Hollywood In The Fortieth Film Noir Analysis

The film noir is not a genre, as Raymond Durgnat pointed out quite accurately to the objection in the book "Hollywood in the Fortieth" by Hayyom and Greenberg (Hollywood in Soroca). This movie can not be defined in the same way as, for example, a western or gangster film: that is, through the scene of action and conflict. Rather, noir is determined by a combination of more elusive qualities of tone, image, intonation. First of all, "Noir", as a "black" film, is defined through the opposition to "gray" and "white" films.

Like German expressionism and the French "new wave", the film noir represents a whole period in the history of cinema. In general, the concept of "film noir" refers to those Hollywood paintings of the forties and early fifties,

The influence of expressionistic poetics of light has always been felt in Hollywood tapes, so it is not surprising that the film noir took into account the experience of expressionism. This was largely due to the arrival of a large number of German and East European directors and operators who worked in this direction: Fritz Lang, Robert Sjödmak, Billy Wilder, Franz Waxman, Otto Preminger, John Bram, Anatol Litwack, Karl Freund, Max Ophüls, John Elton, Douglas Sirk, Fred Zinnemann, William Dieterle, Max Steiner, Edgar G. Ulmer, Curtis Bernhardt, Rudolf Mate.

At first glance, the influence of German expressionism, largely based on artificial studio lighting, seems incompatible with post-war realism, gravitating to rigid full-scale shooting, but the creators of films noir uniquely managed to combine in a single style, seemingly mutually exclusive elements. The best masters of the noir turned the real world into excellent scenery, using unnatural and expressionistic lighting in the filming on location. In films such as Union Station, They Live by Night, The Killers, an alarmingly bracing combination of realism and expressionism

This transition is noticeable in the tape of Samuel Fuller in 1953 "Occurrence on the South Street" (Pickup on South Street), in which the "black" visual series is connected with the "red" threat. The scenes on the shore with Richard Widmark and Jean Peters are filmed in the best traditions of the noir, but a dynamic fight in the metro already shows that Fuller's directorial style is much better suited to the new criminal drama of the middle and late fifties.

The era of film noir was extremely productive from an artistic point of view, perhaps the most productive in the history of Hollywood, at least if this productivity is measured not by the highest achievements, but by the average artistic level. The "black" film chosen at random will almost certainly be better than the randomly chosen silent comedy, the musical, the western, and so on. However, any "black" film of Joseph Lewis of the "B" category will be better than his Western in the same category. In general, the period of the film noir is characterized by an unusually high artistic