History & Development

Film noir is origin from America and is emerged during the period of unstableness of political, from 1941 to 1958, which is the time of the World War II and the Cold War. It is associated with a black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, an aesthetic movement during 1910s and 1920s that involved theater, photography, painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as cinema. The term "Film Noir" is a French phrase literally meaning "black film" that to describes these movies.

Noir is the creation of the postmodern cultural-a belated reading of classic Hollywood that popularized by the cineastes of French New Wave, that suitable by reviewers, academics, and film-makers, and then re-cycled it on TV. In between the period from 1941 to 1948, there are about 20 percent of Film Noir made were adapted from hard-boiled detective novels written by American authors, for instance Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler. James M.Cain, and others.

According to Lewis, film noir is rooted in the 30s hard-boiled pulp and pop fictions together with the precode gangster films. That is the film noir has the characteristic of both, the hard-boiled style and world-weary pessimism with shadow-laden visual style and the combination of capital accumulation and criminal scheme. Film noir is also a world of criminals, of darkness and violence with characters’ central motives are usually greed, lust and ambition, drench in fear. Having said that, noir classified as modern genre.

As the consequence of the war, women have changed their roles by having economic independence, in which they have moved into the traditionally male workplace. Thus, there is the existence of the power of  femme fatale unleashed over the alienated hero in Noir films. According to Kolker, the cinematic elements has been developed was the result of cultural need on that time. Film Noir generally easily identified by it dark, pessimistic and paranoiac mood. It always shows the characters in a dark side that reflect the bad cultural of the society, and violence.

Film Noir has been a productive genre for filmmakers for the whole last half of the twentieth century. The film techniques used in film noir is normally low-key lighting as tend to include dramatic shadows and stark contrast, camera angles which often high-angle shots or tilted, the setting is in somber mood with crime and corruption, disillusioned and jaded characters and other elements. Some examples of Film Noir are Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944), The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) and Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950).

Lastly, we will talk about the development of film noir. Neo-noir often seen in modern motion pictures that protruding show the specific elements of film noir. So it is also known as the new wave of film noir. Film noir mostly refers to those black and white and also included femme fatales, doomed heroes/anti heroes and also detectives. Additionally, neo-noir is the term given to describe the films that use modern film-making methods but incorporating film noir elements. 

As neo-noir gives tribute to film noir as its predecessor, it does maintain some important attributes of film noir such as low key lighting and the presence of shadows. Neo-noir most generally shot in color, they do borrow the plots or themes that are famous from the film noir. However, these film noir elements do not become a conflict of neo-noir for the addition of color and contrast. An example of neo-noir film is Sin City (Frank Miller, 2005).