Guillermo Del Toro’s Definition Of Film Noir

Will respond in an informed way when I see this - highly anticipated 


Cate Blanchett & Bradley Cooper 



Helen Walker & Tyrone Power in 1947

Excellent post with many good points.

It has always sickened me how for thousands of years supposedly educated teachers, philosophers, craftsmen and others have used the meaningless word 'art'. It should be deleted from all dictionaries forthwith. 

As you imply, the term 'film noir' is inherently suspect, being in French. Why we should adopt the guidance of those frog-eating surrender-monkeys on any subject is beyond me.

You are correct that at least 99% of so-called 'film noirs' revolve around one or more crimes. (Or should that be 'films noirs'? An illustration of the sort of dilemmas we run in to when not sticking to good old plain English.) I would guess that a similar percentage of westerns also centre on instances of law-breaking. I suggest therefore that we no longer use the term 'western' but call those 'crime' films as well. 

There is certainly no definition, nor are there criteria, upon which there's wide agreement. And although there are sources crediting the term to a French critic as far back as 1946, it's true that it didn't come into general use until decades later, and it's this retroactive application to scores of films that's partially responsible for difficulty in pinning it down.

That very absence of consensus has engendered many vigorous yet cordial discussions here on this board over roughly the last five years, among which has been that of whether films noir constitute a genre or a style, or even whether there are minimum requirements, such as the crime element mentioned here. I consider that a happy circumstance, if only for the lively examinations of films significant or minor and revered or neglected that those discussions have brought about. 

Perhaps the one thing about which there's something close to agreement is that it's easier to say what isn't "noir" than what is. 

But I could be as wrong about that as a guy betting his last sawbuck on a losing horse.     

 

Western Noir

Don't forget LAURA on horseback from 1956

Having revisited a few of my most favored films noir in recent days, I've been giving some thought to Del Toro's remarks. 

Of course, film noir isn't about the "clichés" he mentions, and I agree that thematic elements are at least as important as visual ones. Still, there's no shortage of venetian blinds, husky voiceovers and dimly-lit streets in those films, nor of smokin' dames (in both senses), which is how they became clichés in the first place.

But there's another latter-day cliché - maybe stereotype is a better word - of which there's no apparent origin in those original films.

Ask someone today to describe film noir music. Nine out of ten are likely to cite something like the accompaniment to Eddie Muller's "Noir Alley" series on TCM. Do a Google or Bing video search on "film noir music" and you'll come up with similar examples. But in the films actually made during the period considered the original noir cycle, you'll be hard-pressed to find melancholy, muted trumpets or mournfully wailing tenor saxes backed by moody piano chords, downbeat bass and brush cymbals and snares. Consult any acknowledged film noir of the '40s - '50s, and you're most likely to hear bombastically blaring brass, urgent strings and thundering timpani suggesting a desperate pursuit and a sock to the jaw more than weary guys in fedoras and languorous vamps nursing late-night drinks in a smoky cafe. 

Anyone can copy well-worn clichés, but how does something become a cliché or stereotype without having previously existed in what's being copied? How did a particular sound come to so evoke a period, a style and the mood of something of which it was never a part? Just one of the mysterious powers of music, perhaps. But it had to have started somewhere. And no, I don't think it was Jerry Goldsmith's Chinatown theme in case anyone thinks of it. It's really not very representative of the stereotypical, down-tempo "cool jazz" sound to which I refer. As many know, Goldsmith was an eleventh-hour hire who had only ten days to compose, arrange and record the score now so well-known. But watch the original trailer, and the music you'll hear is not from Goldsmith's score, but from the rejected one by Phillip Lambro, who was already employing the now-familiar moody and downbeat sound so firmly associated with the style and genre before Goldsmith wrote a note. 

I'm still left wondering when and how that sound came about, and why it should say "film noir" to so many. The answers are as elusive as any two-bit gunsel in a town full of grimy, rat-hole hideouts.
     
  

timshelboy - 

Thanks for the reply and kind words.

I'm pretty sure mine is an outlier's viewpoint, but I've never been able to convince myself that Laura belongs in the category. There was a time when I could be coaxed only as far as designating it as what I called "glam noir," but I've even stepped away from that. It's a romantic, high-style, drawing room whodunnit, but it simply doesn't incorporate the visual and thematic aspects that have come to characterize noir. Sure, it's got crime and a collection of shady characters, each both manipulative and manipulated and harboring their own dark secrets and twisted desires, but so does any Agatha Christie mystery.  

But then, one of the seductive things about film noir is that nobody can comprehensively and definitively list its requirements to the satisfaction of everyone, making it endless fun to discuss and debate.  

EDIT (for some afterthoughts): If I understand correctly, the central storytelling conceit of Vera Caspary's novel was that each major character provided to the reader their own Roshomon-like narration and recounting of events, itself an intriguingly noirish concept, but something the film doesn't much exploit. I really must get around to reading it.    

You also have modern day noirs like No country for old en which is a neo noir.