film noir argumentative essay

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“Film Noir”: The Elusive Genre

There are two terrific film-noir series taking place in New York right now, one at Film Forum , “Femmes Noir,” the other, at the Museum of Modern Art , “Lady in the Dark: Crime Films from Columbia Pictures, 1932-1957.” But only the Film Forum series uses the word “noir,” and MOMA ’s avoidance of the term makes perfect sense.

Film noir is a peculiar genre. A Western is identifiable by people on horseback in the West; a musical involves singing and dancing; a war movie shows war. Even the so-called women’s picture was a movie that featured women prominently. But the directors who worked in film noir didn’t use that term to describe their work. One searches in vain for the term in the interviews with some of the genre’s crucial creators—Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Fritz Lang, Robert Aldrich, and Edgar G. Ulmer—by Peter Bogdanovich in his great collection “ Who the Devil Made It .” The first appearance of the term “film noir” in this magazine is from 1971 ; the first in the New York Times is from 1973.

For that matter, the term wasn’t even endemic in French cinephilic circles. When François Truffaut discussed his film “Shoot the Piano Player” soon after its release, he spoke of it in terms of “B movies” and “gangster films”; when Jean-Luc Godard talked about “Breathless,” he said that he wanted to make a “gangster film” and also referred to “films policiers.”

The documentation on the subject is ample and fascinating, as provided in a richly detailed historical post by M. E. Holmes at a Web site devoted to the French critic Nino Frank , who coined the term in 1946. Holmes’s meticulous discussion of the use and rise of the term cites Frank’s work liberally, and highlights what he found so remarkable in the films in question:

Thus these “noir” films no longer have anything in common with the usual kind of police reel. They are essentially psychological narratives with the action—however violent or fast-paced—less significant than faces, gestures, words—than the truth of the characters, this “third dimension” I discussed a short while ago.

The movies in question, Frank argued, aren’t procedurals or whodunits, they’re character studies and sociological investigations. Holmes traces the fascination with these Hollywood crime dramas of the forties through the work of other French critics of the postwar years:

It is clear that one of the key elements in the welcome given by the French critics to the American “films noirs” was the feeling that serious European influence lay behind their modern American settings and panache. Later commentators have pointed to stylistic influences from prewar German films, but for the 1946 critics the primary consideration was not one of style. It was rather that they believed in cinema’s twofold function: as an absorbing entertainment and as a potential force for good, not through reinforcing conventional morality but through its ability to expose corruption and injustice. They had seen at first hand the prewar struggles of European filmmakers to speak out against evil in their films, and felt that the new American crime films could represent the opportunity for a surreptitious continuation of that work within unashamedly entertainment films.

In other words, Frank and the critics who joined him in his praise of the newly dubbed genre were interested in exactly the sorts of things that the young enthusiasts of Cahiers du Cinéma —Truffaut, Godard, and company—didn’t care about at all: the politics and sociology of cinema, the cinema of social criticism. The big French book on the subject of film noir was written, in 1955, by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton—two critics associated with the magazine Positif , Cahiers ’ s bitter rival. French Wikipedia sums up the opposition well, if tendentiously;

Raymond Borde was a member of the editorial board of Positif from 1954 to 1967. A member of the Communist Party until 1958, he was a partisan of [politically] engaged cinema and took a stand against Cahiers du Cinéma and the filmmakers of the New Wave, whose politique des auteurs and rightist tendencies he denounced.

The term “film noir” has come down to us as a product of a subordinate strain of French criticism, different from the one that came to dominate cinematic discourse with the concept of auteurism, as well as to dominate filmmaking itself through the innovations of the New Wave. It had no currency among Hollywood filmmakers of the forties and fifties, for the simple reason that French criticism over-all had little influence in the U.S. until the rise of the New Wave. (Though it would be interesting to try to trace the term in Cahiers through the years—a concordance is needed.) And, even as film noir has become firmly entrenched in the cultural vocabulary, its strangeness remains. That’s why I’m partial to the choice of MOMA ’s curators to cite the simplest unifying factor in their series—the element of crime—that both predates the rise of film-noir style and, above all, that survives it.

I wrote here a few years ago about the genre, and I cited four factors that contributed to its rise: “the influence of German Expressionism, the liberating innovations of Orson Welles, the new importance of independent producers, and the probing of wartime traumas.” German filmmakers fleeing the Nazi regime, such as Lang, Preminger, Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Max Ophuls, and Billy Wilder brought their shadowy, fragmented aesthetic to Hollywood. Welles (who was also a director of film-noir classics, including “The Lady from Shanghai”) gave directors, including his venerable elders, a sense that anything was possible, even in Hollywood. The sudden weakening of studio control over production (the result of court battles) gave independent producers, many of whom were very sympathetic to artistically original directors, a much freer hand. And then there’s the war, with its terrors and disruptions.

The four movies that Nino Frank cites in his primordial 1946 essay are “The Maltese Falcon,” “Laura,” “Murder, My Sweet,” and “Double Indemnity.” All of them were made during the Second World War (though “The Maltese Falcon” was made in 1941, before the United States was involved in combat). The film historian Sheri Chinen Biesen makes a convincing case, in her book “ Blackout ,” that there are two separate strains of film noir—one arose during wartime, the other followed it:

These early noir films created a psychological atmosphere that in many ways marked a response to an increasingly realistic and understandable anxiety—about war, shortages, changing gender roles, and “a world gone mad”—that was distinctive from the later postwar paranoia about the bomb, the cold war, HUAC, and the blacklist, which was more intrinsic to late 1940s and 1950s noir pictures.

I’m not sure that the distinction is as precise or as clear as she suggests. For instance, I don’t think that there’s a difference in kind between Siodmak’s “Phantom Lady,” from 1944, and “Criss Cross,” from 1949, or between Lang’s “The Woman in the Window,” from 1944, and “While the City Sleeps,” from 1956. But I do think that she’s right to call attention to the historical specificities on which the genre (if, indeed, it’s a genre) thrived. Many of the crime dramas of the nineteen-thirties had much to do with the Depression; those of wartime reflected the war (though it’s a critical temptation to read the war into any film contemporaneous with it), and those that came after the war—well, by definition, they reflect postwar life.

That’s why it’s strange to think of film noir as a genre—at least, as an open-ended one. A Western is a Western is a Western, whether it’s filmed by Thomas H. Ince in 1916, by John Ford in 1939, or by Clint Eastwood in 1992. The same is true of war films, comedies, and, yes, crime movies. But the film noir is historically determined by particular circumstances; that’s why latter-day attempts at film noir, or so-called neo-noirs, almost all feel like exercises in nostalgia.

The Concept of Film Noir Essay

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One of the most praised and seen movie genres, “Film noir” is considered as a remarkable and classic movie form by the audience. Film noir is that movie form in which dark and criminal events are showed to the audiences.

This form serves as a revolutionary genre in Hollywood movies as it played a vital role in changing the tradition of sunny, optimistic and commercial movies after World War II. The term “Film Noir” was coined by the French critics in order to criticize and evaluate those movies which are dark, pessimistic, negative, and serious i.e. different from the usual commercialized cinema.

There are some of the apparent characteristics of film genre. In particular, film noir has some of its distinctive features as well. In this paper, we shall discuss two silent features of film noir namely style and narrative structure. We shall elaborate such features through the analysis of movie LA Confidential that is categorized in film noir genre.

This was authenticated by Foster Hirsch who is known for his brilliant work as an analyst who used to analyze the most original genre of American cinema ‘Film Noir’ in his classic way. He evaluated that: “ Noir deals with criminal activity, from a variety of perspectives, in a general mood of dislocation and bleakness which earned the style its name.

Unified by a dominant tone and sensibility, the noir canon constitutes a distinct style of film-making; but it also conforms to gender requirements since it operates within a set of narrative and visual conventions…. Noir tells its stories in a particular way, and in a particular visual style. The repeated use of narrative and visual structures….certainly qualifies noir as a genre, one that is in fact as heavily coded as the western” (Conard & Porfirio, 2007, pp. 9-10).

The inventers and those who supported the genre and write many movies on this were strongly opposed by the government in the post war period as there were lots of reasons behind this.

Cain, the writer of Double Indemnity was terribly criticized by the Production Code Administration (PCA) which was against the depiction of lawlessness and acts of demoralization to the audiences. So, in this way the genre of Film Noir was greatly opposed as it was injecting a negative thought in people that one can do anything for the sake of self indulgence and material satisfaction (Staudler, 2005).

The most prominent feature of film noir genre is its style that is influenced by social change in American society in post war era. The stylistic feature portrays doomed heroes, manipulating people, personal and political agendas of characters. Moreover, the stylistic feature projects dark light sets which create long and wide shadows, disturbed and uncomfortable atmosphere and are usually dragged.

Other than this a prominent quality of this genre is the development of negative behaviors in heroes or ant-heroes usually generated by Femme Fatale which is the depiction of Women in Film Noirs in a way which has never seen by the audience previously. This kind of women is different, thrilling and serve as an illicit desire for Men.

Conclusively, these features of Style in Film Noir can be precisely considered as the salient feature used in the story projection of this genre. Stylistic feature is greatly visible in various Film Noirs in the past. One of the most notable examples include “L.A. Confidential” (1997) directed by Curtis Hanson show these features in order to present the original idea of Film Noir.

L.A. Confidential shows the evil and personal desires of different people related to different backgrounds. It bears the characters of a typical film noir which includes criminal activities and lethal women engagements within criminal groups. The city shown in the movie serves as the combating zone of human insights.

The story is about some cops, their crimes and the guilt which they are carrying in their hearts. The style of the film is like a typical film noir i.e. dull and slow but interesting. The cinematographers have done every possible effort in order to bring originality in the movie. The movie atmosphere is dim with fewer colors and the characters have usually awkward gestures and style of clothing. (Arthur, 2008).

Another feature of film noir is the narrative structure which means a lot to a film noir genre. The characterizations are done in such a way that the people who play those characters become the source of story narration.

The narrative structures are different in different movies. Sometimes the screenplay’s voice-over adds a special essence in storytelling which also acts as a source of putting intensity and quality to the movie. Also, sometimes the film’s voice-over addresses are done by a specific person who narrates the story throughout the film. This narration is spoken in a deadpan way by which the story seems more interesting to the audience (Staudler, 2005).

The narrative style used in L.A. Confidential is descriptive and mind captivating. For example, the entry of Ed Exley, an ambitious and concerned cop in a crime scene shows the descriptive narrative structure when the camera focuses on each and every details of the entire grimy objects from ashtrays to the torn register.

Means, the cinematographers have paid attention to every character and even to the minor things which are although not related to the main story theme but they do play an important part in the narration of story. This means that narration in L.A. Confidential is done usually through the visuals of a scene.

By giving importance to the minor things the director has tried to give the whole explanation which is commendable. Another style of narration used in other film noirs is the narration through any of the character. For example in Double Indemnity the voice-over of the story is not the camera but a character from the film. An insurance investigator, Barton Keyes, narrates the whole plot of the story throughout the film (Staudler, 2005).

L.A. Confidential although depicts the confused moods of fifties but it also updates its theme by showing all possible contemporary cultural obsession. It presents government, law enforcement and organized crime as the three interlinked forms. According to the creator of the story these three forms are interconnected with each other and each has common goals and brutal business tactics. They can do anything to victimize the city’s underclass (Arthur, 2008).

The movie L.A. Confidential has all the features of a film noir and presents briefly a clear idea about the style and narrative structure used in the film. The story is quite different from the usual film noirs but it has many variations which and mind captivating characteristics which attract the audience. L.A. confidential has provided information about this genre to the audience by showing them the original features.

The new thing in this movie was the depiction of a brief account of crimes by the government officials not the common people. Other than this, the movie makers like the other film noirs have again incorporated their suggestions about the evil desires of human and their devilish plots in this movie which clarifies the fact that man can descend to any level in order to achieve his goals (Arthur, 2008).

Although this genre of film making was opposed to a high extent but originally it is a way of depicting real life incidents. The stories and characters are made on the basis of real life happenings. Writer Cain (Double Indemnity) has also taken example from his own life and clarified that although this genre seems controversial and is something which is showing things which can have a demoralizing impact on people but in actual these are the hard realities of life which the Hollywood movies are trying to show to the people.

Arthur, P. (2008). L.A. Confidential. New York: Cineaste Publishers.

Conard, M., & Porfirio, R. (2007). The Philosophy of Film Noir. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.

Staudler, G. (2005). Doble Indemnity, Hard-Boil Film Noir. New York, London.: W.W.Norton&Company.

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The Philosophy of Film Noir

Les reid sees through a lens darkly with mark conard ..

Film noir represents a dark night of the soul in American cinema. In the 1920s and 30s the most popular genre was the Western, with its tales of courage, self-reliance, male toughness and female sweetness. Westerns were infused with the values of the American Dream, and the Western hero was likeable, trustworthy and admirable. By contrast, the films made in the 1940s and 50s referred to as ‘film noir’ convey dark feelings of disillusionment, pessimism and cynicism. Recurring characteristics of these films are that the whole society portrayed seems corrupt; the protagonist is more anti-hero than hero; a femme fatale lures the protagonist into crime; crime is presented as a cunning exploit; and fatalism rules as plans go awry. The expressionistic use of black/white photography which gives film noir its name emphasises the bleak reality of urban life and the disillusionment it brings.

Film noir has been written about extensively since Borde and Chaumeton first analysed it in 1955. This new book brings together thirteen essays on philosophical aspects of the genre, covering a wide range of issues, from ontology (is film noir a genre or what?) to aesthetics (does its fatalism equate with tragedy?) to the meaning of life (is its cynicism founded on a moral crisis, such as existential angst?) and more. Among the philosophers mentioned, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer feature most often, with Plato and Aristotle close behind. Thomas Nagel, Paul Edwards and Charles Peirce are the most popular modern philosophers cited. I found the references clearly explained and effectively used, adding considerably to the interest of the discussions.

The phenomenon of film noir invites sociological speculation. For example, in a well-known essay on its social context, ‘Notes on Film Noir’ in Film Noir Reader 2 , Paul Schrader emphasised the trauma of World War 2 and the difficulties encountered post-war when the survivors tried to resume normal life. Film noir gave expression to those social problems.

Such speculations are tempting, but they are methodologically dubious since they make broad sociological comments usually with little empirical data to support them. For the most part, the contributors to this anthology avoid such speculation and concentrate on the films rather than on the society in which they were made.

The essay by Steven M. Sanders is a case in point. He examines the fatalistic outlook found in many classic noir films, and compares it to the concept of absurdity in existentialism. He uses Vertigo and The Third Man as his main examples, but Double Indemnity , The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Asphalt Jungle are also obviously fatalistic. In these films, the protagonist seems doomed: plans do not work out, human relationships are flawed and unreliable, and society seems biased in favour of others. That combination of fatalism and alienation has some kinship with existentialism. The existentialist is alienated because he or she refuses to accept as given the moral codes of others. According to Sartre, anyone who denies his or her own freedom by following a received moral code (eg by being an orthodox Catholic) is guilty of bad faith. Freedom however brings absurdity in its wake, because the world is indifferent to the hopes of humanity. Hence the pointless toil of Sisyphus, which is celebrated as heroic by Camus.

Such existentialist defiance of the absurd world is expressed in the dark wit which is a feature of film noir. However, Sanders concludes that film noir and existentialism are fundamentally different in their attitude to human freedom. Both recognise that our freedom is bounded by physical limits; but existentialism emphasises the capacities that humans have – the scope of our freedom – whereas film noir sees only contingency, failure and fate.

A similar analysis of the fatalism in film noir leads Ian Jarvie to conclude that despite the combination of flawed heroes and pessimistic outcomes, the narratives do not attain the status of tragedy. In Aristotelian terms, film noir is low drama . Jarvie says that the stories are “morally incoherent.” They provide glimpses of personal integrity, but no clashes of principle which test the moral fibre of the protagonist, thus falling short of tragedy.

Those arguments I found quite persuasive, but there were others which were much less so. I was assured by J. Holt that the pessimism of neo-noir is one of its strengths because pessimism is more realistic than optimism. That assertion is contentious in itself; but it was also at odds with the critique offered by P.A. Cantor, in which he claimed that the pessimism of film noir is the product of a distorted view of the USA which 1930s European émigré directors like Ulmer, Wilder, Siodmak and Lang conveyed through their films. I was left wondering whether pessimism is realistic, distorted, or both.

Equally debatable was the identification of a lack of religious faith with meaninglessness, alienation or a lack of moral values (the world of film noir is largely God-free). Sometimes such false assumptions have been inherited from earlier philosophers. Conard, for example, accepted from Nietzsche the assertion that the death of God entails the death of meaning, as if no-one could find a purpose in life without belief in the supernatural. No doubt Nietzsche is a fitting source to quote, as his rhetorical excesses match the melodramatic expressionism of film noir; but I would not take anything he wrote as gospel.

Discussion of film noir is often too narrowly focused, in my opinion. Precursors in the pulp fiction of the 1920s and 30s are acknowledged here, but earlier prototypes are rarely mentioned. Consider Hamlet, certainly a film noir anti-hero: alienated, cynical, and abrasive in his wit, hostile to the society in which he lives, shrewdly intelligent in his pursuit of his enemy and ruthless when others block his path. His black attire, specified in Shakespeare’s text, suits his dark broodings and the pessimistic outcome of the play. Hamlet deals with all forms of killing: accidental manslaughter, deliberate murder, impulsive killing and suicide. Hamlet ponders on the morality of the killings, but events often outstrip his philosophising, and the audience are swept along in his wake. Emotions run high, and the interludes of rational thought are brief and ineffectual. At the end we feel sobered by a grim pursuit of justice in which many innocent people have been killed. Hamlet dies, and “the rest is silence.”

The classics of film noir stir the emotions in the same way. Killings happen, and we are morally implicated by our sympathy for the wrongdoers. We feel more sympathy for the killers than for their victims. Ordinary moral reasoning seems to be undermined.

Hume argued quite convincingly that morality ultimately rests on our emotions of sympathy and compassion. Those feelings provide the ‘ought’ – the basic moral values – from which all our complex moral reasonings are derived. But Hume assumed our sympathies would follow a conventional path and cherish our common humanity. The challenge of film noir is to deny that assumption and depict a world where our sympathies take a different path that leads us down darker alleyways. Perhaps that is part of its attraction. We enter a world where our moral bearings are lost, and we allow ourselves to side with amoral people living in a world quite like our own, but with all its ugly, unjust defects emphasised. We cannot tell how well we shall cope, confronting murky situations with our moral complacency switched off, but that uncertainty grips our conscience and our attention and carries us into the story.

Philosophy is the art of putting our thoughts in order. But doing that requires us to scatter the pieces sometimes, just to see how we again arrive at order from the disorder. Film noir performs such a function for our moral thinking, and does so in a most engaging way. This collection of essays, delving into the films and elucidating their philosophical depths, is also challenging and engaging. Read it and prepare to be provoked.

© Les reid 2008

Les Reid is Chair of the Belfast Humanist Group : belfast.humanists.net . You can find a list of classic noir films at imdb.com/chart/filmnoir .

• The Philosophy of Film Noir , edited by Mark T Conard, published by the University Press of Kentucky, 2007, pb, 248 pages, $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8131-9181-2.

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George Pal and the End of the World

1994 part eight: who was top of the box office at summer’s end, once upon a time in the west (1968) – the making of a western classic, presumed innocent: season one review – apple tv+ does it again, severance: a review of the stunning apple tv+ show, reacher: the hits and misses of amazon prime’s popular series, hollywood feuds: angelina jolie and jon voight, who killed hot toddy the mysterious death of thelma todd, the hollywood vampires – a drunken oral history, scholars’ spotlight: douglas fairbanks jr. – the last prince of hollywood’s golden age, scholars’ spotlight: ray harryhausen, scholars’ spotlight: the legacy of irving thalberg, i’ll be right there: a review of the edie falco dramedy, blink twice review: an okay first try for a freshman, alien: romulus review – you just had to make it weird (or alien re-resurrection), james bond in space the making of moonraker (1979), scholars’ spotlight: audrey hepburn, scholars’ spotlight: robert shaw, slingshot: director mikael håfström tells us about his new sci-fi thriller, running on empty: director daniel andré talks about his new offbeat comedy, director jt mollner and songwriter z berg talk strange darling, film noir: a critical analysis of the genre, introduction.

Film noir was an incredibly popular genre of film primarily in the United States that was heavily influenced by French and German film, as the term is French for ‘black film.’ These films typically are centered on crime and violence with the leading actor being a man who is surrounded by crime and tries to maneuver around it and a new sort of character in film, the femme fatale. The concept of a femme fatale was introduced by film noirs and is the lead female character who is very seductive and mysterious, but her actions typically lead to the downfall of the male lead in the film.

Classic Noir

This genre has become so memorable in film history due to great films such as Double Indemnity (1944), Out of the Past (1947), and Detour (1945), which all feature archetypal noir character types, narrative techniques, and themes of film noir. The characters of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity and Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) from Out of the Past are some of the most well-known femme fatales due to the three-dimensional nature of their characters and their incredible performances.

The film’s narrative and themes very much express the structure of the classic and legendary noir films as they all share the same elements of crime, mystery, and double-crossing. Their recognition is deserved, and they will continue to be watched, appreciated, and studied due to their perfect depiction of film noir. All three of these films depict the essential roles of the criminal man and femme fatale masterfully . These characters are what define film noir, so it’s incredibly important for these main roles to be well-written and played by talented actors.

Flawed Individuals

The character of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity is the perfect noir male lead. This is because he’s presented as an extremely charismatic and amicable man who on the inside is truly manipulative. He’s also a morally flawed individual. Neff is complimented well by the seductive and dangerous Phyllis Dietrichson. She plans to murder her husband to collect his sizable life insurance payout.

They are both equally criminal and morally flawed, as they have an affair together and plot the death and collection of the insurance payment together. The manipulative natures of these two characters are what made the film so memorable and perfected the genre of film noir, setting a standard for film noir characters.

The character dynamics in Out of the Past are similar in a sense as the male lead, Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), gets sucked back into criminal activity by a mysterious, yet dangerous woman, Kathie Moffat. She seduces him and he falls in love, which ultimately leads to his downfall at the end when they are driving away, and she shoots him dead in the car. Kathie ends up getting shot by the police as a result, as this is the typical ending for these noir characters, death or arrest.

On the other hand, the film Detour has a somewhat different type of character dynamic in that the male lead, Al Roberts (Tom Neal), isn’t your typical charming and self-confident man. Rather, he’s more the opposite in that he is disillusioned. There are numerous scenes throughout the film that depict him doubting himself or being negative about the situation. He states:

“That’s life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you”

To the audience, it doesn’t seem like Roberts is a criminal in nature or that he intends to commit crimes. He merely wants to visit his girlfriend in Los Angeles. Roberts gets himself into an unfortunate situation when the stranger he was hitchhiking with suddenly dies and hits his head on a rock when Roberts opens the car door. While likely the victim of heart failure, due to his proneness to anxiety, Roberts panics and flees the scene which leads to a string of crimes it doesn’t seem he plans on committing.

His anxiety starts to corrupt him further when he picks up a woman, Vera (Ann Savage), who wants to blackmail him with the death of his driver, Haskell. Roberts later ends up killing Vera inadvertently, by strangling her with a telephone cord through the door. None of his actions appear to be planned out or calculated, so it’s hard to say if the character of Al Roberts was a true archetypal, film noir leading man.

Narrative Technique

Vera, on the other hand, is a character that is more akin to the femme fatale role. This is because she lures Roberts in and proceeds to ruin his life by threatening him with blackmail. Inevitably, this leads to her death, which weighs on Roberts’s consciousness and prevents him from living life as a typical, free man.

Narrative techniques are quintessential to the structure of a film. In film noir specifically, they can make or break the movie. These films use a myriad of narrative techniques to advance the plots of the respective films. In Double Indemnity , the plots are progressed through the use of various flashbacks, lighting, and dialogue.

The flashbacks create suspense, giving pieces of information to the audience. The lighting and shadows respectively are essential in noir films, as the intense darkness and contrast are signature in this genre. They represent danger and mystery, which represents the premise of the film and the nature of its characters. The dialogue in this film is very notable, with many of the memorable quotes being from interactions between Phyllis and Walter:

“How fast was I going, officer? I’d say about ninety. Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket. Suppose I let you off with a warning this time. Suppose it doesn’t take. Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles. Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder. Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder. That tears it!”

The chemistry between the two made for a very memorable film, with a very cohesive and well-written story. Out of the Past also utilizes these mediums, especially the nonlinear structure to immerse the audience in the distorted lives of criminals and shady people. The lighting plays a big role in the film as well, creating sharp contrasts of light and shadow, symbolizing good and evil.

Flaws and Femme Fatales

Detour uses the same features as well. However, Ulmer makes a point to include symbolism in the film, such as the long, deserted road Roberts is driving on and the loneliness and darkness it represents. Detour is also a very low-budget production, being produced by a “Poverty Row” production company, Producers Releasing Corporation. The quality of the camera and the techniques used are low. Thus, the low-budget style adds to the rawness of the film. T he crudeness of the production represents Roberts, as he feels very desperate and distorted.

Overall, the films share similar narrative techniques. This contributes to the quality of the film and cements them as exceptional film noirs. Aside from the character types and narrative techniques, these films excelled in capturing the themes of film noir. All of them had the same themes of moral flaws, femme fatales, and fatalism. The three male leads all had moral flaws in their way. For example, Walter Neff becomes embroiled in a conspiracy to kill Phyllis Dietrichson’s husband and collect his insurance money.

The femme fatales of these films were all very iconic. Yet, similar in the sense of what their goals were. They intended to manipulate and cause the downfall of the leading man. W hether that be via death or prison. Lastly, the themes of fatalism that are found in all three films complete the films. The characters, usually the leading males, typically feel trapped and desperate. Thus, turning to violence and crime as a means to heal their despair. These themes are what comprise the structure of the classic film noir. They are also what make the films so enjoyable and compelling.

In conclusion, Double Indemnity , Out of the Past , and Detour , are quintessential film noirs that perfectly represent the genre. All three of these films feature necessary elements of film noir such as archetypal characters, narrative techniques, and themes of film noir. Characters such as Walter Neff and Kathie Moffat are incredibly memorable and beloved. Their fantastic performances and the film’s usage of lighting, dialogue, and flashbacks make the film legendary. Furthermore, film noir is one of the most famous and greatest genres of film and these films aided in the genre’s status as classic .

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1 (page 1) p. 1 C1 The idea of film noir

• Published: February 2019
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The term ‘film noir’ originated with French film critics during the 1930s, but it soon became associated with American films in the mid-1940s. ‘The idea of film noir’ explains the strong influence of the Surrealists on French attitudes toward the new American films. The first and most important book on film noir was A Panorama of the American Film Noir: 1941–1953 , compiled by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton. They define noir in terms of five affective qualities typical of Surrealist art: oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. Film noir continued through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and forms of the genre have spread all around the world.

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Videographic Film & Media Studies Fall 2017

Fmmc0334, mw 8:40-9:55am.

• Course Policies
• Learning Goals and Grading
• Technical Information
• Exercise #1 – Videographic PechaKucha
• Exercise #2 – Voiceover
• Exercise #3 – Videographic Epigraph
• Exercise #4 – Multiscreen
• Exercise #5 – Algorithmic Double Feature
• Assignment #6 – Abstract Trailer
• Midterm Reflection Essay
• Videographic Response Essay
• Final Videographic Essay
• Self Evaluative Essay

Video Commentaries

• Weekly Schedule

Film Noir: The Case for Black and White

I would like to preface this commentary by saying that I genuinely enjoyed this video, and found some of the techniques employed by the author to be extremely effective. Initially I planned to write about how the author made use of still images and color manipulation to illustrate his point in a manner that felt innovative. Instead, I found myself getting hung up on a small section of dialogue in the video’s introduction. This definitely feels unfair because this is one of my favorite videographic essays I’ve seen all semester. It feels fresh and well edited, and the voiceover is excellent (if a little rushed). Anyway…

Jack Nugent’s videos on his YouTube channel “Now You See It” feel reminiscent of video essay heavyweights like Tony Zhou. Like Zhou, Nugent gives fast paced and well-spoken voiceover that presents information in a way that is easily digestible by a viewer who is watching their first video essay. In his essay “Film Noir: The Case for Black and White”, Nugent starts with what he hopes is a relatable points that will resonate with most viewers. He asserts that black and white film is often unfairly criticized by modern film audiences. But I take issue in the way he makes this point. Nugent seems to bemoan the closeminded-ness of those who fail to see the appeal of black and white films, a complaint which is meant to resonate with viewers who share an appreciation for formative works of cinema that predate the widespread use of color cinematography. While Nugent is able to back up his cinema “snobbery” with in-depth knowledge of black and white films that standout for the presence of high contrast and deliver a “noir style” of cinematography, his introduction feels unnecessarily hostile. Disappointingly, this early appeal to the viewer’s own cultural knowledge and superiority seems effective.

If you scroll down in to the comment section, Nugent’s frustration is echoed by viewers who also can’t stand when people don’t like black and white film (I should also interject to say that scrolling down to the comments section on any YouTube video is normally an absolute mistake). One commenter writes, “The moment when someone says: ‘I don’t like black and white movies’ and you know, the person will never love the movies like you do.”  While another adds that, “People who can’t stand black and white movies have very poor taste in film.” Obviously Nugent is effective in connecting with a section of viewers who appreciate black and white film, and in my opinion he makes a compelling argument in support of the merit of such films. But I can’t get over the arrogance of the introduction. While it is meant to function as a defense of black and white films, it comes off as exclusionary. The tone and style of the video cater to the casual cinema fan, but the introduction belittles someone who has found video essays as a gateway to film criticism…someone who this video would otherwise be targeting.

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Collections of Essays

• Cameron, Ian, ed. The Movie Book of Film Noir. London: Studio Vista, 1992. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 M68 1992 This collection of essays by eminent British movie critics and historians examines the films, directors and themes of classic film noir from 1945 to 1955. It is illustrated with over 100 stills that capture crucial moments in the films.
• Copjec, Joan, ed. Shades of Noir: A Reader. New York: Verso, 1993. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 S5 1993 This collection of academic essays examines films from the classic film noir era, as well as more recent pictures such as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" that arguably contain elements of film noir.
• Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, 1998. DAVIS and UL PN1995.9.W6 W66 1998 This collection of academic essays looks at film noir from a feminist perspective. It includes 80 black and white photographs.
• Palmer, R. Barton, ed. Perspectives on Film Noir. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1996. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 P47 1996 This is a collection of critical essays on classic noir films up through more recent neo-noir.
• Server, Lee, et al., eds. The Big Book of Noir. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1998. DAVIS and UL PN 1995.9.F54 B54 1998 This collection of essays and interviews covers classic film noir, as well as related genres such as hard-boiled fiction, comic books, and cartoons.
• Silver, Alain and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 F57 1996 This book is an anthology of 22 seminal and contemporary essays on film noir, drawing together definitive studies on the philosophy and techniques that have gone into the creation of films from the 1940s through more recent neo-noir films. It also includes many black and white photographs.
• Silver, Alain and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader 2. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999. DAVIS PN1995.9.F54 F58 1999 This follow-up to the Film Noir Reader includes more critical essays on film noir, including several articles by American authors from the 1940s that are among the first writings on film noir in English.

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The aim of this topics page is to introduce readings on the Film Noir discourse. The literature on Film Noir spans across periods, nations, subgenres, and disciplines. This guide is aiming to shed light on these different lenses from which scholars have examined Film Noir - National Cinemas , Gender and Race, Literary Influences , and Neo-Noir . Each section will include a curated list of scholarly literature to prompt research focus and applicable search tips to streamline your research process.

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Elements Of Film Noir Essay

Ultimately the movement of film noir can be understood as a product of the period, to a certain extent due to the sheer impact, events such as the second world war had on the characterisation of the typical male protagonist and the typical mood and aesthetic of Film Noir. When deciding whether film noir could be described as a “product of the period” it is important to consider Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity as it contains the majority of the conventions that belong to Film Noir and ultimately formed the “bridge to the postwar phase of film noir.

This is prominent in Double Indemnity due to the fact that the main protagonist, Walter a cynical insurance agent and Phyllis, a heartless scheming housewife and the femme fatale of the narrative, plan to murder Phyllis’s husband and collect $100,000 in insurance. From the argument which Connor presents it is evident that the narrative elements of Double Indemnity can be described as “a product of the period. ” This is due to the fact that the narrative elements of murder, sexual desire and greed can be described as a visual representation of the attempt to grapple with the rise of Fascism in Europe.

So therefore it can be argued that Wilder’s narrative focus on greed, sexual desire, and murder is a result and to some extent a reaction to the rise of fascism in Europe and therefore “a product of the period. ” The time in which Double Indemnity was produced also plays a significant role in explaining how film noir can be understood as a product of the period. The film was released in 1944 during the later years of World War Two where the tendency of the masculine crisis began to emerge.

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Film Writing: Sample Analysis

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Introductory Note

The analysis below discusses the opening moments of the science fiction movie  Ex Machina  in order to make an argument about the film's underlying purpose. The text of the analysis is formatted normally. Editor's commentary, which will occasionally interrupt the piece to discuss the author's rhetorical strategies, is written in brackets in an italic font with a bold "Ed.:" identifier. See the examples below:

The text of the analysis looks like this.

[ Ed.:  The editor's commentary looks like this. ]

Frustrated Communication in Ex Machina ’s Opening Sequence

Alex Garland’s 2015 science fiction film Ex Machina follows a young programmer’s attempts to determine whether or not an android possesses a consciousness complicated enough to pass as human. The film is celebrated for its thought-provoking depiction of the anxiety over whether a nonhuman entity could mimic or exceed human abilities, but analyzing the early sections of the film, before artificial intelligence is even introduced, reveals a compelling examination of humans’ inability to articulate their thoughts and feelings. In its opening sequence, Ex Machina establishes that it’s not only about the difficulty of creating a machine that can effectively talk to humans, but about human beings who struggle to find ways to communicate with each other in an increasingly digital world.

[ Ed.:  The piece's opening introduces the film with a plot summary that doesn't give away too much and a brief summary of the critical conversation that has centered around the film. Then, however, it deviates from this conversation by suggesting that Ex Machina has things to say about humanity before non-human characters even appear. Off to a great start. ]

The film’s first establishing shots set the action in a busy modern office. A woman sits at a computer, absorbed in her screen. The camera looks at her through a glass wall, one of many in the shot. The reflections of passersby reflected in the glass and the workspace’s dim blue light make it difficult to determine how many rooms are depicted. The camera cuts to a few different young men typing on their phones, their bodies partially concealed both by people walking between them and the camera and by the stylized modern furniture that surrounds them. The fourth shot peeks over a computer monitor at a blonde man working with headphones in. A slight zoom toward his face suggests that this is an important character, and the cut to a point-of-view shot looking at his computer screen confirms this. We later learn that this is Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a young programmer whose perspective the film follows.

The rest of the sequence cuts between shots from Caleb’s P.O.V. and reaction shots of his face, as he receives and processes the news that he has won first prize in a staff competition. Shocked, Caleb dives for his cellphone and texts several people the news. Several people immediately respond with congratulatory messages, and after a moment the woman from the opening shot runs in to give him a hug. At this point, the other people in the room look up, smile, and start clapping, while Caleb smiles disbelievingly—perhaps even anxiously—and the camera subtly zooms in a bit closer. Throughout the entire sequence, there is no sound other than ambient electronic music that gets slightly louder and more textured as the sequence progresses. A jump cut to an aerial view of a glacial landscape ends the sequence and indicates that Caleb is very quickly transported into a very unfamiliar setting, implying that he will have difficulty adjusting to this sudden change in circumstances.

[ Ed.:  These paragraphs are mostly descriptive. They give readers the information they will need to understand the argument the piece is about to offer. While passages like this can risk becoming boring if they dwell on unimportant details, the author wisely limits herself to two paragraphs and maintains a driving pace through her prose style choices (like an almost exclusive reliance on active verbs). ]

Without any audible dialogue or traditional expository setup of the main characters, this opening sequence sets viewers up to make sense of Ex Machina ’s visual style and its exploration of the ways that technology can both enhance and limit human communication. The choice to make the dialogue inaudible suggests that in-person conversations have no significance. Human-to-human conversations are most productive in this sequence when they are mediated by technology. Caleb’s first response when he hears his good news is to text his friends rather than tell the people sitting around him, and he makes no move to take his headphones out when the in-person celebration finally breaks out. Everyone in the building is on their phones, looking at screens, or has headphones in, and the camera is looking at screens through Caleb’s viewpoint for at least half of the sequence.  

Rather than simply muting the specific conversations that Caleb has with his coworkers, the ambient soundtrack replaces all the noise that a crowded building in the middle of a workday would ordinarily have. This silence sets the uneasy tone that characterizes the rest of the film, which is as much a horror-thriller as a piece of science fiction. Viewers get the sense that all the sounds that humans make as they walk around and talk to each other are being intentionally filtered out by some presence, replaced with a quiet electronic beat that marks the pacing of the sequence, slowly building to a faster tempo. Perhaps the sound of people is irrelevant: only the visual data matters here. Silence is frequently used in the rest of the film as a source of tension, with viewers acutely aware that it could be broken at any moment. Part of the horror of the research bunker, which will soon become the film’s primary setting, is its silence, particularly during sequences of Caleb sneaking into restricted areas and being startled by a sudden noise.

The visual style of this opening sequence reinforces the eeriness of the muted humans and electronic soundtrack. Prominent use of shallow focus to depict a workspace that is constructed out of glass doors and walls makes it difficult to discern how large the space really is. The viewer is thus spatially disoriented in each new setting. This layering of glass and mirrors, doubling some images and obscuring others, is used later in the film when Caleb meets the artificial being Ava (Alicia Vikander), who is not allowed to leave her glass-walled living quarters in the research bunker. The similarity of these spaces visually reinforces the film’s late revelation that Caleb has been manipulated by Nathan Bates (Oscar Isaac), the troubled genius who creates Ava.

[ Ed.:  In these paragraphs, the author cites the information about the scene she's provided to make her argument. Because she's already teased the argument in the introduction and provided an account of her evidence, it doesn't strike us as unreasonable or far-fetched here. Instead, it appears that we've naturally arrived at the same incisive, fascinating points that she has. ]

A few other shots in the opening sequence more explicitly hint that Caleb is already under Nathan’s control before he ever arrives at the bunker. Shortly after the P.O.V shot of Caleb reading the email notification that he won the prize, we cut to a few other P.O.V. shots, this time from the perspective of cameras in Caleb’s phone and desktop computer. These cameras are not just looking at Caleb, but appear to be scanning him, as the screen flashes in different color lenses and small points appear around Caleb’s mouth, eyes, and nostrils, tracking the smallest expressions that cross his face. These small details indicate that Caleb is more a part of this digital space than he realizes, and also foreshadow the later revelation that Nathan is actively using data collected by computers and webcams to manipulate Caleb and others. The shots from the cameras’ perspectives also make use of a subtle fisheye lens, suggesting both the wide scope of Nathan’s surveillance capacities and the slightly distorted worldview that motivates this unethical activity.

[ Ed.: This paragraph uses additional details to reinforce the piece's main argument. While this move may not be as essential as the one in the preceding paragraphs, it does help create the impression that the author is noticing deliberate patterns in the film's cinematography, rather than picking out isolated coincidences to make her points. ]

Taken together, the details of Ex Machina ’s stylized opening sequence lay the groundwork for the film’s long exploration of the relationship between human communication and technology. The sequence, and the film, ultimately suggests that we need to develop and use new technologies thoughtfully, or else the thing that makes us most human—our ability to connect through language—might be destroyed by our innovations. All of the aural and visual cues in the opening sequence establish a world in which humans are utterly reliant on technology and yet totally unaware of the nefarious uses to which a brilliant but unethical person could put it.

Author's Note:  Thanks to my literature students whose in-class contributions sharpened my thinking on this scene .

[ Ed.: The piece concludes by tying the main themes of the opening sequence to those of the entire film. In doing this, the conclusion makes an argument for the essay's own relevance: we need to pay attention to the essay's points so that we can achieve a rich understanding of the movie. The piece's final sentence makes a chilling final impression by alluding to the danger that might loom if we do not understand the movie. This is the only the place in the piece where the author explicitly references how badly we might be hurt by ignorance, and it's all the more powerful for this solitary quality. A pithy, charming note follows, acknowledging that the author's work was informed by others' input (as most good writing is). Beautifully done. ]

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The essay film

In recent years the essay film has attained widespread recognition as a particular category of film practice, with its own history and canonical figures and texts. In tandem with a major season throughout August at London’s BFI Southbank, Sight & Sound explores the characteristics that have come to define this most elastic of forms and looks in detail at a dozen influential milestone essay films.

Andrew Tracy , Katy McGahan , Olaf Möller , Sergio Wolf , Nina Power Updated: 7 May 2019

from our August 2013 issue

Le camera stylo? Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

I recently had a heated argument with a cinephile filmmaking friend about Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983). Having recently completed her first feature, and with such matters on her mind, my friend contended that the film’s power lay in its combinations of image and sound, irrespective of Marker’s inimitable voiceover narration. “Do you think that people who can’t understand English or French will get nothing out of the film?” she said; to which I – hot under the collar – replied that they might very well get something, but that something would not be the complete work.

The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August.

To take this film-lovers’ tiff to a more elevated plane, what it suggests is that the essentialist conception of cinema is still present in cinephilic and critical culture, as are the difficulties of containing within it works that disrupt its very fabric. Ever since Vachel Lindsay published The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915 the quest to secure the autonomy of film as both medium and art – that ever-elusive ‘pure cinema’ – has been a preoccupation of film scholars, critics, cinephiles and filmmakers alike. My friend’s implicit derogation of the irreducible literary element of Sans soleil and her neo- Godard ian invocation of ‘image and sound’ touch on that strain of this phenomenon which finds, in the technical-functional combination of those two elements, an alchemical, if not transubstantiational, result.

Mechanically created, cinema defies mechanism: it is poetic, transportive and, if not irrational, then a-rational. This mystically-minded view has a long and illustrious tradition in film history, stretching from the sense-deranging surrealists – who famously found accidental poetry in the juxtapositions created by randomly walking into and out of films; to the surrealist-influenced, scientifically trained and ontologically minded André Bazin , whose realist veneration of the long take centred on the very preternaturalness of nature as revealed by the unblinking gaze of the camera; to the trash-bin idolatry of the American underground, weaving new cinematic mythologies from Hollywood detritus; and to auteurism itself, which (in its more simplistic iterations) sees the essence of the filmmaker inscribed even upon the most compromised of works.

It isn’t going too far to claim that this tradition has constituted the foundation of cinephilic culture and helped to shape the cinematic canon itself. If Marker has now been welcomed into that canon and – thanks to the far greater availability of his work – into the mainstream of (primarily DVD-educated) cinephilia, it is rarely acknowledged how much of that work cheerfully undercuts many of the long-held assumptions and pieties upon which it is built.

In his review of Letter from Siberia (1957), Bazin placed Marker at right angles to cinema proper, describing the film’s “primary material” as intelligence – specifically a “verbal intelligence” – rather than image. He dubbed Marker’s method a “horizontal” montage, “as opposed to traditional montage that plays with the sense of duration through the relationship of shot to shot”.

Here, claimed Bazin, “a given image doesn’t refer to the one that preceded it or the one that will follow, but rather it refers laterally, in some way, to what is said.” Thus the very thing which makes Letter “extraordinary”, in Bazin’s estimation, is also what makes it not-cinema. Looking for a term to describe it, Bazin hit upon a prophetic turn of phrase, writing that Marker’s film is, “to borrow Jean Vigo’s formulation of À propos de Nice (‘a documentary point of view’), an essay documented by film. The important word is ‘essay’, understood in the same sense that it has in literature – an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well.”

Marker’s canonisation has proceeded apace with that of the form of which he has become the exemplar. Whether used as critical/curatorial shorthand in reviews and programme notes, employed as a model by filmmakers or examined in theoretical depth in major retrospectives (this summer’s BFI Southbank programme, for instance, follows upon Andréa Picard’s two-part series ‘The Way of the Termite’ at TIFF Cinémathèque in 2009-2010, which drew inspiration from Jean-Pierre Gorin ’s groundbreaking programme of the same title at Vienna Filmmuseum in 2007), the ‘essay film’ has attained in recent years widespread recognition as a particular, if perennially porous, mode of film practice. An appealingly simple formulation, the term has proved both taxonomically useful and remarkably elastic, allowing one to define a field of previously unassimilable objects while ranging far and wide throughout film history to claim other previously identified objects for this invented tradition.

Las Hurdes (1933)

It is crucial to note that the ‘essay film’ is not only a post-facto appellation for a kind of film practice that had not bothered to mark itself with a moniker, but also an invention and an intervention. While it has acquired its own set of canonical ‘texts’ that include the collected works of Marker, much of Godard – from the missive (the 52-minute Letter to Jane , 1972) to the massive ( Histoire(s) de cinéma , 1988-98) – Welles’s F for Fake (1973) and Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), it has also poached on the territory of other, ‘sovereign’ forms, expanding its purview in accordance with the whims of its missionaries.

From documentary especially, Vigo’s aforementioned À propos de Nice, Ivens’s Rain (1929), Buñuel’s sardonic Las Hurdes (1933), Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961); from the avant garde, Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Straub/Huillet’s Trop tôt, trop tard (1982); from agitprop, Getino and Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Portabella’s Informe general… (1976); and even from ‘pure’ fiction, for example Gorin’s provocative selection of Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909).

Just as within itself the essay film presents, in the words of Gorin, “the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected),” so, without, its scope expands exponentially through the industrious activity of its adherents, blithely cutting across definitional borders and – as per the Manny Farber ian concept which gave Gorin’s ‘Termite’ series its name –  creating meaning precisely by eating away at its own boundaries. In the scope of its application and its association more with an (amorphous) sensibility as opposed to fixed rules, the essay film bears similarities to the most famous of all fabricated genres: film noir, which has been located both in its natural habitat of the crime thriller as well as in such disparate climates as melodramas, westerns and science fiction.

The essay film, however, has proved even more peripatetic: where noir was formulated from the films of a determinate historical period (no matter that the temporal goalposts are continually shifted), the essay film is resolutely unfixed in time; it has its choice of forebears. And while noir, despite its occasional shadings over into semi-documentary during the 1940s, remains bound to fictional narratives, the essay film moves blithely between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, complicating the terms of both.

“Here is a form that seems to accommodate the two sides of that divide at the same time, that can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate,” writes Gorin. When Orson Welles , in the closing moments of his masterful meditation on authenticity and illusion F for Fake, chortles, “I did promise that for one hour, I’d tell you only the truth. For the past 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off,” he is expressing both the conjuror’s pleasure in a trick well played and the artist’s delight in a self-defined mode that is cheerfully impure in both form and, perhaps, intention.

Nevertheless, as the essay film merrily traipses through celluloid history it intersects with ‘pure cinema’ at many turns and its form as such owes much to one particularly prominent variety thereof.

The montage tradition

If the mystical strain described above represents the Dionysian side of pure cinema, Soviet montage was its Apollonian opposite: randomness, revelation and sensuous response countered by construction, forceful argumentation and didactic instruction.

No less than the mystics, however, the montagists were after essences. Eisenstein , Dziga Vertov and Pudovkin , along with their transnational associates and acolytes, sought to crystallise abstract concepts in the direct and purposeful juxtaposition of forceful, hard-edged images – the general made powerfully, viscerally immediate in the particular. Here, says Eisenstein, in the umbrella-wielding harpies who set upon the revolutionaries in October (1928), is bourgeois Reaction made manifest; here, in the serried ranks of soldiers proceeding as one down the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin (1925), is Oppression undisguised; here, in the condemned Potemkin sailor who wins over his imminent executioners with a cry of “Brothers!” – a moment powerfully invoked by Marker at the beginning of his magnum opus A Grin Without a Cat (1977) – is Solidarity emergent and, from it, the seeds of Revolution.

The relentlessly unidirectional focus of classical Soviet montage puts it methodologically and temperamentally at odds with the ruminative, digressive and playful qualities we associate with the essay film. So, too, the former’s fierce ideological certainty and cadre spirit contrast with that free play of the mind, the Montaigne -inspired meanderings of individual intelligence, that so characterise our image of the latter.

Beyond Marker’s personal interest in and inheritance from the Soviet masters, classical montage laid the foundations of the essay film most pertinently in its foregrounding of the presence, within the fabric of the film, of a directing intelligence. Conducting their experiments in film not through ‘pure’ abstraction but through narrative, the montagists made manifest at least two operative levels within the film: the narrative itself and the arrangement of that narrative by which the deeper structures that move it are made legible. Against the seamless, immersive illusionism of commercial cinema, montage was a key for decrypting those social forces, both overt and hidden, that govern human society.

And as such it was method rather than material that was the pathway to truth. Fidelity to the authentic – whether the accurate representation of historical events or the documentary flavouring of Eisensteinian typage – was important only insomuch as it provided the filmmaker with another tool to reach a considerably higher plane of reality.

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931)

Midway on their Marxian mission to change the world rather than interpret it, the montagists actively made the world even as they revealed it. In doing so they powerfully expressed the dialectic between control and chaos that would come to be not only one of the chief motors of the essay film but the crux of modernity itself.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), now claimed as the most venerable and venerated ancestor of the essay film (and this despite its prototypically purist claim to realise a ‘universal’ cinematic language “based on its complete separation from the language of literature and the theatre”) is the archetypal model of this high-modernist agon. While it is the turning of the movie projector itself and the penetrating gaze of Vertov’s kino-eye that sets the whirling dynamo of the city into motion, the recorder creating that which it records, that motion is also outside its control.

At the dawn of the cinematic century, the American writer Henry Adams saw in the dynamo both the expression of human mastery over nature and a conduit to mysterious, elemental powers beyond our comprehension. So, too, the modernist ambition expressed in literature, painting, architecture and cinema to capture a subject from all angles – to exhaust its wealth of surfaces, meanings, implications, resonances – collides with awe (or fear) before a plenitude that can never be encompassed.

Remove the high-modernist sense of mission and we can see this same dynamic as animating the essay film – recall that last, parenthetical term in Gorin’s formulation of the essay film, “multiply[ing] the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected)”. The nimble movements and multi-angled perspectives of the essay film are founded on this negotiation between active choice and passive possession; on the recognition that even the keenest insight pales in the face of an ultimate unknowability.

The other key inheritance the essay film received from the classical montage tradition, perhaps inevitably, was a progressive spirit, however variously defined. While Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) amply and chillingly demonstrated that montage, like any instrumental apparatus, has no inherent ideological nature, hers were more the exceptions that proved the rule. (Though why, apart from ideological repulsiveness, should Riefenstahl’s plentifully fabricated ‘documentaries’ not be considered as essay films in their own right?)

The overwhelming fact remains that the great majority of those who drew upon the Soviet montagists for explicitly ideological ends (as opposed to Hollywood’s opportunistic swipings) resided on the left of the spectrum – and, in the montagists’ most notable successor in the period immediately following, retained their alignment with and inextricability from the state.

Progressive vs radical

The Grierson ian documentary movement in Britain neutered the political and aesthetic radicalism of its more dynamic model in favour of paternalistic progressivism founded on conformity, class complacency and snobbery towards its own medium. But if it offered a far paler antecedent to the essay film than the Soviet montage tradition, it nevertheless represents an important stage in the evolution of the essay-film form, for reasons not unrelated to some of those rather staid qualities.

The Soviet montagists had created a vision of modernity racing into the future at pace with the social and spiritual liberation of its proletarian pilot-passenger, an aggressively public ideology of group solidarity. The Grierson school, by contrast, offered a domesticated image of an efficient, rational and productive modern industrial society based on interconnected but separate public and private spheres, as per the ideological values of middle-class liberal individualism.

The Soviet montagists had looked to forge a universal, ‘pure’ cinematic language, at least before the oppressive dictates of Stalinist socialist realism shackled them. The Grierson school, evincing a middle-class disdain for the popular and ‘low’ arts, sought instead to purify the sullied medium of cinema by importing extra-cinematic prestige: most notably Night Mail (1936), with its Auden -penned, Britten -scored ode to the magic of the mail, or Humphrey Jennings’s salute to wartime solidarity A Diary for Timothy (1945), with its mildly sententious E.M. Forster narration.

Night Mail (1936)

What this domesticated dynamism and retrograde pursuit of high-cultural bona fides achieved, however, was to mingle a newfound cinematic language (montage) with a traditionally literary one (narration); and, despite the salutes to state-oriented communality, to re-introduce the individual, idiosyncratic voice as the vehicle of meaning – as the mediating intelligence that connects the viewer to the images viewed.

In Night Mail especially there is, in the whimsy of the Auden text and the film’s synchronisation of private time and public history, an intimation of the essay film’s musing, reflective voice as the chugging rhythm of the narration timed to the speeding wheels of the train gives way to a nocturnal vision of solitary dreamers bedevilled by spectral monsters, awakening in expectation of the postman’s knock with a “quickening of the heart/for who can bear to be forgot?”

It’s a curiously disquieting conclusion: this unsettling, anxious vision of disappearance that takes on an even darker shade with the looming spectre of war – one that rhymes, five decades on, with the wistful search of Marker’s narrator in Sans soleil, seeking those fleeting images which “quicken the heart” in a world where wars both past and present have been forgotten, subsumed in a modern society built upon the systematic banishment of memory.

It is, of course, with the seminal post-war collaborations between Marker and Alain Resnais that the essay film proper emerges. In contrast to the striving culture-snobbery of the Griersonian documentary, the Resnais-Marker collaborations (and the Resnais solo documentary shorts that preceded them) inaugurate a blithe, seemingly effortless dialogue between cinema and the other arts in both their subjects (painting, sculpture) and their assorted creative personnel (writers Paul Éluard , Jean Cayrol , Raymond Queneau , composers Darius Milhaud and Hanns Eisler ). This also marks the point where the revolutionary line of the Soviets and the soft, statist liberalism of the British documentarians give way to a more free-floating but staunchly oppositional leftism, one derived as much from a spirit of humanistic inquiry as from ideological affiliation.

Related to this was the form’s problems with official patronage. Originally conceived as commissions by various French government or government-affiliated bodies, the Resnais-Marker films famously ran into trouble from French censors: Les statues meurent aussi (1953) for its condemnation of French colonialism, Night and Fog for its shots of Vichy policemen guarding deportation camps; the former film would have its second half lopped off before being cleared for screening, the latter its offending shots removed.

Night and Fog (1955)

Appropriately, it is at this moment that the emphasis of the essay film begins to shift away from tactile presence – the whirl of the city, the rhythm of the rain, the workings of industry – to felt absence. The montagists had marvelled at the workings of human creations which raced ahead irrespective of human efforts; here, the systems created by humanity to master the world write, in their very functioning, an epitaph for those things extinguished in the act of mastering them. The African masks preserved in the Musée de l’Homme in Les statues meurent aussi speak of a bloody legacy of vanquished and conquered civilisations; the labyrinthine archival complex of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the sardonically titled Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) sparks a disquisition on all that is forgotten in the act of cataloguing knowledge; the miracle of modern plastics saluted in the witty, industrially commissioned Le Chant du styrène (1958) regresses backwards to its homely beginnings; in Night and Fog an unprecedentedly enormous effort of human organisation marshals itself to actively produce a dreadful, previously unimaginable nullity.

To overstate the case, loss is the primary motor of the modern essay film: loss of belief in the image’s ability to faithfully reflect reality; loss of faith in the cinema’s ability to capture life as it is lived; loss of illusions about cinema’s ‘purity’, its autonomy from the other arts or, for that matter, the world.

“You never know what you may be filming,” notes one of Marker’s narrating surrogates in A Grin Without a Cat, as footage of the Chilean equestrian team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics offers a glimpse of a future member of the Pinochet junta. The image and sound captured at the time of filming offer one facet of reality; it is only with this lateral move outside that reality that the future reality it conceals can speak.

What will distinguish the essay film, as Bazin noted, is not only its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen. No less than were the montagists, the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.

— Andrew Tracy

1.   À propos de Nice

Jean Vigo, 1930

Few documentaries have achieved the cult status of the 22-minute A propos de Nice, co-directed by Jean Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman at the beginning of their careers. The film retains a spontaneous, apparently haphazard, quality yet its careful montage combines a strong realist drive, lyrical dashes – helped by Marc Perrone’s accordion music – and a clear political agenda.

In today’s era, in which the Côte d’Azur has become a byword for hedonistic consumption, it’s refreshing to see a film that systematically undermines its glossy surface. Using images sometimes ‘stolen’ with hidden cameras, A propos de Nice moves between the city’s main sites of pleasure: the Casino, the Promenade des Anglais, the Hotel Negresco and the carnival. Occasionally the filmmakers remind us of the sea, the birds, the wind in the trees but mostly they contrast people: the rich play tennis, the poor boules; the rich have tea, the poor gamble in the (then) squalid streets of the Old Town.

As often, women bear the brunt of any critique of bourgeois consumption: a rich old woman’s head is compared to an ostrich, others grin as they gaze up at phallic factory chimneys; young women dance frenetically, their crotch to the camera. In the film’s most famous image, an elegant woman is ‘stripped’ by the camera to reveal her naked body – not quite matched by a man’s shoes vanishing to display his naked feet to the shoe-shine.

An essay film avant la lettre , A propos de Nice ends on Soviet-style workers’ faces and burning furnaces. The message is clear, even if it has not been heeded by history.

— Ginette Vincendeau

2. A Diary for Timothy

Humphrey Jennings, 1945

A Diary for Timothy takes the form of a journal addressed to the eponymous Timothy James Jenkins, born on 3 September 1944, exactly five years after Britain’s entry into World War II. The narrator, Michael Redgrave , a benevolent offscreen presence, informs young Timothy about the momentous events since his birth and later advises that, even when the war is over, there will be “everyday danger”.

The subjectivity and speculative approach maintained throughout are more akin to the essay tradition than traditional propaganda in their rejection of mere glib conveyance of information or thunderous hectoring. Instead Jennings invites us quietly to observe the nuances of everyday life as Britain enters the final chapter of the war. Against the momentous political backdrop, otherwise routine, everyday activities are ascribed new profundity as the Welsh miner Geronwy, Alan the farmer, Bill the railway engineer and Peter the convalescent fighter pilot go about their daily business.

Within the confines of the Ministry of Information’s remit – to lift the spirits of a battle-weary nation – and the loose narrative framework of Timothy’s first six months, Jennings finds ample expression for the kind of formal experiment that sets his work apart from that of other contemporary documentarians. He worked across film, painting, photography, theatrical design, journalism and poetry; in Diary his protean spirit finds expression in a manner that transgresses the conventional parameters of wartime propaganda, stretching into film poem, philosophical reflection, social document, surrealistic ethnographic observation and impressionistic symphony. Managing to keep to the right side of sentimentality, it still makes for potent viewing.

— Catherine McGahan

3. Toute la mémoire du monde

Alain Resnais, 1956

In the opening credits of Toute la mémoire du monde, alongside the director’s name and that of producer Pierre Braunberger , one reads the mysterious designation “Groupe des XXX”. This Group of Thirty was an assembly of filmmakers who mobilised in the early 1950s to defend the “style, quality and ambitious subject matter” of short films in post-war France; the signatories of its 1953 ‘Declaration’ included Resnais , Chris Marker and Agnès Varda. The success of the campaign contributed to a golden age of short filmmaking that would last a decade and form the crucible of the French essay film.

A 22-minute poetic documentary about the old French Bibliothèque Nationale, Toute la mémoire du monde is a key work in this strand of filmmaking and one which can also be seen as part of a loose ‘trilogy of memory’ in Resnais’s early documentaries. Les statues meurent aussi (co-directed with Chris Marker) explored cultural memory as embodied in African art and the depredations of colonialism; Night and Fog was a seminal reckoning with the historical memory of the Nazi death camps. While less politically controversial than these earlier works, Toute la mémoire du monde’s depiction of the Bibliothèque Nationale is still oddly suggestive of a prison, with its uniformed guards and endless corridors. In W.G. Sebald ’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, directly after a passage dedicated to Resnais’s film, the protagonist describes his uncertainty over whether, when using the library, he “was on the Islands of the Blest, or, on the contrary, in a penal colony”.

Resnais explores the workings of the library through the effective device of following a book from arrival and cataloguing to its delivery to a reader (the book itself being something of an in-joke: a mocked-up travel guide to Mars in the Petite Planète series Marker was then editing for Editions du Seuil). With Resnais’s probing, mobile camerawork and a commentary by French writer Remo Forlani, Toute la mémoire du monde transforms the library into a mysterious labyrinth, something between an edifice and an organism: part brain and part tomb.

— Chris Darke

4. The House is Black

(Khaneh siah ast) Forough Farrokhzad, 1963

Before the House of Makhmalbaf there was The House is Black. Called “the greatest of all Iranian films” by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who helped translate the subtitles from Farsi into English, this 20-minute black-and-white essay film by feminist poet Farrokhzad was shot in a leper colony near Tabriz in northern Iran and has been heralded as the touchstone of the Iranian New Wave.

The buildings of the Baba Baghi colony are brick and peeling whitewash but a student asked to write a sentence using the word ‘house’ offers Khaneh siah ast : the house is black. His hand, seen in close-up, is one of many in the film; rather than objects of medical curiosity, these hands – some fingerless, many distorted by the disease – are agents, always in movement, doing, making, exercising, praying. In putting white words on the blackboard, the student makes part of the film; in the next shots, the film’s credits appear, similarly handwritten on the same blackboard.

As they negotiate the camera’s gaze and provide the soundtrack by singing, stamping and wheeling a barrow, the lepers are co-authors of the film. Farrokhzad echoes their prayers, heard and seen on screen, with her voiceover, which collages religious texts, beginning with the passage from Psalm 55 famously set to music by Mendelssohn (“O for the wings of a dove”).

In the conjunctions between Farrokhzad’s poetic narration and diegetic sound, including tanbur-playing, an intense assonance arises. Its beat is provided by uniquely lyrical associative editing that would influence Abbas Kiarostami , who quotes Farrokhzad’s poem ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ in his eponymous film . Repeated shots of familiar bodily movement, made musical, move the film insistently into the viewer’s body: it is infectious. Posing a question of aesthetics, The House Is Black uses the contagious gaze of cinema to dissolve the screen between Us and Them.

— Sophie Mayer

5. Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still

Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972

With its invocation of Brecht (“Uncle Bertolt”), rejection of visual pleasure (for 52 minutes we’re mostly looking at a single black-and-white still) and discussion of the role of intellectuals in “the revolution”, Letter to Jane is so much of its time as to appear untranslatable to the present except as a curio from a distant era of radical cinema. Between 1969 and 1971, Godard and Gorin made films collectively as part of the Dziga Vertov Group before they returned, in 1972, to the mainstream with Tout va bien , a big-budget film about the aftermath of May 1968 featuring leftist stars Yves Montand and  Jane Fonda . It was to the latter that Godard and Gorin directed their Letter after seeing a news photograph of her on a solidarity visit to North Vietnam in August 1972.

Intended to accompany the US release of Tout va bien, Letter to Jane is ‘a letter’ only in as much as it is fairly conversational in tone, with Godard and Gorin delivering their voiceovers in English. It’s stylistically more akin to the ‘blackboard films’ of the time, with their combination of pedagogical instruction and stern auto-critique.

It’s also an inspired semiological reading of a media image and a reckoning with the contradictions of celebrity activism. Godard and Gorin examine the image’s framing and camera angle and ask why Fonda is the ‘star’ of the photograph while the Vietnamese themselves remain faceless or out of focus? And what of her expression of compassionate concern? This “expression of an expression” they trace back, via an elaboration of the Kuleshov effect , through other famous faces – Henry Fonda , John Wayne , Lillian Gish and Falconetti – concluding that it allows for “no reverse shot” and serves only to bolster Western “good conscience”.

Letter to Jane is ultimately concerned with the same question that troubled philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida : what’s at stake ethically when one claims to speak “in place of the other”? Any contemporary critique of celebrity activism – from Bono and Geldof to Angelina Jolie – should start here, with a pair of gauchiste trolls muttering darkly beneath a press shot of ‘Hanoi Jane’.

6. F for Fake

Orson Welles, 1973

Those who insist it was all downhill for Orson Welles after Citizen Kane would do well to take a close look at this film made more than three decades later, in its own idiosyncratic way a masterpiece just as innovative as his better-known feature debut.

Perhaps the film’s comparative and undeserved critical neglect is due to its predominantly playful tone, or perhaps it’s because it is a low-budget, hard-to-categorise, deeply personal work that mixes original material with plenty of footage filmed by others – most extensively taken from a documentary by François Reichenbach about Clifford Irving and his bogus biography of his friend Elmyr de Hory , an art forger who claimed to have painted pictures attributed to famous names and hung in the world’s most prestigious galleries.

If the film had simply offered an account of the hoaxes perpetrated by that disreputable duo, it would have been entertaining enough but, by means of some extremely inventive, innovative and inspired editing, Welles broadens his study of fakery to take in his own history as a ‘charlatan’ – not merely his lifelong penchant for magician’s tricks but also the 1938 radio broadcast of his news-report adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – as well as observations on Howard Hughes , Pablo Picasso and the anonymous builders of Chartres cathedral. So it is that Welles contrives to conjure up, behind a colourful cloak of consistently entertaining mischief, a rueful meditation on truth and falsehood, art and authorship – a subject presumably dear to his heart following Pauline Kael ’s then recent attempts to persuade the world that Herman J. Mankiewicz had been the real creative force behind Kane.

As a riposte to that thesis (albeit never framed as such), F for Fake is subtle, robust, supremely erudite and never once bitter; the darkest moment – as Welles contemplates the serene magnificence of Chartres – is at once an uncharacteristic but touchingly heartfelt display of humility and a poignant memento mori. And it is in this delicate balancing of the autobiographical with the universal, as well as in the dazzling deployment of cinematic form to illustrate and mirror content, that the film works its once unique, now highly influential magic.

— Geoff Andrew

7. How to Live in the German Federal Republic

(Leben – BRD) Harun Farocki, 1990

Harun Farocki ’s portrait of West Germany in 32 simulations from training sessions has no commentary, just the actions themselves in all their surreal beauty, one after the other. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland is shown as a nation of people who can deal with everything because they have been prepared – taught how to react properly in every possible situation.

We know how birth works; how to behave in kindergarten; how to chat up girls, boys or whatever we fancy (for we’re liberal-minded, if only in principle); how to look for a job and maybe live without finding one; how to wiggle our arses in the hottest way possible when we pole-dance, or manage a hostage crisis without things getting (too) bloody. Whatever job we do, we know it by heart; we also know how to manage whatever kind of psychological breakdown we experience; and we are also prepared for the end, and even have an idea about how our burial will go. This is the nation: one of fearful people in dire need of control over their one chance of getting it right.

Viewed from the present, How to Live in the German Federal Republic is revealed as the archetype of many a Farocki film in the decades to follow, for example Die Umschulung (1994), Der Auftritt (1996) or Nicht ohne Risiko (2004), all of which document as dispassionately as possible different – not necessarily simulated – scenarios of social interactions related to labour and capital. For all their enlightening beauty, none of these ever came close to How to Live in the German Federal Republic which, depending on one’s mood, can play like an absurd comedy or the most gut-wrenching drama. Yet one disquieting thing is certain: How to Live in the German Federal Republic didn’t age – our lives still look the same.

— Olaf Möller

8. One Man’s War

(La Guerre d’un seul homme) Edgardo Cozarinsky , 1982

One Man’s War proves that an auteur film can be made without writing a line, recording a sound or shooting a single frame. It’s easy to point to the ‘extraordinary’ character of the film, given its combination of materials that were not made to cohabit; there couldn’t be a less plausible dialogue than the one Cozarinsky establishes between the newsreels shot during the Nazi occupation of Paris and the Parisian diaries of novelist and Nazi officer Ernst Jünger . There’s some truth to Pascal Bonitzer’s assertion in Cahiers du cinéma in 1982 that the principle of the documentary was inverted here, since it is the images that provide a commentary for the voice.

But that observation still doesn’t pin down the uniqueness of a work that forces history through a series of registers, styles and dimensions, wiping out the distance between reality and subjectivity, propaganda and literature, cinema and journalism, daily life and dream, and establishing the idea not so much of communicating vessels as of contaminating vessels.

To enquire about the essayistic dimension of One Man’s War is to submit it to a test of purity against which the film itself is rebelling. This is no ars combinatoria but systems of collision and harmony; organic in their temporal development and experimental in their procedural eagerness. It’s like a machine created to die instantly; neither Cozarinsky nor anyone else could repeat the trick, as is the case with all great avant-garde works.

By blurring the genre of his literary essays, his fictional films, his archival documentaries, his literary fictions, Cozarinsky showed he knew how to reinvent the erasure of borders. One Man’s War is not a film about the Occupation but a meditation on the different forms in which that Occupation can be represented.

—Sergio Wolf. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido

9. Sans soleil

Chris Marker, 1982

There are many moments to quicken the heart in Sans soleil but one in particular demonstrates the method at work in Marker’s peerless film. An unseen female narrator reads from letters sent to her by a globetrotting cameraman named Sandor Krasna (Marker’s nom de voyage), one of which muses on the 11th-century Japanese writer  Sei Shōnagon .

As we hear of Shōnagon’s “list of elegant things, distressing things, even of things not worth doing”, we watch images of a missile being launched and a hovering bomber. What’s the connection? There is none. Nothing here fixes word and image in illustrative lockstep; it’s in the space between them that Sans soleil makes room for the spectator to drift, dream and think – to inimitable effect.

Sans soleil was Marker’s return to a personal mode of filmmaking after more than a decade in militant cinema. His reprise of the epistolary form looks back to earlier films such as  Letter from Siberia  (1958) but the ‘voice’ here is both intimate and removed. The narrator’s reading of Krasna’s letters flips the first person to the third, using ‘he’ instead of ‘I’. Distance and proximity in the words mirror, multiply and magnify both the distances travelled and the time spanned in the images, especially those of the 1960s and its lost dreams of revolutionary social change.

While it’s handy to define Sans soleil as an ‘essay film’, there’s something about the dry term that doesn’t do justice to the experience of watching it. After Marker’s death last year, when writing programme notes on the film, I came up with a line that captures something of what it’s like to watch Sans soleil: “a mesmerising, lucid and lovely river of film, which, like the river of the ancients, is never the same when one steps into it a second time”.

10. Handsworth Songs

Black Audio Film Collective, 1986

Made at the time of civil unrest in Birmingham, this key example of the essay film at its most complex remains relevant both formally and thematically. Handsworth Songs is no straightforward attempt to provide answers as to why the riots happened; instead, using archive film spliced with made and found footage of the events and the media and popular reaction to them, it creates a poetic sense of context.

The film is an example of counter-media in that it slows down the demand for either immediate explanation or blanket condemnation. Its stillness allows the history of immigration and the subsequent hostility of the media and the police to the black and Asian population to be told in careful detail.

One repeated scene shows a young black man running through a group of white policemen who surround him on all sides. He manages to break free several times before being wrestled to the ground; if only for one brief, utopian moment, an entirely different history of race in the UK is opened up.

The waves of post-war immigration are charted in the stories told both by a dominant (and frequently repressive) televisual narrative and, importantly, by migrants themselves. Interviews mingle with voiceover, music accompanies the machines that the Windrush generation work at. But there are no definitive answers here, only, as the Black Audio Film Collective memorably suggests, “the ghosts of songs”.

— Nina Power

11.   Los Angeles Plays Itself

Thom Andersen, 2003

One of the attractions that drew early film pioneers out west, besides the sunlight and the industrial freedom, was the versatility of the southern Californian landscape: with sea, snowy mountains, desert, fruit groves, Spanish missions, an urban downtown and suburban boulevards all within a 100-mile radius, the Los Angeles basin quickly and famously became a kind of giant open-air film studio, available and pliant.

Of course, some people actually live there too. “Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticise,” growls native Angeleno Andersen in his forensic three-hour prosecution of moving images of the movie city, whose mounting litany of complaints – couched in Encke King’s gravelly, near-parodically irritated voiceover, and sometimes organised, as Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation, “in the manner of a saloon orator” – belies a sly humour leavening a radically serious intent.

Inspired in part by Mark Rappaport’s factual essay appropriations of screen fictions (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, 1993; From the Journals of Jean Seberg , 1995), as well as Godard’s Histoire(s) de cinéma, this “city symphony in reverse” asserts public rights to our screen discourse through its magpie method as well as its argument. (Today you could rebrand it ‘Occupy Hollywood’.) Tinseltown malfeasance is evidenced across some 200 different film clips, from offences against geography and slurs against architecture to the overt historical mythologies of Chinatown (1974), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and L.A. Confidential (1997), in which the city’s class and cultural fault-lines are repainted “in crocodile tears” as doleful tragedies of conspiracy, promoting hopelessness in the face of injustice.

Andersen’s film by contrast spurs us to independent activism, starting with the reclamation of our gaze: “What if we watch with our voluntary attention, instead of letting the movies direct us?” he asks, peering beyond the foregrounding of character and story. And what if more movies were better and more useful, helping us see our world for what it is? Los Angeles Plays Itself grows most moving – and useful – extolling the Los Angeles neorealism Andersen has in mind: stories of “so many men unneeded, unwanted”, as he says over a scene from Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), “in a world in which there is so much to be done”.

— Nick Bradshaw

12.   La Morte Rouge

Víctor Erice, 2006

The famously unprolific Spanish director Víctor Erice may remain best known for his full-length fiction feature The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), but his other films are no less rewarding. Having made a brilliant foray into the fertile territory located somewhere between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ with The Quince Tree Sun (1992), in this half-hour film made for the ‘Correspondences’ exhibition exploring resemblances in the oeuvres of Erice and Kiarostami , the relationship between reality and artifice becomes his very subject.

A ‘small’ work, it comprises stills, archive footage, clips from an old Sherlock Holmes movie, a few brief new scenes – mostly without actors – and music by Mompou and (for once, superbly used) Arvo Pärt . If its tone – it’s introduced as a “soliloquy” – and scale are modest, its thematic range and philosophical sophistication are considerable.

The title is the name of the Québécois village that is the setting for The Scarlet Claw (1944), a wartime Holmes mystery starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce which was the first movie Erice ever saw, taken by his sister to the Kursaal cinema in San Sebastian.

For the five-year-old, the experience was a revelation: unable to distinguish the ‘reality’ of the newsreel from that of the nightmare world of Roy William Neill’s film, he not only learned that death and murder existed but noted that the adults in the audience, presumably privy to some secret knowledge denied him, were unaffected by the corpses on screen. Had this something to do with war? Why was La Morte Rouge not on any map? And what did it signify that postman Potts was not, in fact, Potts but the killer – and an actor (whatever that was) to boot?

From such personal reminiscences – evoked with wondrous intimacy in the immaculate Castillian of the writer-director’s own wry narration – Erice fashions a lyrical meditation on themes that have underpinned his work from Beehive to Broken Windows (2012): time and change, memory and identity, innocence and experience, war and death. And because he understands, intellectually and emotionally, that the time-based medium he himself works in can reveal unforgettably vivid realities that belong wholly to the realm of the imaginary, La Morte Rouge is a great film not only about the power of cinema but about life itself.

Sight & Sound: the August 2013 issue

In this issue: Frances Ha’s Greta Gerwig – the most exciting actress in America? Plus Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives, Wadjda, The Wall,...

More from this issue

DVDs and Blu Ray

Buy The Complete Humphrey Jennings Collection Volume Three: A Diary for Timothy on DVD and Blu Ray

Humphrey Jennings’s transition from wartime to peacetime filmmaking.

Buy Chronicle of a Summer on DVD and Blu Ray

Jean Rouch’s hugely influential and ground-breaking documentary.

Further reading

Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

Kevin B. Lee

The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

The world at sea: The Forgotten Space

What I owe to Chris Marker

Patricio Guzmán

His and her ghosts: reworking La Jetée

Melissa Bradshaw

At home (and away) with Agnès Varda

Daniel Trilling

Pere Portabella looks back

John Akomfrah’s Hauntologies

Laura Allsop

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Film Analysis — The Analysis Of The Film “Fargo”

The Analysis of The Film "Fargo"

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Published: Mar 3, 2020

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Works Cited:

• Suderman, Peter. “What Makes the Coen Brothers' Movies so Great - and Hard to Classify.” Vox, Vox, 10 Feb. 2016, www.vox.com/2016/2/10/10953068/coen-brothers-movies-hail-caesar.
• “Fargo (1996).” Most Influential, Significant and Important Films in American Cinema - The 1960s, www.filmsite.org/fargo.html.

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Argumentative Essay: Is Film Noir a Movie Genre? - CustomEssayMeister

According to Oxford Languages, Film Noir is a cinematography style or genre that expresses pessimistic moods and fatalistic ideas. The dark detective films that were mainstream during the post-World War II era later became known as Film Noirs. They were films with a stoic detective, a black-and-white color scheme, and a plot involving gangsters or the mob. Even today, there are still films and other entertainment mediums that embody the Film Noir visual style. The vibe of a detective in a fedora hat and trench coat walking in a dark alley while smoking a cigarette is still a pleasant thing to see for many. However, some people do not see the Film Noir style as a legitimate film genre. This argumentative essay will attempt to provide evidence that Film Noir should be considered a movie genre.

When one hears the term Film Noir, what comes to mind is an image of a detective in the 1990s. Film Noir is the representation of the state of the world after World War II. (Gurkan, 2015) It shows the sorrow left by the war, the anxiety felt by the survivors, and the fear that a new war may break out. Besides these negative emotions, Film Noir also showed the beginning of feminism and equality with the introduction of Femme Fatales and the rise of suburbanization through the use of suburban settings.

Arguments that Film Noir is not a genre is an issue that filmmakers are still unable to resolve. Critics argue that Film Noir is not a genre but a visual style. The style came from German Expressionism and from 1930s French films (Irwin, 2006, p 207). These critics focus on the behind-the-scenes filmmaking aspect of Film Noir. They argue that Film Noir is defined by the use of visual techniques such as in-camera angles, camera placements, set designs, and lighting.

Defining a Movie Genre

Providing the definition of a movie genre should be the first step in understanding if Film Noir suits the category. Different film experts and filmmakers provide different perspectives on the definition of a movie genre. Thomas Schatz, Executive Director of the University of Texas Film Institute, provides two approaches in defining a movie genre. First is the static definition in which he proposed that a genre has a fixed formula of narrative and cinematic components. The second is the dynamic definition in which he states that a movie genre undergoes continual refinement due to the changes in the industry (Schatz 1991, p. 16). The static definition provides the traditional approach where there is a fixed checklist of styles and techniques that critics can use to categorize a film into a movie genre. Take for example the Action movie genre where the main selling points of the movies are fast-paced action and highly stimulating visuals. The dynamic definition suggests that a movie genre goes through a series of changes as time passes. This may be perhaps due to a new idea in film theory or a result of a filmmaker's creative experiment. The dynamic definition may also emphasize the emergence of movie subgenres such as Rom-Com from the Romantic movie genre and Survival Horror from the Horror movie genre.

Other examples are the films The Underwold (1967) and Public Enemy (1913) which are Gangster films. The movie subgenre Gangster films is a result of the Crime genre undergoing careful refinement due to the post-war effects and narrative styles of the filmmakers. Viewers can only differentiate Gangster films from other Crime movie genres by their continued exposure to the subgenre and by comparing them to other crime movie genres. Film director Robert Altman supports this by stating that film genre theory has avoided potential conflicts between the different aspects of the film genre by sorting together similarly themed examples from specific genres (Altman, 1999, p. 15). This provides the argument that the preservation of the original definition of a genre is due to the emergence of the subgenre categories.

Thomas Schatz's definition of movie genres focused on the shared understanding of the filmmakers and the audience. A movie or film's genre is an obvious theme that can be identified by the similarity in themes, plots, settings, and filming style. Also, with the emergence of subgenres for each movie genre, perhaps there is an argument that Film Noir is under the Crime genre.

Defining Film Noir

Critics and audiences can recognize Film Noirs by the 1990s soundtracks, a detective as the protagonist, and a plot often involving a femme fatale and gangsters. Recognizing the themes of a Film Noir is easier than giving a concrete definition of the term (Naremore (1995, p 12). Film Noir originated in the USA with a few influences from German Expressionist cinematography. Examples of Film Noirs are The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Indemnity (1944), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and In a Lonely Place (1950). The themes of these films were dark and they showed the harsh life in suburban areas. The heroes or anti-heroes were mostly cynical and even suicidal like in the case of It's a Wonder Life (1946). Film scholar Chris Fujiwara argued that the filmmakers of films in the Film Noir category did not actually refer to them as Film Noir (Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2005). The filmmakers believed that they were creating films in the crime genre.

The fact that the Film Noir category was not a used term during the early stages when black and white detective films were mainstream is a strong argument on how Film Noir is not a genre. Film experts are even debating if Film Noir connotes a period in time, a genre, a cycle, a style, or simply a phenomenon (Naremore, 1995, p. 12). The French critic Nino Frank coined the term Film Noir. Critics used the term Noir to refer to the realism of a corrupt and disorganized world that French filmmakers attempted to capture. Though the term was foreign and almost non-existing for American Filmmakers, the fact that audiences can categorize certain films into the Film Noir genre cannot be set aside.

Film Noir Protagonists

The protagonists in Film Noirs can mostly be defined as anti-heroes due to their moral ambiguity. Film Noir genre protagonists are often portrayed as a person with a different, mostly darker outlook on life. Detectives are the most common Film Noir protagonists, however, other kinds of people such as a drifter and professors can be Film Noir protagonists. Being able to define the characteristics of a Film Noir protagonist helps in the argument that Film Noir is a genre. This can be compared to the brave soldiers or skillful martial artists in the Action genre.

Black and White Theme

The black-and-white theme of Film Noirs is one of the most iconic visual styles from the 1990s. Even today, this kind of visual style is used especially in mystery and detective films. Certain shows even change to black and white when trying to portray a setting in the 1990s. The black and white tones also complement the goal of filmmakers to show the dark and polluted environment of the suburbs. The incorporation of this color scheme into Film Noir is another way how people are able to categorize certain films into the genre.

Film Noir as a Style

It does not make sense to say that Film Noir is simply a style of filming even though the Noir label communicates a specific tone and exhibits particular stylistic traits (Schrader, 1990).   This is because, when it comes to considering visual style, mood, or tone as the defining aspect of Film Noir, the difficulty arises that any one of these can be transgeneric, which is to say that no one of these by itself will always define a film as Noir. Thus, for example, while The Maltese Falcon (1941) is seen as one of the earliest and best examples of the genre, Citizen Kane (1941) is clearly not according to Irwin (2006), because it lacks a central crime element, and is therefore not a Film Noir in spite of its chiaroscuro lighting, deep focus, disturbing camera angles, and generally skeptical tone. Indeed, most contemporary studies of Film Noir as a genre or of individual Noir films usually use some combination of the approaches or terminology mentioned above (genre, visual style, recurring story motifs, recurring tone, or mood) (Irwin, 2006). And even if there tends to be a certain critical vagueness as to specifics in these studies, still the Noir label has helped in the revaluation of a large number of neglected films, helped by focusing attention on these examples of a non-self-conscious genre that thrived for some twenty years (Vernet, 1993).

Film Noir as a Genre

The debate about whether Film Noir is a legitimate movie genre is still ongoing among film scholars. Some argue that the problem with recognizing Film Noir as a movie genre is that it cannot be identified through its production, promotion, and consumption. Film Noir was more of a scholarly discovery resulting from critical retrospection (Palmer, 1994, p. 140). The makers of the films that were later categorized as Film Noirs filmed their movies as crime dramas or murder mysteries. Film scholars suggest that Film Noir should be viewed as a generic field that contains the elements used in the films within its category. Since the Film Noir, visual style has been used by other genres such as Westers, horror films, comedy, and science fiction, this argument seems to have a solid foundation that Film Noir should not be a genre.

However, Thomas Schatz's dynamic definition can argue that society can reestablish and redefine the definition of a genre. This idea of society creating boundaries is particularly important in respect to Film Noir because, while classic Film Noir was not a genre at the time it was produced and instead classified and marketed under other genres, classic Film Noir has established its own genre over time. This recognizes both the evolutionary potential of those elements that define certain genres and also their existence in and influence from a constantly changing society (Neale, 2000).

Film Noir has been an influential style or genre for filmmaking and other entertainment mediums. Certain fiction books and storytelling video games have classified themselves within the category of Noir. The continuous debate of whether this genre is legitimate exists exclusively in the filmmaking world. Mostly due to the diverse genres in which the elements of Film Noir were used. However, going back to the dynamic definition of a genre, Film Noir can be regarded as a film genre through the passage of time and innovations in filmmaking. Audiences are able to point out elements of a film that can be attributed to a Film Noir. Specific character archetypes and visual styles have also been attributed to Film Noir. The term Film Noir may not have existed before the Noir films, but the collective recognition of critics and audiences towards the genre helps in its argument that it is a movie genre.

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