The History Of Film Noir

Nino Frank was a French critic who in 1946 first applied the term film noir (French for “Black Film”) to Hollywood movies. Nino Frank was unknown to most of the American Film Industries at the time. Cinema historians and critics defined film noir as a remembrance; many of the creators involved in the making of classic noir films later claimed to be unaware of having created a distinctive type of film.

Film Noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize doubt and sexual motivation. The classic Hollywood Film Noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film Noir of the 40s and 50s was a very simple black-and-white visual style. Many of the classical Noir stories derived from the crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression.

Film noir has sources not only in cinema but other artistic media as well. The simple lighting schemes are in the tradition of chiaroscuro (Italian for light-dark, meaning the contrast of light and dark) and tenebrism (A heightened version of chiaroscuro using violent contrasts of light and dark) , techniques using high contrasts of light and dark were developed by the 15th and 16th century by painters. Film noir's aesthetics are influenced by The German Expressionism. The opportunities offered by the ever growing Hollywood film industry influenced many important film artists working in Germany who had either been directly involved in the Expressionist movement or studied with its practitioners. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Michael Curtiz brought dramatic lighting techniques and a great deal of ideas to mise-en-scène with them to Hollywood, where they would make some of the most famous of classic noirs. Lang's 1931 masterwork, the German M, is among the first major crime films of the sound era (the sound era was the time when a motion picture was made with synchronized sound began to take place) to join a characteristically noirish visual style with a noir-type plot.