Online Course: Film Noir - Danger, Darkness and Dames WRITTEN BY CHRIS GARCIA Welcome to Film Noir: Danger, Darkness and Dames! This online course was written by Chris Garcia, an Austin American-Statesman Film Critic. The course was originally offered through Barnes & Noble's online education program and is now available on The Midnight Palace with permission. There are a few ways to get the most out of this class. We certainly recommend registering on our message boards if you aren't currently a member. This will allow you to discuss Film Noir with the other members; we have a category specifically dedicated to noir. Secondly, we also recommend that you purchase the following books. They will serve as a companion to the knowledge offered in this course. You can click each cover to purchase directly. Both of these books are very well written and provide incredible insight in to Film Noir, its many faces, themes and undertones. This course is structured in a way that makes it easy for students to follow along and pick up where they leave off. There are a total of FIVE lessons. Each lesson contains lectures, summaries and an assignment. Note: this course is not graded. The sole purpose is to give students a greater understanding of Dark City, or, Film Noir to the novice gumshoe. Having said that, the assignments are optional but highly recommended. The most important thing is to have fun! Enjoy the course! Jump to a Lesson: Lesson 1, Lesson 2, Lesson 3, Lesson 4, Lesson 5 Lesson 1: The Seeds of Film Noir, and What Noir Means Social and artistic developments forged a new genre. Lecture 1 - Introduction In this course you will learn about film noir, its definition, its place in film history, and its place in film today. We'll also take a look at some defining films, actors, and filmmakers of the movement. This first lesson will cover the definition of film noir, its validity as a style, and the environment from which it sprang. definition of film noir, its validity as a style, and the environment from which it sprang. If at any time you have questions or comments about this course or its texts, please post them on our message board. I've found that the more each of you participate, the more we all can learn from each other. The main reference book for this course will be the Film Noir Reader by Alain Silver and James Ursini. I highly encourage you to read this text along with the course lessons. It presents a great overview of noir. Is Film Noir Really a Movie Genre, or Just a Fancy Way of Saying "Black Cinema"? Before we answer the question posed above, let's define what a movie genre is. A genre is a category in the arts, such as Impressionism in painting or romance in fiction. Your local Blockbuster splinters its video stock into the prominent movie genres, often with alarming laxity. There are sections for westerns, comedies, war films, horror films, and musicals, to name a few. These are relatively strict groupings, and the movies in each category, bound by similar qualities, would have a hard time wriggling out of their respective genres. Not so with noir. Though the bulk of noirs can safely be indexed in crime, mystery, or thriller genres, noir is really a style of movie, not a circumscribed genre that jealously holds its subjects captive. What's the difference between style and genre? Style reflects flavor, look, tone, and theme. Noirs invariably share some or most of these qualities. Genre denotes the inflexible content of a movie, the type of story being told. If it has gunslingers, horses, and cacti, and it's set in Tombstone, Arizona, it's a western. Spontaneous song and dance in embarrassingly public arenas should tip you off that you're watching a musical. And so on. Noir, on the other hand, is acutely fluid. The style's unmistakable traits -- ominous shadows, claustrophobic atmosphere, murder, danger, alienation, corruption, double dealing, bleak endings -- flow indiscriminately, frequently bubbling up in movies that don't neatly fit the crime or gangster genres. Take Sweet Smell of Success, for example. The 1957 film starring Burt Lancaster is an extremely dark and hard- bitten drama about a tyrannical newspaper columnist and the venomous power he exerts over others. There are no gangsters, but the movie's cynical textures, grim themes, and scabrous tone frequently earn it the noir tag. (Note that not all gangster and crime films are noirs.) Film noir is so elusive that it took the French to designate the new style, informing Hollywood that it had minted a batch of movies in the 1940s which were linked by a shocking cynicism and despair. The French didn't see American films during World War II. After the war, French critics, seeing American movies for the first time in six years, were struck by a new strain of Hollywood film. They saw unapologetic violence and stark nihilism imbuing movies such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), and the prototypical noir Double Indemnity (1944). Stunned and fascinated by the movies' postwar pessimism, they dubbed this fresh style film noir -- literally "black film" -- though the phrase is widely translated as "dark cinema." The name derives from the black covers of a series of crime and detective novels, the Serie Noir, which was popular in France. Many of these pulp paperbacks were translations of books by American crime writers Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and, later, Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me) and Mickey Spillane (Kiss Me Deadly). Noir flourished through the '40s and '50s in such definitive classics as Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Out of the Past (1947), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Laura (1944), and The Big Heat (1953), all of which happen to be macabre crime stories. But while the French were lumping the films into a unified genus, American moviegoers took them for granted as Hollywood-issue thrillers and melodramas. The first book on noir, Panorama du Film Noir Americain by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, was published in France in 1955, but the term would not enter the lexicon for good until the heyday of serious film studies in the late '60s and '70s. Alain Silver's introduction to our course text, Film Noir Reader, cites one film reviewer's take on how an emerging style can be mistaken for a new genre: "Genres are invented by critics. When the first film noir -- whatever you might consider that to be -- was released, nobody yelled, "Hey, let's go down to the Bijou! The first film noir is out!" What is at first innovation or anomaly only becomes a genre through repetition and eventual critical classification." Noir remains a slippery rubric. Some viewers, like screenwriter and former critic Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), spurn calling noir a genre or a style. To Schrader, noir is a movement, "and therefore restricted in time and place" -- namely, to postwar America. However it's argued, noir is a fairly pliant style that bleeds into movies that would otherwise be traditional dramas or, in some cases, comedies. (I will demonstrate this in Lesson 5.) The noir influence is palpable: It gives movies a bitter tang. They are tougher, meaner; they leave teeth marks, and they dash hopes for happy endings. Most critics regard noir as a distinctly American style, like jazz. (And like jazz, it's a Yankee creation the French adore and emulate. Take a look at Jean-Luc Godard's raffish New Wave nod to noir chic in Breathless.) Writes Silver: "The noir cycle has a singular position in the brief history of American motion pictures: a body of films that not only presents a relatively cohesive vision of America but that does so in a manner transcending the influences of auteurism or genre ... Film noir is a self-contained reflection of American culture and its preoccupations at a point in time. As such it is the unique example of a wholly American film style." Next we'll take a look at some of the trends in American society and filmmaking that gave birth to film noir. Summary: Film Noir: What Is It? "A term coined by French critics to describe a type of film that is characterized by its dark, somber tone and cynical pessimistic mood." (The Film Encyclopedia, Third Edition, by Ephraim Katz). Lecture 2 - Postwar Disillusionment and Bare-Knuckled Realism American movies around World War II were, for the most part, celebrations of optimism. They were soft and sanguine, uninterested in rippling the status quo's nicely ironed surface. During the war, movies fussed with ennobling heroics and feel-good patriotism -- emotional propaganda. By war's end, lavish musicals, soapy melodramas, and treacly romances reigned at the show palaces. Then, in the mid-1940s, our soldiers came home. What they found was a place altered from how they'd left it. Like those in all fighting countries, American society went through cataclysmic change during the war effort. Women went to work in factories. Cities thrived. With the men away, many homes were broken, becoming war casualties on the domestic front. Wartime was also, notably, the advent of the nuclear age, whose collateral anxiety cannot be downplayed. War veterans had been through hell and back. The horrors of war introduced a rough-hewn cynicism. These were not always happy individuals. Many noir protagonists are war vets discovering their shaky place in American society.