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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