| |
In this paper I will be looking at the different ways theory of Hollywood Cinema has been utilized in the past. In particular, I will be examining the genre theory of film noir. In exploring genre theory it is important to understand why they are popular, what genre means and equally important, what is "film noir?"
Why Genre Films Are so Popular
One reason for the popularity of genre films is that genre films create a feeling and an emotion, rather than action, pity and fear rather than fighting. These films serve the interest of those in charge helping to maintenance a status quo.1 In other words, genre films serve as a safe haven for viewers to come for easy comfort and relief. After a hard day of work, stability is the only requirement...genre is dependable.
One can think of genre as a “classification” for films (such as westerns, thrillers, comedies, etc.) which, in and of itself, informs the audience as to the type of story line or images that will be viewed in the movie. Tom Ryall states as his definition of “genre”: “Genre may be defined as patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the filmmaker, and their reading by an audience.”2 This definition incorporates 2 ideas, that it classifies films and dictates how they are made by the filmmaker, as well as, giving expectations to the audience on how to read/interpret a film. To collaborate this point, Barry Keith Grant states simply, “genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations. They also encourage expectations and experiences to those of similar films we have seen already.”3 But no matter how one identifies genre, Hollywood has a great influence on its development and the audience and since the audience can have a great influence on Hollywood, genre can be looked at as a cultural form.4 Even so, most of Hollywood’s genres go through a period of accommodation during which the public’s desires are fitted to Hollywood’s priorities (and vice-versa).
Yet, this is not to say all genres are culturally based or that a society’s culture can be Icon-ized by a particular genre, in particular when the influence is through Hollywood’s potential for audience manipulation in the guise of entertainment,5 for example, the Science Fiction or Film Noir movies. In fact, both of these types of films' categories take only one aspect of life and embellish on it -- as if the genre asks, “What if?” What if we could go to another dimension, live on the moon, be attacked by aliens (martians) or all work is done by robots and computers. It is the “what ifs” of film noir that I am more intersted in in this paper. “What if...” every shadow had someone watching us, there was no where to turn for help, everyone you ever knew is no longer trustworthy, or you see someone you know talking with the person she/he fears the most. Too many questions, too many mysteries. It is because of these mysteries, we have to ask, “What is film noir?”
What Is Film Noir?
Paul Schrader writes one possible insight,
It is the tone and mood that puts the noir in film noir. Put under the detective’s magnifying glass, these qualities magnify the cynic, the dark side of life, the disillusioned, the paranoia and the hopelessness. But, Schrader goes on to say it refers to a period of Hollywood films made in the forties and fifties that portrays America with dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption.7 This dark slice of life is alienating and the tough characters live in the deep shadows. They act and think in a way that separates them from the everyday emotional world. Here is a world void of emotion because of survival, violence and deception. Here the main character has a great passion for the past and present, but greatly fears the future.
Film noir, like Dirk DeBruyn’s description of the 16mm Melbourne, Australia’s artists, “does not fit into some unified aesthetic,”8 although it did push the boundaries in the way the audience looked at film in the post-war America.
Film Noir As Culture?
Since its beginning, Hollywood has been fulfilling an idealistic role around the world. Initially, Hollywood maintained its’ role as a cultural form by giving the audience what they wanted to see...the caring family, poverty dissolved, the boy got the girl, basically, the happy ending. These were not just the hopes of the audience but also the filmmakers. Therefore, the owners of the studios, culturally influenced the early cinema. In other words, the culture of the immigrants coming to America influenced and created an utopian cinema. In this way, the Hollywood cinema had great global social appeal. During the coming of age of film noir, there was a shift in cinema’s cultural function. With the arrival of the war and post-war era, film noir peaked and soon American filmmakers became greatly profitable here at the US box office. However, “the result of this was not a social cinema, but a cinema that mediated social structures and issues through utopian idealism.... From the late forties onward, films had undergone a significant cultural shift forcing the economic and social factors to determine cinema’s cultural role.” 9
In this modern Hollywood, “atrocity, catastrophe, brutality, corruption and deceit have become daily seen media events and the response of Hollywood has been to incorporate this as a sense of the apocalypse; the world is collapsing, society is disintegrating.” 10 Quite bluntly, the shades of noir.
Film Noir As Family?
Fred Pfeil reflects that the newer genre of “noir” has one chief difference from the non- or even anti-domestic classic “noir” to the extent to which the newer one includes, and indeed is centered on, home and family.11 He cites as his examples the films Blue Velvet and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. (Note here that the original noir’s first characterized themselves by violating home and family.) Normally, both are either non-existent or there is trouble in the marriage -- rarely is there a stable family unit, or any stable relationship for that matter.
In Blue Velvet, Pfiel shows the Oedipal Complex in the context of the film noir. Jeffrey, the main character, has an affair with Dennis Hoppers’ wife (Isabella Rossellini) to the beautiful dark-haired woman (Rossellini) physically abused and contrasted with the bland blonde young woman (light vs. dark noir). Hopper’s family is not usual, but then neither is noir.
I personally have my own “noirish” metaphor of Blue Velvet, that is, it is much like a bright red, candied apple, in which, after you have taken a bite you realize there is a worm inside. In film noir, like this apple, nothing is perfect and nothing is as it seems on the outside.
While Pfiel alludes to the ‘family “noir”’ of T2 in the fact that the family, destroyed as it is, is alone in the mean streets, with evil lurking everywhere. Here the family is topsy turvy, “dad” is a robot, “mom” is a warrior and, in his own way, the child is a parent to both. 12
At the end of both films, there is an attempt to reconstruct the family. Jeffrey’s dad, the reason why he is in town, is out of the hospital and he has taken the blond to a family picnic. In T2, however, the robot “dies”, leaving the mother and son to work together on being a family.
Film Noir As Gender Based?
Film noir can also be viewed from the gender perspective of male domination or feminist.
Narrative gender based films for Mulvey puts the spectator as a voyeur. The film has control over space, time, and what is pleasurable. However, the intimacy and engagement are purely masculine in nature. Since the woman is only viewed in terms of her form, the spectator (in his identification with the hero) gains possession and control of the female character. The female represented on the screen is seen in fragmentation (we glimpse a leg, profile) so that she is no longer identifiable, but rather an image of desire for men. Woman is the erotic object for the hero and the masculine audience.14 Obviously, Laura Mulvey is a feminist writer.
I think she would agree with John Blaser, who writes,
“The noir women, ‘femme fatale’, represents the most direct attack on traditional womanhood and the nuclear family. She refuses to play the role of devoted wife and loving mother that mainstream society prescribes for women. She finds marriage to be confining, loveless, sexless, and dull, and she uses all of her cunning and sexual attractiveness to gain her independence. She remains fiercely independent even when faced with her own destruction. And in spite of her inevitable death, she leaves behind the image of a strong, exciting, and unrepentant woman who defies the control of men and rejects the institution of the family.” 15
But I cannot help to wonder what Laura Mulvey would say about the new noir women, like Ripley in “Aliens” or Thelma and Louise or Jessica in “Who Shot Roger Rabbit?”? These types of characters have the strong women who are in control, although they do seem to do masculine actions they do it with a “lady’s” flare. Afterall, they are the driving force behind the plot, even if they are without family, without relationship and can only depend on themselves for survival.
Katherine Lee believes that the woman as signifier is "bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command."16
This feminist film theory has inherited the notion that desire is (re)produced as a kind of excess to representation. This theoretical formulation is often accompanied by the contradictory assumption that “the Symbolic is nevertheless adequate to masculine desire.” 17 Ultimately, in Noir films, "a hero cannot be both strong and vulnerable, the woman good and evil."18 This is because in noir films, there is always a clear distinction for everything: black vs. white, man vs. woman, good vs. bad, not so good vs. evil.
It’s A Film Noir Life
In writing this paper, I realize, that what at first seems absurd, has some real meaning. Robin Wood wrote an article on Hitchcock and Capra. In Hitchcock’s Shadow Of Doubt, Robin speaks of the films overt ideological sexuality. More amazing was his finding of film noir in It’s a Wonderful Life. Who would have thought that such a wonderful Christmas classic would have such overtones, but it’s there. In fact, the film noir in the film enhances the dichotomy of what is in “George’s” life and what could have been had he not been born. Wood cites two very different father figures (Baily, Sr. and Mr. Potter), two very different small towns (Bedford Falls and Pottersville)19 and two very different George Baily, Jr.s. Interestingly enough the jovial, happy family man George lives in a happy sunny world, but the other George is a creature of the night, selfish, angry, with nowhere to turn to and lonely -- even the town is filled with visual noir when it is Pottersville: clubs, loud bars, mistrust and plenty of shadows. No, this is not the same town George knows. The film makes use of the same perspective of noir genre as Blue Velvet did above, that there can be something rotten everywhere, even the nicest of places; nothing is as it seems. While George is in his film noir world, as in T2, there is a disturbing deterioration of family and home.
Film Noir As Progressive
Films that are made through the Hollywood system and display certain features that are considered “against the grain” of the typical conventions governing text, have been referred to as "progressive."20 In progressive films the law is seen as corrupted and/or ineffectual and the family is absent.21 Film noir fits the “progressive” ideology -- especially with regard to the family.
Film Noir As Myth
The myth within film noir, the hard-boiled detective, is simply at the center of the action, development and helps to generate the myth itself. One of the key attributes of this myth is that it draws from one of the first “hard-boiled” novels - Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett (and later underscored by the writer Raymond Chandler) which determined the precedent and transcends time to today. What I’m talking about is, although set in different times and places, most of the films hold true to the city setting and the approximate time of the stories, that is memorialized in the period furnishings, visual icons and style22 - all of which have became the look around the myth.
The Private Investigator has a borderline position in criminal justice, with a distaste for the police force. He may be a former cop or have worked for the district attorney’s office, but no longer has any affiliation with, except that he may have friends in the office. He will have a run-in with them. The PI is always skeptical of his client -- especially if it’s a female. He just barely gets paid to eat and pay the bills. He has honor, integrity, a man of character, but feels like a failure. Yet he never gives up in his quest for justice. This is make-up of our “hard-boiled” hero is crucial to our belief in the myth.23 But not everyone considers the detective as hero, rather the important characteristic of the detective is his philosophy on life.
Film Noir As Motif
Existentialism
Existentialism, as described by Robert Porfirio, is a major ingredient in film noir and totally fits into the film noir framework.24 Like most people in this area of research, he does not consider film noir a genre, he relates it to this philosophy, because he feels it too defies exact definition. Existentialism’s outlook begins with a disoriented individual facing a chaotic world, placing emphasis with man in a world where there are no values, moral absolutes, a world devoid of any meaning, but the one man creates. Finally, existentialism encourages responsibility and a leap into the unknown, while highlighting life’s meaninglessness and man’s alienation.25 To put it plainly, “the aim of film noir was to create alienation.”26
Visual
“Visual style rescued many an otherwise pedestrian film from oblivion. But it was not everything; nor was the presence of crime; in some guise, the fundamental defining motif.”27
There are those who differ with Porfririo’s statement on visual style.
Individuals who have seen just a few film noir films can point out the common thread of all film noir films -- visual style. It does not matter what the image is portrayed, a mood of claustrophobia, paranoia and despair completely looms over the images.28 Analysis of visual style highlights common, yet unique, visual motifs that contribute or create mood for effective film noir -- in particular the lighting and camera.
The lighting is an important aspect for it the “low key” creates high contrast and black shadows, allowing to hide faces, and symbolically hide motivations and true character. This strange light also creates a harshness and “cold” atmosphere. The camera uses odd angles, unbalanced and tight framing, extreme close ups and the wide angle lens for distortion, as well as keeping everything in focus. Adding to this are mirrors, reflecting the dark side, character distance from one another and crisp vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines (door frames, window blinds, train tracks, stairwells, pipes, etc.).29
Overall, while researching, I discovered there are many elements that make up “film noir” and that the theorists of genre cannot agree if this “black” cinema is a genre. Exploring this research has prompted me to suggest the following recommendations.
I would like to see further research done into why there are so many “cult” film noir followers, as availability for research groups should not be scarce. It would be interesting to see a study on audience response of “noir” films: 1) is the audience influenced to look at the more “dark” side of life? 2) does it initially give the viewer a pessimistic mood? or 3) does the viewer become so aware of the “darkness” around them, they become motivated to do something about it?
So the next time you are alone, and you leave a dark theatre, and you see a man in a trench coat, standing under a fog embraced lamppost, whose face is only illuminated by the flickering flame of a match that lights his cigarette, you may want to ponder genre theory. Then as you continue to walk in the shadows on a wet desolate street -- before you turn around to see if the man is following you, you may want to ask yourself, “What if there was no noir?”
1 Judith Hess Wright, "Genre Films and the Status Quo," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 41.
2 Tom Ryall, “Teaching through Genre”, Screen Education, No 17, Winter 1975/76, p. 27.
3 Barry Keith Grant, “Film Genre Reader”, University of Texas, 1986, p.xi.
4 David Geerts, “The Concept of Genre”.
5 Rick Atman, "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 36.
6 Paul Schrader, ‘Notes on Noir’, Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 170.
7 Ibid., p. 174.
8 Dirk De Bruyn, Film Text, Film Texture: A Checklist Of Artists And Sixteen Millimeter Film
9 Eugene Doyen, “Utopia & Apocalypse - The Cultural Role of Hollywood Cinema”, Work in Progress 3.2 (1995 December), found on Internet. Because I used a search service specifically for “theory” I do not have an URL address.
10 Ibid., Eugene Doyen, “Utopia & Apocalypse - The Cultural Role of Hollywood Cinema”.
11 Fred Pfeil, Revolting Yet Conserved: Family “Noir” In Blue Velvet And Terminator 2, Postmodern Culture v.2 n.3 (May, 1992) [paragraph 7]
12 Ibid., [paragraph 29].
13 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): p. 7.
14 Katherine Lee, Katherine Lee on Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema"
15 John Blaser, “No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir”, Copyright ©, blaserj@ada.org.
16 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): p. 11.
17 Zoe Sofia, The Australian Journal of Media & Culture vol. 2 no 2 (1989).
18 Silver, Alain , Introduction, Film Noir Reader, 3rd Edition, (1996 May).
19 Robin Wood, "Ideology, Genre, Auteur," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 65.
20 Barbara Klinger, "'Cinema/Ideology/Criticism' Revisited: The Progressive Genre," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 74.
21 Ibid., p. 81.
22 John Cawelti, "Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 184.
23 Ibid.
24 Robert Porfirio, ‘No Way Out: Existential Motifs in Film Noir’ (1976), Film Noir Reader, Limelight Editions, 1996, p. 81.
25 Ibid., pp. 77-81.
26 Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, ‘Towards a Definition of Film Noir’ (1955), Film Noir Reader, Limelight Editions, 1996, p. 25.
27 Ibid., p.80.
28 Janey Place and Lowell Peterson, ‘Some Visual Motifs in Film Noir’ (1974), Film Noir Reader, Limelight Editions, 1996, p. 65.
29 Ibid. pp. 66-68.
Atman, Rick, "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 36.
Blaser, John, “ No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir”, Copyright © 1995.
Borde, Raymond and Étienne Chaumeton, ‘Towards a Definition of Film Noir’ (1955), Film Noir Reader, Limelight Editions, 1996, p. 25.
Cawelti, John, "Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 184.
De Bruyn, Dirk, “Film Text, Film Texture: A Checklist Of Artists And Sixteen Millimetre Film”.
Doyen, Eugene, “Utopia & Apocalypse - The Cultural Role of Hollywood Cinema”, Work in Progress 3.2 (1995 December), found on Internet.
Geerts, David, “The Concept of Genre”, (1995 May).
Grant, Barry Keith, “Film Genre Reader”, University of Texas, 1986, p.xi.
Klinger, Barbara, "'Cinema/Ideology/Criticism' Revisited: The Progressive Genre," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 74-90.
Lee, Katherine, Katherine Lee on Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema".
Mulvey, Laura, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Screen, v.16, n.3 (Autumn 1975), p. 7.
Pfeil, Fred, Revolting Yet Conserved: Family “Noir” In Blue Velvet And Terminator 2, Postmodern Culture v.2 n.3 (May, 1992).
Place, Janey and Lowell Peterson, ‘Some Visual Motifs in Film Noir’ (1974), Film Noir Reader, Limelight Editions, 1996, p. 65.
Porfirio, Robert ‘No Way Out: Existential Motifs in Film Noir’ (1976), Film Noir Reader, Limelight Editions, 1996, p. 77-81.
Ryall, Tom, “Teaching through Genre”, Screen Education, No 17, Winter 1975/76, p. 27.
Schrader, Paul, ‘Notes on Noir’, Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 170.
Silver, Alain and James Ursini, Introduction, Film Noir Reader, Limelight Edition, (1996 May).
Sofia, Zoe, The Australian Journal of Media & Culture vol. 2 no 2 (1989).
Wood, Robin, "Ideology, Genre, Auteur," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 65.
Wright, Judith Hess, "Genre Films and the Status Quo," Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 41.
jest click the jester
Get your own Free Home Page