Noir

Film Noir is considered by some film critics to be time and location specific – made in and depicting America between 1941 and 1958. But other noir definitions are more fluid and there are films from other countries and time periods, which some theorists have retrospectively classified as noir.

The key-identifying feature of a film noir is its look; high contrast lighting, chiaroscuro, oblique camera angles, night time action and persistent rain.

Films noir are ‘almost always a masculine scenario, the hero is a man struggling with other men, who suffers alienation and despair, and is lured by fatal and deceptive women.’(1) This film noir ‘heroine’, the femme fatale, appears in many films within the genre including Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945), both directed by Otto Preminger. Both of these films are built ‘around the murder of a woman who is the object of obsession for several men,’(2) and they exemplify and reveal attitudes about both men and women in 1940s Hollywood which are surprisingly still pertinent to attitudes around gender roles today.