By Michael Bayer
Mention film noir, and most people will form a mental picture of it. If they have the most basic familiarity with noir, they’ll picture black and white, shadows and light, and probably some smoke or fog for good measure. They may even picture fedoras, streetlamps, and a dame’s silhouette posed in a doorway. In fact, noir’s visual style has made such an indelible imprint on American cinema – and the visual arts generally – that many Americans recognize it even if they don’t know the name for it.
Before film noir, Hollywood movies had been marketed to the widest possible audience and shot in what is often called classical style where the camera is positioned as the “ideal observer.” This vantage point meant subjects were perfectly centered at 180 degrees, compositions were evenly lit and balanced, and scenes were edited to ensure smooth and natural transitions. But all of these neat and tidy principles were about to collide with the creative forces of a world seemingly on the verge of collapse.
American commercial concerns intersected with the European artistic perspective by way of armies of expats escaping war. With growing interest in the yet-to-be-named auteurism, newly arrived Hollywood filmmakers, especially those on the fringes, took creative risks and challenged cinema orthodoxy. As famously stated by legendary noir cinematographer John Alton in his 1949 book, Painting with Light: “People are getting tired of the chocolate-coated photography of yesterday. They have had enough of it.”
As with the paintings of abstract expressionism, another American-made art movement contemporaneous with noir, creators depicted the alienation and inhumanity of the modern, war-torn age through chaos, at least relative to what had come before, promoting a discourse that was almost apocalyptic. Both movements reflected a break from the past. And both blurred the boundaries between low and high art.
Ironically, perhaps the single film with the greatest influence on the film noir aesthetic was not a noir at all: Citizen Kane. Released in 1941 by RKO, the studio that went on to have the most consistently noir look, Orson Welles’ film, considered by many to be the greatest ever made, is the perfect showcase of the noir style; in fact, watching Citizen Kane may be the single most enlightening project that a noir beginner can undertake. Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland changed all the rules, demonstrating that artistry lived in radical angles, extreme lighting, and unusual compositions. Such baroque filmmaking was nothing short of a revolution, even if it took another couple of decades for Citizen Kane to earn the status it deserved.
Welles had innovated in large part to navigate budget limitations, and his stylistic choices, especially Toland’s lighting, would soon be replicated by other filmmakers on lower-tier films to produce maximum artistry with minimum budget. Restrictive budgets forced filmmakers to invent new techniques — low-key lighting hid cheap sets, deep focus reduced the number of time-consuming camera set-ups, etc. — while these same budgetary workarounds helped filmmakers stand out creatively and impress studio heads so they could earn higher-profile assignments.
Lighting is the primary variable in the noir style. Alton called it mystery lighting or criminal lighting, a technique that combined high style and realism: “There’s an age-old saying that all evil happens at night. Where there is no light, one cannot see, and when one cannot see, his imagination starts to run wild.”
Lighting, of course, was the primary lever of the expressionism — or the external representation of internal thoughts and feelings — which arrived in Hollywood with directors fleeing Hitler’s Germany. (Perversely, noir may never have emerged without the Nazis.) A dramatic, baroque filmic language that bloomed in Weimar Berlin through the 1920’s and early 1930’s, German expressionism was based on the concept of stimmung, which refers to a mood visually generated through light. Later, Alton expounded on the concept: “In drama, we light for mood, we paint poems. Lighting with its ups and downs becomes a symphonic construction, paralleling the dramatic situations. The mood of tragedy is enhanced by a strong contrast of deep blacks and glaring whites.”
Introduced as a term at a 1913 art exhibition, German expressionism in film was perfected in Robert Weine’s extraordinary The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920. As much a language as a style, it used outsized and delineated shadows to distort compositions, oblique or vertical lines to encage characters, and strained yet ornamental angles to reflect the clash of ideologies and moralities in society. In the 1930’s, French directors like Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné adapted aspects of expressionist lighting to establish the dreamy moods of their short-lived poetic realism movement leading up to the war.
Expressionism was further enabled by innovation in production equipment. Newer, faster, more sensitive film stocks introduced in the 1940’s allowed for image capture with less lighting. New lenses allowed for just one light to be used to create the chiaroscuro effect. Key light (front) plus fill light (sides) plus backlight (rear), the traditional arrangement that evenly distributed light across all areas of the screen, could now be replaced with low-key (front and low) lighting to maximize contrast, distort facial expressions, and manipulate shadows and highlights for more dramatic effect.
“To create an authentic effect, the cameraman lit the character from a low light which illuminated the face from an unusual angle,” Alton wrote. “It distorted the countenance and threw shadows seldom seen in everyday life across the face.”
In the 1950’s, as camera technology evolved and on-location shooting became a cost-effective alternative, expressionism waned significantly as the primary palette of film noir. It remained a common element but in smaller doses. Instead, crime moved into the cold light of day where evil assaulted the viewers’ senses with no alleviation from the safety of shadows.
Aside from lighting, film noir brought radical changes to composition, upsetting the harmony and symmetry which had been so crucial to shooting in the classical style. In a broader sense, noir altered the way filmmakers employed mise-en-scène, a somewhat frustrating concept that expands composition to include performers, set design, props, and the way in which a director places (or omits) objects in front of the camera. Revered Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, in his extraordinary book Sculpting in Time, explained mise-en-scène in a particularly noir-relevant way: “We can be struck by the way an episode takes on a mise-en-scène which makes for the utmost expressiveness. On seeing it, we might exclaim with delight, ‘You couldn’t think of that if you tried!’ What is it that we find so arresting? The incongruity of the composition in relation to what is happening. In fact, it’s the absurdity of the mise-en-scène that catches our imagination, but this absurdity is only apparent. It covers something of great significance which gives the mise-en-scène the quality of absolute conviction which makes us believe in the event.”
In film noir, mise-en-scène often was designed to jar and disorient the viewer so that we would feel the protagonist’s alienation. American director and critic Paul Schrader called this “obliquity,” or the compositional tension created through an unusual combination of lines, forms, and movements. Film noir tended to employ radical angles: very low, very high, angle-on-angle, or Dutch (diagonal). Compositions were often askew, made even more complicated through informal balance (asymmetry), framing (even frames within frames), and compositional lines bisecting the screen in various directions. Nearly 20 years after making Citizen Kane, Welles tested the limits of mise-en-scène in Touch of Evil (1958), opening with a seemingly endless crane shot with an omniscient vantage point of a Mexican border town. The film features shots from every possible angle to confuse and disorient, sometimes making no spatial sense at all.
If filmmakers could create disorientation through compositional chaos across the width of the screen, they could add even more stimulation by also using the depth of the screen. Camera and lens innovations had stretched depth of field so that more narrative content could fit into each shot. Deep focus, in which the background is just as in-focus and important as the foreground, accommodated more characters and allowed for geometric blocking and action, all of which competed for the viewer’s attention, approximating the confusion and over-stimulation of modern life. Mirrors and reflections added duplicity while framing elements (doorways, windows, banisters) evoked oppression and claustrophobia.
Cameras could even produce vertigo in the viewer, often roving throughout the set, shooting extremely long takes without a cut, moving in for a choker close-up or following a character in moving close-up. Editors added further motion through cut-ins, cut-aways, cross-cutting, and pop-in shots, while optical printers and other compositing techniques condensed space and time for hallucinogenic sequences. The drugging of Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) in Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944) is a brilliant example of compositing to intensify disorientation.
The American city, which was quickly gobbling up an enormous share of the country’s population, also influenced film noir significantly. Noir highlighted and often exaggerated the harsh, angular, urban edifices and marinated in the cold anonymity of the city (the same atmosphere beautifully captured in the paintings of Edward Hopper), contrasting gritty slums and foggy piers with the fresh light of Art Deco buildings like the Chrysler Building and Los Angeles City Hall.
A short-lived but legendary architectural movement, Art Deco transformed American cityscapes in the 1920’s and 1930’s with buildings that were sleek but not minimalist, featuring ornate geometric lines and fragmented shapes. This baroque simplicity made for a fitting parallel to the nascent film noir style.
Skyscrapers towered over the noir story, but the action took place on the streets where danger skulked in the alleys and subway tunnels, where corpses landed in the gutters with a crowd assembling round. These urban noir exterior scenes were heavily influenced by American street artists, most notably the self-promoting freelance photographer Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, who had a knack for showing up at crime scenes and capturing “blood on the pavement” with his flash. His cold, raw photos captured the darkest moments of urban life, disturbingly candid scenes of scandal, violence, and death, and were compiled in his first book, The Naked City, published in 1945 and the inspiration for Jules Dassin’s 1948 film of the same name.
The notion of film noir in color seems absurd on its face. After all, color noir is an oxymoron.
Yet, a small group of color films, which includes Desert Fury (1947), Violent Saturday (1955), and Slightly Scarlet (1956), are widely considered noir not only because they meet the criteria on plot and mood but because, even without the perfect contrast of black and white, they employ noir visual techniques often to stunning effect. (Henry Hathaway’s 1953 Niagara is perhaps the pinnacle in this regard.) Most color noirs were released in the 1950’s when color film and processing were just becoming more affordable and beginning to dominate. In 1947, 12% of all Hollywood films were made in color; by 1954, this figure was already 50%.
The first color noir, however, is still widely considered the greatest of its ilk. John M. Stahl’s resplendent Leave Her to Heaven (1945), starring a dazzling Gene Tierney as a psychopathic killer, became one of 20th Century Fox’s biggest box office successes of the classic era. For a studio known for musicals and melodramas, many of them already making ravishing use of color, a crime film with such an evil undercurrent was a shock to the system when presented in magnificent Technicolor.
© 2024 Heart of Noir
