The use of low and wide-angle camera angles and skewed or Dutch angle shots are another Film Noir characteristic
Other devices of disorientation relatively common in film noir include shots of people reflected in one or more mirrors, shots through curved or frosted glass or other distorting objects.
With in The Big Heat(director Fritz Lang)(1953) violence and criminality contaminate a small city controlling elections and the police as well as threatening family. The cast with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame playing the two main characters , in which a uptight but unscrupulous cop on the trail of a gang who holds power over the police force , when a bomb meant to kill him kill’s his beloved wife instead he becomes a furious force of vengeance and justice aided along the story by the gangsters ex girlfriend Debbie. As Bannion and Debbie fall further and further into the gangland traps they use every means possible to get the truth told.
With many of the films of the 50’s they move out of shadowy stairwells and back alleys to occupy well furnished homes and lush estates. Much of the violence occurs off screen but is still extremely evident in the film with it more treating than ever, the low key lighting of angle compositions ad night for night photography that distinguishes the visual style of noir films is used sparingly in The big heat, further fading the boundaries between the criminal elements and the rest of society. The Big heat is shows the importance of family and its relations ship with urban milieu. The final lie of the big heat can also be read as a warning a pessimistic message true to the noir sensibility “It is not only in the mean city streets but in every place of business, every government office, and even every family that violence and criminality potentially percolate, waiting to erupt”
During the years of the war American cities grew enormously as workers flocked to rapidly expanding urban areas for the promise of new jobs and new lives, But as population grew so did its problems, Dull lifeless cities captured in shadow , and in them shadows was the growing crime gang’s witch are notorious to film noir “New York City is portrayed as a urban inferno, inhabited by a disaffected and alienated populace that has surrendered itself to crime and corruption brought about by industrialization and urbanization.” Nicholas Christotopher writs about Somewhere in the night (director Joseph Mankiewicz)(1946) stating that The great sprawling American city, endless in flux, both spectacular and sordid, with all its amazing permutations of human and topographical growths, with its deadly textured nocturnal life that can be seductive, almost otherworldly labyrinth of dreams or a tawdry bazaar of lost soul: the city is the seedbed of noir.
Femme fatale in Noir use’s the sexual attractiveness of woman the ruthless cunning way woman manipulate men in order to gain power independence money and all of these at once, Rejecting the stereotypical woman of the early 1900, thee fame fatale in Noir is that of building up the powerful , Independent woman only to punish dustily in the end . When looking deeper into Women in noir are really combined by the roles traditionally open to them there destructive struggle for independence is a responses to the restrictions that men place on them, It’s not just independent women as dangerous corrupt and irrational as they come in film noir they have no prescription for how women should act and few balancing examples women are often bland to the point of parody. The image of the powerful, fearless and independent femme fatale that sticks in our mind when these movies end perhaps in a dramatic twist. Noir is often described as essentially pessimistic the stories that are regarded as most characteristic tell of people trapped in unwanted situations which in generally they do not cause but yet are still reconcile and must be the bigger hero striving against random uncaring fate and frequently doomed . Film Noir is defined by moral ambiguity.
The White Heat (1949)(director Raoul Walsh) one of the top classic crime-heist dramas of the post-war period, and one of the last of Warned Brothers gritty crime films in its era. White Heat is an entertaining, Fascinating and hypnotic portrait of a flamboyant, mother-dominated and fixated, epileptic and psychotic killer, who often spouts crude bits of humor. Not only dose the film use film noir style elements but also documentary elements, its characterized by an increased level of violence and brutality along with classical Greek elements.
But it is the violence and crime in film noir that really makes a film Black, Or as the French say Noir, the years of 1941 to 1958 made the boundaries of this cinematic classical period , with in these years the world was also in turmoil with the World War II , Americas part in the war shines true in the films of Noir ,
The years that followed the end of World War II marked the start of a crucial phase in the creation definition and popularizing of both literary and cinematic noir. There were several concurrent developments ,Hollywood production’s of a growing numbers of pessimistic, Dowbeat crime films series of crime novels and the appearance on America of a new kind of book , The kind that would reduce cost and make books more assemble Film released in America just before the end of the war, such a Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (both 1944) showing the French that Americans could do Black to, the dark film revolution had begin on both sides of the water . Even in the 1990’s and 2000’s film noir has been used under the term Neo-noir similarly to noir , movies such as Chinatown directed by Roman Polanski in 1974 but it was the American great films of the 1980s that relives noir’s moral self destruction and visual ambience like the movie Body and Soul (1947) all the classical noir trades wore relived in movies such as Black Widow(1987) with it based in a hot humid city with violence and crime the story line true out …
Film Noir’s classical period was that of great cinematic drama, giving film a new untapped area to produce some of the worlds best films its characteristics even today is extremely evident in film. Woman Crime dull City’s and Villains may have been about before film noir but when placed together the Black of film becomes one of the silver spoon.
Referencing;
Crime Culture:
Driving is Murder The automobile, Violence and the City in Film Noir: .
(1970). "Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir",
essay with links to discussions of ten important noirs; part of Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture
-Graydon (2007), p. 30; Hirsch (2001), pp. 12, 202; Schrader (1972), pp. 59–61 [in Silver and Ursini].
^ Schrader (1972), p. 61
Film noir backgrounds: filmnoir.com
Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genre: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System, (New York: McGraw-Hill Inc, 1981), p. 24.
Janey Place, ‘Women in Film Noir’, in E Ann Kaplan, (ed), Women in Film Noir, (London: BFI Publishing, 190), pp. 35-55, p. 35.
Ibid, p. 50.
Maria Pramaggione and Tom Wallis, Film: A Critical Introduction, (London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2008), p. 382.
Spencer Selby, Dark City: The Film Noir, (London: St James Press, 1984), p. 39.
Woman in film noir – The central archetypal role < The Motley View.
Characteristics of film noir :
Agee, James. "Films: Double Indemnity." The Nation, October 14, 1944, 415. Contemporary review of the film.
Palmer, R. Barton, ed. Perspectives on Film Noir. Perspectives on Film series. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., Imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996.
Place, Janey and Lowell Peterson. "Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir (1974)" in Film Noir Reader, Alain Silver and James Ursini, ed. New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1996, 1997, Fourth Limelight Edition, February, 1998.
Pratt, Ray. Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2001.
Quart, Leonard and Albert Auster. American Film and Society since 1945, 3d ed. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002.
Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir (1972)" in Film Noir Reader, Alain Silver and James Ursini, ed. New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1996, 1997, Fourth Limelight Edition, February, 1998.
