Noir

In reading Schraders' Notes on Film Noir I found myself agreeing with almost everything he said except perhaps his statement that Noir is not its own genre. As Laura put it so well in her blog Film "Grey" or Film "off-White": Film Noir Schrader defines genre to be "a type of tacit contract between filmmaker and audience that promises a certain type of plot, character, setting, style and so on" Based on this I find it hard to see how he can consider Film Noir not to be a genre in its own right.

Schrader says that Noir is defined by more subtle things like tone and mood rather then by content and plot. With that I am inclined to agree with him. It is the tone of Noir which makes it so different. However, I would have to argue that it is the content as well as the lighting that establishes tone in Noir. The tone that is kept dark and deceitful, as well as the happy endings would not work with the content of todays movies. Could you imagine a super hero movie like the fantastic four ending in them all dying in some crazy accident. Or turning around and all stabbing each other in the back. While that would work for an interesting movie I feel that the content of the crime movie, where the main character is involved in more then just stopping the crime, leads itself a bit better to the dark tone of Noir.

Another reason that I think Noir is really its own genre is the amout of influence it has had and the difference between it and other genre's. Film Noir sticks out today even as a type of film that is different then any other genre because of the fact that the bad guy often wins. Something which is still talked about and revered 50 years after it ended deserves its own recognition. Also as Alex Kikka put it in his appropriately titled blog Another Noir? the odds of another time period in which another Noir type genre comes again is very unlikely. This means that Noir was not only special and different but also potentially unique.

I found it really interesting to think about the depth that the characters have in Film Noir. Generally characters in movies today are either all good or all bad. This isn't necessarily that different in film Noir as most of the characters are simply bad. But the protagonist usually has more depth to him. While we want the protagonist to be good he often does bad things that we as the audience must come to reckon with. Or even if we do not see any bad in him we must at least have to deal with the fact that in the end he will fail. Seeing a good character fall into a situation that we as the audience know he will not be able to get out of is an interesting feeling in its own right. One that we dont get to explore very often in cinema these days.