Film Noir

• Film Noir translates to 'Black Cinema' in French
• Under German occupational in WW2 the French didn't see US films for 5 years finding Hollywood films to have become darker.
• Hollywood's classical film noir period was between the 1940s to the late 1950s
• New tech such as sensitive film stock, lighting advances using practicals and cheaper filmaking made film noir possible.
• Pulp fiction refers to the pulp of paper and means cheap to produce fictional stories.
• Film noir was influenced by crime pulp fiction of the 1930s of hard-boiled tough detectives.
• Post WW2 Film Noir also highlighted women's redefined role on the home-front and post-war despair and PTSD.
• There is debate whether film noir is an aesthetic style or separate genre.
• Fatalism is a motif in Noir with a cynical protagonist often accepting fate as inevitable with free will seen as an illusion.
• Like German Expressionism film noir has high contrast lighting and dark themes.
• In Noir the protagonist is usually seduced as a woman called the femme fetale.
• The Haze Production Code was in place between the 1930s to 1950s before being dissolved during the 1960s Civil Rights period and was a conservative code which stipulated stringent regulations on liberal ideas and controlled messages in the subtexts of film.