Film Noir

I really enjoyed reading these articles. I've always been a big fan of the hard-boiled detective genre in fiction (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, etc.) so it was interesting to learn about how that style translates into the visual sphere. It was good to read the articles right before we watched "Double Indemnity" so that we could look out for the specific stylistic conventions of the genre onscreen. With this background knowledge, it was really interesting to pay special attention to the light and shadow as equally important film elements as character and plot.

It also got me thinking about some more contemporary films that could be classified as neo-noirs (I swear I was going to write about this before I saw the other blog posts). One of my favorite movies is "Chinatown," a 1973 Roman Polanski film starring Jack Nicholson. It, like the films discussed in the articles, features a morally ambiguous private eye negotiating the shadowy, rain-slicked streets of Los Angeles in a convoluted psychological story of corruption and sexual misconduct. Another one I thought of (as did other classmates) is "Sin City," a movie based on the Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name. Although director Robert Rodriguez had the advantage of adapting from a comic book (which is essentially a storyboard), that movie overplays genre tropes to make a connection with the audience: the hard-drinking, down-on-his-luck detective, the buxom femme fatale, the corrupt social and political patriarchy, etc. I really like now being able to trace specific influences of the genre into movies released much later than the original movement.