Noir Narrative Conventions - Film Noir - Noir Overview.
The Maltese Falcon movie (1941) was considered the first noir film and encapsulates conventions of Crime Fiction and it's sub genres: Film Noir and Hard Boiled detective fiction. Generically, value lies in its plot, its choice and the nature of the characters, and the visual conventions amongst others.
Voice-overs and Flashback in Film Noir One of the stylistic features common to many noir films is the use of extraordinary narrative devices like voice-overs and flashback sequences. These structural elements are included to underscore or otherwise complement thematic elements of the film.The period of film noir, the 40s and early 50s, was also the time when Freudian influence on psychological.
Wilder and Brackett seamlessly blend genres—satire, dark comedy, film noir, and melodrama—to masterful effect in Sunset Boulevard, so solely classifying the film as a film noir would be limiting. The film employs film noir conventions like the femme fatale and male antihero archetypes, high contrast lighting, voice-over narration, a downbeat ending, and a bleak, cynical tone.
Film noir does not have a thematic coherence: the term is most often applied to crime dramas, but certain westerns and comedies have been cited as examples of film noir by some critics. Other critics argue that film noir is but an arbitrary designation for a multitude of dissimilar black-and-white dramas of the late 1940s and early ’50s.
Hollywood has given the world three movie genres: Westerns, musicals and film noir. The first two are on the endangered species list, but noir is undergoing an explosive rebirth of popularity - even though the average moviegoer doesn't know quite how to pronounce it, or what it is.
Film Noir. When you think that phrase, the mind is immediately drawn to images of leggy ice queens, rumbled losers in fedoras, guns, neon and certain deadpan cynicism. Film Noir wasn’t a self conscious movement in the way the French New Wave was. It wasn’t a brand name like a Marvel superhero epic.
Film Noir is a genre of stylish crime dramas, difficult to define, but the 1940's and 50's were the classic period. Whether works since then can be accurately classed as Noir is a subject of much debate among film critics. Film Noir, and the literature from which it is drawn, is clearly the progenitor of later genres, particularly Cyberpunk. Common subjects of noir films include murder.