Trouble is My Business: Introduction to Film Noir 001 Film Noir: Introduction to Film Noir A four PowerPoint set covering: Introduction to Film Noir, Characters and Themes, Place and Iconography, Plot and Story Structure. The course was supported by screenings of; The Rules of Film Noir (Documentary) and The Matese Falcon. Largely stolen, ripped, copied, re-worked and edited from other sources these slide decks were produced to support an ESL Drama course on the topic of Film Noir. My apologies to those I have rampantly sampled but actually I feel I have drawn a number of sources together here to produce something which is more than the sum of its parts (fair use).

2. Film Noir

3. Film Noir
 (literally 'black film or
cinema') was coined by
film critics (in 1946) who
noticed the trend of how
'dark', downbeat and
black the looks and
themes were of many
American crime and
detective films released
following World War II.

4. Titles
 Titles of many film
noirs often reflect
the nature or tone of
the style and content
itself: Dark Passage
(1947), The Naked
City (1948), Fear in
the Night (1947)

5. Cinematic Origins and Roots of
Classic Film Noir
European émigré film-makers fleeing
the war in Europe.
The style of German Expressionism of
the 1920s and 1930s,

7. Lighting
Strong,
onedirectional lighting,
creating deep
shadows with heavy
contrast against the
lit areas

8. Crime Fiction
The plots and
themes often taken
from adaptations of
best-selling, hardboiled, crime
fiction by Raymond
Chandler or
Dashiell Hammett.

9. Historical Conetext
Classic film noir developed during
and after World War II, reflecting
the resultant tensions and
insecurities of the time period.

10. Themes
Melancholy, alienation, anxiety,
mistrust, loss of innocence,
bleakness, disillusionment,
disenchantment, pessimism,
ambiguity, moral corruption,
evil, guilt, desperation and
paranoia.

11. Male Lead
Very often, a
film noir story
was developed
around a
cynical, hardhearted,
disillusioned
male character

12. Heros or Anti-Heros
Hard-Boiled
detectives, cops,
private eyes,
gangsters, killers
government
agents, petty
criminals,
murderers.

13. Female Lead
… who
encountered a
beautiful but
promiscuous,
amoral, doubledealing and
seductive femme
fatale

14. Femme Fatale
She would use
her feminine wiles
and come-hither
sexuality to
manipulate him
into becoming the
fall guy - often
following a
murder.

15. The Femme Fatale
The females in film noir were either of
two types - dutiful, reliable, trustworthy
and loving women;
or femme fatales - mysterious,
duplicitous, double-crossing, gorgeous,
unloving, predatory, tough-sweet,
unreliable, irresponsible, manipulative
and desperate women.

16. Betrayal
After a betrayal
she was often
destroyed, often
at the cost of
the hero's life

17. Story & Plot
Storylines were often complex, maze-
like including many double-crosses,
Typically told with dark, moody
background music,
Razor-sharp and witty dialogue,
Confessional, first-person voice-over
narration.

18. Style and Mood
Film noir films (mostly
shot in gloomy grays,
blacks and whites)
thematically showed the
dark and inhumane side
of human nature and
they emphasized the
brutal, unhealthy,
seamy, shadowy, dark
and sadistic sides of the
human experience.

19. Style and Mood
An oppressive atmosphere of
menace, pessimism, anxiety,
suspicion that anything can go
wrong, dingy realism, futility,
fatalism, defeat and entrapment
were stylized characteristics of film
noir.

21. Visual Look
Film noir films were marked
visually by extreme black and
white lighting, ominous
shadows, strange camera
angles, cigarette smoke, and
unbalanced compositions.

23. Settings and Place
Settings were often interiors with single-
source lighting, venetian-blinded
windows, and dark, claustrophobic,
gloomy appearances.
Exteriors were often urban night scenes
with deep shadows, wet asphalt, dark
alleyways, mean streets, and flashing
neon lights.

26. Locations
Story locations were often in
dark streets, dimly-lit and
low-rent apartments, hotel
rooms, or abandoned
warehouses.

28. The Maltese Falcon
 The first detective film
to use the shadowy,
nihilistic noir style in a
definitive way was the
pivotal work of novice
director John Huston in
the mystery classic The
Maltese Falcon (1941),
from a 1929 book by
Dashiell Hammett.