NOIR is bigger than just Films Noir.
The Facts. The term Film Noir was first coined in the mid 1930s by French religious and right wing publications deeming French films that were against the state and its laws, or about unredeemed characters of dubious morals as you guessed it Films Noir. That's a pretty broad subjective brush and with that as your definition of the NOIR universe, you don't have to fit Films Noir into certain criteria, or time periods, or genres.
The Visual Style, often associated with Film Noir however, was already around, germinating with the Post Impressionist artists in the late 1880s and in photographic imagery after 1904. But we'll come back to this style discussion shortly.
You watch enough Films Noir and you literally get to the point where, "you know them when you see them." I'll go that one better. A Film Noir, for me is any pan generic dark story told in a visually stylistic way that triggers a vibe that you subjectively tune to, it's almost akin to a drug/alcohol high.
You get a Noir buzz. Once you have seen many Films Noir and acquire an affinity for NOIR in general you will realize, if you have an active imagination, that Noir is not just confined to film.
So let's briefly examine NOIR and the vast and varied sources of inspiration, the resulting output, and the creative reflections back and forth.
Série noire
Timewise the first modern detective story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1841.
Eighty years later, "Noir" Hardboiled Crime fiction literature (in France they are called Série noire) appeared on the scene. These stories paint a Noir-ish "mind movie" in your head as you read them. Hardboiled Crime was one of the major sources of the Classic Hollywood Films Noir. It was first pioneered by Carroll John Daly in Black Mask magazine in December 1922.
It was then popularized by Dashiell Hammett who had his first Continental Op story published in 1923. The New York Times described Hammett as "the dean of the 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction."
Raymond Chandler, in my opinion, has some of the best descriptive passages of what we can collectively call the dark side of all the Hardboiled authors. Cornell Woolrich dealt with "moral ambiguity on its way to becoming moral invisibility... The author's triumph is to make the subjects and stories so varied (and thus suspenseful) while the tone is constantly dark, menacing, inescapable." (Richard Corliss - Time). Jim Thompson's stories were about psychopaths or everyday schlubs who make wrong decisions, Mickey Spillane's tales were about violence and sex and they pointed ahead to the Neo Noir films to come.
Aural Noir
From Jazz (the devils music), Blues ballads, and torch songs, to the story songs of Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen, there is no denying that listening to certain songs and putting images to the words can emotionally put you in that noir-ish state of mind.
Visual Noir
When you look at the world through "Noir shaded glasses," or you've acquired your "noir credentials," however you deem to describe it, you find that you will be able to detect Noir wherever you see it. The German Expressionism films were the first low budget crude beginnings of the Noir Style, the template, the DNA of the filmmaking that we now call Films Noir. But German Expressionism has its roots also.
Post-Impressionism & Expressionism artistic styles, were predominantly French art movements that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905. The Post-Impressionism movement, led by Paul Cézanne included Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Georges Seurat. The Post-Impressionists tended to use unorthodox or whimsical colors, emphasize geometric forms, and also distorted forms for expressive effects. Expressionists ramped it up even more presenting the world solely from a subjective perspective, and distorted it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.
In these paintings below you can see some of the aesthetic roots of the moody cinematography of Films Noir.
Waterloo Bridge. Horse drawn carriages on the evening rush lined up on the slight diagonal of the structure, a setting sun throws pools of light through the arches, and a rising fog obscures the far shore while the bridge its self throws a ever growing cold blue shadow across the Thames.
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| Waterloo Bridge - Claude Monet |
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| It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) |
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| Claude Monet’s London |
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| Appointment With Danger (1950) |
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| Starry Night - Vincent Van Gogh |
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| On Dangerous Ground (1951) |
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| Café Terrace Place du Forum Arles Vincent Van Gogh |
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| The Big Combo (1955) |
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| Starry Night Over The Rhone - Vincent Van Gogh |
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| Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) |
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| Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877- Claude Monet |
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| The Sleeping Car Murder aka Compartiment tueurs (1965) |
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| Camille-Pissaro-Boulevard-Montmartre |
Below, in Surreaut's Sunday afternoon on the island of la grande jatte 1886, shadows across the lawn in the foreground diagonally cut the canvas, its repeated in the water / shoreline diagonal in the background. The trees and their shadows provide vertical blind-like effect in the upper right corner.  Sunday afternoon on the island of la grande jatte 1886  Multiple diagonals, shadows, and diagonals within diagonals cuts the canvas of Gustave Caillebotte's Le pont de l' Europe.  Le pont de l' Europe - 1876    Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painter and printer, gave us the scattered light sources of the dimly lit interior of the of the Moulin Rouge the equivalent of todays nightclubs, lounges, and strip joints. Some faces are garishly lit, some shrouded in shadow, others in various degrees of silhouette.  At the Moulin Rouge - Toulouse-Lautrec   Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism were the next three art movements to possibly have an influence on German Expressionism. Expressionism circa 1900, portrayed the world subjectively with distortions to evoke moods and, expressing the meaning of the emotional experiences. A bold diagonal cuts through reality. Is it the edge of madness? The Scream an Expressionist painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1893 it is seen as symbolizing the anxiety of the human condition, but it also could equally all it a noir nightmare.   Cubism (influenced by the three dimensional works of Paul Cezanne) circa 1904 took various different views of subjects and put them together in the same picture. It resulted in creating a view of the world in their paintings that appears fragmented and abstracted. This movement was pioneered by Pablo Picasso and George Braque. The chaotic jumble of verticals over curves and diagonals, the blocks, slabs, and the shadows are similar to the various geometrical shapes haphazardly stacked one upon the other that can suggest the infrastructure of big cities.  Ma Jolie - Picasso   Kurt Schwitters  The Naked City (1948)   Futurism was an Italian art movement of the early twentieth century that used elements of neo-impressionism and cubism to create compositions that expressed the idea of the dynamism, in other words the energy and movement, of the modern world. Chief artists associated with futurism were Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Tullio Crali.  Dynamism of A Dog on a Leash 1912 - Giacomo Balla     Simultaneous Vision - Umberto-Boccioni  Ugo Gianattasio   Tullio Crali   Guglielmo Tato Sansoni  Aeroritratto di Mussolini aviatore - Alfredo Gauro Ambrosi  Robert Delaunay   Tullio Crali  War 1914 - Gino Serevini World War I was a cataclysmic event. Mass insanity. German Expressionism was a German art movement that emphasized the artist's inner feelings or ideas over replicating reality. The German Expressionist cinema movement was jump started Germany due to the governments embargo complications of World War I.    In 1916, the German government had banned all foreign films. This led to a boom in domestic film production from 24 films in 1914 to 130 films in 1918. However due to rationing and inflation these films were made on the cheap. "The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd angles, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects. The plots and stories of the Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal and other "intellectual" topics triggered by the experiences of World War I. (as opposed to standard action-adventure and romantic films)." (Thompson, Kristin. Bordwell, David. Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill. 2010, p.91) Later films mistakenly categorized as part German Expressionism include dystopian sci-fi Metropolis (1927) and the proto-noir murder mystery M (1931), both directed by Fritz Lang, however they were actually Weimar cinema and have none of the typical German Expressionism features. German Expressionism in America influenced mainly Hollywood Horror Films which were in vogue during the 1930s and to a smaller extent Gangster Films. In Europe the style influenced French Poetic Realist Noir, British Film Noir and later with the exodus of German film makers to Hollywood prior to WWII American Film Noir.  |
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| The Stranger On The Third Floor (1940) |
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| The Phantom Lady (1944) |
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| The Stranger On The Third Floor (1940) |
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| Silhouette (1916) - Man Ray |
Surrealism (1920-1950s), Newsreel Footage (1930-1940s) and the rise of Photojournalism Photography (1930-1950s) were the last three visual artistic influences to affect the Visual Style of these films before their popularization as Films Noir. Another extraneous physical factor for Hollywood Noir was electricity rationing during the WWII years. "A" productions were allotted a lot of wattage, "B" productions the dregs, and the directors, cinematographers, set designers et al. had to get creative and here is where the German film industry refugees put their knowledge of how to make a film on peanuts to good use. This is all nicely explained in Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir by Sheri Chinen Biesen.
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| Looks like a Dali wall painting in Alias Nick Beal |
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| Dali |
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| Natural Born Killers (1994) |
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| Mr. Arkadin (1955) |
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| I Wake Up Screaming (1941) |
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| Killers Kiss (1955) |
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| Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) |
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| The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali |
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| Mr. Arkadin (1955) |
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| Giorgio de Chirico |
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| Mr. Arkardin (1955) |
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| Giorgio de Chirico |
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Blue Velvet (1986)
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| Wild At Heart (1990) |
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| Flesh and Lace (1965) |
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| The Twilight Zone -Little Girl Lost - (1959-1964) |
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| Dali |
Highway Dragnet (1954)
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| WeeGee |
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WeeGee |
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| WeeGee |
Edward Steichen produced a photograph known as Moonlight: The Pond in 1904 it was the first time photography actually gained recognition in the art world.
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| Frank Horvat |
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| Andreas Feininger |
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| Jack Delano |
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| Wolfgang Suschitzky |
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| Gordon Parks |
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| Fan Ho |
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