Research - Film Noir

Film Noir

Focusing on the genre’s distinctive lighting style. Find a YouTube clip that fits the film noir genre and embed it alongside your research.

Found information about film noir: Film Noir is a film genre often classified as providing dark or fatalistic interpretations of reality, meaning "black film" in French it is a cinematic term predominantly used to describe Hollywood crime dramas mainly for those that emphasise the moral ambiguity and sexual motivation seen within them. The term is applied to the films of the late 1940s to the early 1950s that often portrayed a rough or criminal underworld and cynical characters. Films seen within that era were often noted for their use of harsh, expressionistic lighting and stylised camera work which was often employed in urban settings.

Stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s film noir has always been associated with the low key lighting seen within the genre's films as often being weak shades of black and white. Although film noir does mean "black film" the emphasis of light and dark is deeply shown by the high key and low key lighting used within the films of that genre which makes it appear as being very accurate and precise.

One of the key features of film noir lighting is the intensity of the darkness which is provided by the low key lighting of the shadows, due to the single light source used to create a film noir film it is often easy to create a superb cinematic lighting. The use of stark, high-contrast lighting is the most noticeable visual feature of film noir. The shadowy noir style can be traced to the German Expressionist cinema which has greatly influenced film noir.

Film Noir Film Focusing on:

Blood Simple (1984)

Plot:

Texas bar owner Julian Marty, who is generally regarded as not a nice person, hires shady private detective Loren Visser, who is able to obtain what Marty requests: evidence - in this instance, photographic - that his wife, Abby, and one of his bartenders, Ray, are having an affair. As Ray and Abby realize that Marty has found out about them, it allows them to plan for their future away from Marty, while be up front with Marty about the situation. Marty, in turn, decides to hire Visser once again, this time to kill Abby and Ray, and dispose of their bodies so that they won't be found. The out in the open affair and the contract hit lead to some actions based on self interest, and a standoff of sorts between the four players, which is compounded in complexity by some wrong assumptions of what has happened, with an innocent bystander, another of the Marty's bartenders, Meurice, potentially and unwittingly adding to the scenario.

Blood Simple is a 1984 American neo-noir psychological crime thriller film written, edited, produced and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. It was the directorial debut of the Coens and the first major film of cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, who later became a noted director, as well as the feature film debut of Joel Coen's wife Frances McDormand, who subsequently starred in many of his features.

The film's title derives from the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest (1929), in which the term "blood simple" describes the addled, fearful mindset of people after a prolonged immersion in violent situations.

The film was shot in several locations in the towns of Austin and Hutto, Texas over a period of eight weeks in the fall of 1982. The film spent a year in post-production and was completed by 1983.