And while we're at it, what the hell is "Noir"?
Originally it meant film, but it's now used to describe everything from literature to music. And everyone seems to have a slightly different definition of it. For example,
According to The Movie Book of Film Noir:
"Film Noir is a term coined by postwar French film critics to describe an area of Hollywood film-making that they particularly relished. Concentrated in the ten years following World War II and characterised above all by its atmosphere and its urban settings, film noir gave a broadly pessimistic treatment to melodrama and to crime movies. In a world that should have felt liberated by victory, failure, or the threat of it, haunted the petty criminal, the potential fall guy, the tired gumshoe and the two-bit femme fatale.
Although the concept of film noir remains nebulous - nobody, until the nostalgia boom of the seventies and eighties, actually set out to make one - it covers a distinguished collection of films that bring together an unrivalled assembly of talent: directors such as Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder, writers including William Faulkner, Daniel Mainwaring and Raymond Chandler, stars like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Barbara Stanwyck and Ava Gardner...." (Suggested by Marcel Bernadac)
And Jim Doherty, as usual, cuts to the chase:
"Hardboiled" is about attitude. Noir" is about atmosphere. They're not the same thing, but neither are they mutually exclusive. That which is both tough and colloquial is hardboiled. That's really all there is to it.
That which is both dark and sinister is noir. That, too, is really all there is to it."
And Marianne Macdonald offers a slightly more poetic version:
"Noir is the shadow moving beyond the campfire light, the darkness down the back alley, in the unlit doorway, between the street lights, OR in the woods. Or for that matter in the unconscious mind, the dark mind of the Other, the killer.... Death's home, really or symbolically. I will stop before I freak myself out on this rainy morning in London!"
RELATED LINKS
