Watch: What Are the Parts of a Good Film Noir Story?

What exactly is film noir?  Is it a movement, a mode, a style, or a
genre?  These questions have preoccupied film scholars for decades.
According to filmmaker Paul Schrader, noir began with The
Maltese Falcon and ended with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
 He’d add that it was largely
an American movement that applied certain stylistic (high contrast
lighting, voice over narration, non-linear storytelling) and thematic
(existentialism, the cruel mechanizations of fate, amour fou) elements
in genres ranging from melodramas to detective films.
Another film scholar might add that directors like Fritz Lang and Billy
Wilder never described their films as being "noir."  They thought they
were making thrillers. Film noir?  That’s a term the French critics
applied retroactively.  

This video essay series takes the fairly provocative stance that film
noir became a genre.  Essentially, in its golden age during the 1940s,
noir was a mode/movement that was superimposed onto other genres.  In
the words of genre theorist Rick Altman, genres
can start off as "adjectives"–fragments of the style and theme might
be there, but the genre has yet to fully solidify because the filmmakers
and audiences haven’t quite gotten their heads around it yet.  However,
by the time Robert Aldrich was making Kiss
Me Deadly in 1955, the writings of the French critics had made it
stateside (in fact, there’s a picture of him reading Borde and
Chaumeton’s Panorama
du Film Noir on the set of Attack!),
and perhaps the filmmakers and audiences had finally
begun to think of noir as being a noun.  When neo-noir flourished in
the 1970s (thanks to filmmakers like Schrader), the movement
emerged–fully formed as a genre–from its black-and-white cocoon.  

I write this trajectory into this introduction to the series because I
can imagine that some of my colleagues might have been troubled by a
video essay that calls film noir a genre. I am more than aware of the
history of this debate, and I will cover it in
a subsequent piece (Part I covered semantics, Part II focuses on
genetic syntax, Part III on pragmatics–so the noir genre discussion
will primarily rest there, and Part IV will focus on evolution.  There
will be a Part V on international noir, so don’t think
I’ve forgotten about that either!). What I’m attempting to do here is
to craft the video essay equivalent of an encyclopedia entry on film
noir for the undergraduate student with a new episode each month.  If
you’re already familiar with the films and the
key debates, you may not find much in the way of "new" knowledge here.
 My main audience–at least in terms of an intellectual presentation–is
the uninitiated.  I assume the pleasures of the more advanced fans and
scholars of noir will be found in the aesthetics
of the pieces, although maybe they’ll be surprised by a "new"
recommendation.  In any case, I hope you enjoy the first part of this
ongoing series, and I look forward to the debate it encourages.  Stay
tuned for more! 

To watch Part I of this series, click here.