpunished, left neo-noir as a choice. This opened the gates to neo-noir filmmakers to show bad things happening with good people and criminals getting their way, an ending more synchronized with the pessimist, cynical idea of noir (Conard).

Works Cited

BIBLIOGRAPHY Altman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. 2003. pp. 27-41.

Conard, Mark. Mark the philosophy of neo-noir. University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

Difference between noir and neo noir. n.d. Web. 04 Sept. 2013. <http://www.differencebetween.info/difference-between-noir-and-neo-noir>.

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Durgnat, Raymond. “The Family Tree of Film Noir.” Film Comment (1974): 10/6. pp. 6-7.

Eifert, Steve. Film Noir Of The Week. 17th May 2009. Web. 06 Sept. 2013. <http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2009/05/out-of-past-1947.html>.

Harvey, Sylvia. Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir. London, 1980.

Jin. A Stylistic Joyride Through Sin City. New Jersey, 12 July 2013. Web.

KCM. “Are film noir and neo noir compaarable?” AngelFire.com. 1998. Web. 06 Sept. 2013.

Kevin, Osheer. Compare and Contrast of Film Noir and Neo-Noir. 24 Oct. 2011. Web. 04 Sept. 2013. <http://voices.yahoo.com/compare-contrast-film-noir-neo-noir-10201875.html?cat=4>.

Luhr, William. Film noir. UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2012.

Mckenzie, Jason. Its not just black and white: Gender roles in film noir. n.d. Web. 06 Sept. 2013. <http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/Articles-Summer05/McKenzie1.html>.

Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture. London, N.Y., 2000.