FILM NOIR AND THE WAR FILM
FILM NOIR
There is no agreement as to what is the adequate definition of film noir. Some scholars think that it is a genre with its norms and conventions and also a particular style. The style of film noir is dark. Dim lights become the norm and create an upsetting atmosphere. The objection to the definition of film noir as a genre is that genres, whether filmic or literary, do not need to have a particular style.
Some scholars think that film noir is a certain style, a series or "cycle." These scholars construe film noir as a style or aesthetic movement within the Ameri can film industry of the 1940's. Yet, there are well-defined sets of traits of the film noir that make other scholars think of it as a genre: a general iconography, fixed characters, and predictable narrative patterns. Thus, the film noir always includes some image of dark city streets glistening at night with fresh rain, tough guys, anti-heroes ensnared by treacherous femme fatales, murder plot s and an unhappy ending which usually includes the defeat of the hero.
Another way of understanding film noir is as a specific emotional reaction in the audience produced by certain films. In this respect, film noir is defined by its effects on people. Film noir is then construed to be an affective phenomenon. It requires a single scene or situation within the narrative of a motion picture to create in the audience the disorientation caused by the film noir.
Film noir can be understood as a tone, attitude or mood. In other words, noir, like melodrama, is not so much a genre as a MODE, or particular way in which a story is told.
However, traditional modes do not have any temporal boundaries. For instance, the melodramatic mode is a constant in the film industry so that today, as in 1940, an a udience can watch a melodrama on the screen. However, film noir has not transcended time. Most of the contemporary remakes of film noir have not succeeded in portraying all the traits associated with the film noir of the mid forties (Body Heat, Against all Odds, and Farewell, My Lovely).
Film noir is an aesthetic movement. It consists of a finite group of motion pictures made during a specific historical period. Aesthetically, film noir relies on shad owy, low-key lighting; deep-focus cinematography; distorting wide angle lenses; sequence shots; disorienting mise-en-scene; tension-inducing, oblique and vertical compositional lines; jarring juxtapositions between shots involving extreme changes in camera angle or screen size, claustrophobic framing; romantic, voice-over narration; and complex narrative structure which often includes flash back s.
Thematically, film noir grapples with existential issues such as the futility of individual action; the alienation of modern man; the problematic choice between being and nothingness; the individual versus industrialized society; the arbitrariness of social justice which results in individual despair leading to paranoia and chaos.
Noir heroes are usually detectives, drifters, or anti social loners. They live in existential angst and in anonymity within a larger dehumanized world. Usually, the most existential of all noir heroes is the amnesiac who confronts the dehumanized world in search of his forgotten identity. The amnesiac epitom izes the social estrangement and psychological confusion that has settled in the American psyche after the war. His identity crises mirrors tho se of the nation.
Women in film noir are represented as social menaces, femme fatales that are willing to destroy and annul the drifter hero. The changing status of women during World War II and the post-war period challenges male dominance. The entry of women into the workforce and their entry into the public sphere violate the fundamental order of sexual relations prescribed by the pre-war society. These changes pose a threat to trad itional values and the institution of the family. Film noir registers the antifeminist backlash by providing a picture of postwar USA in which there is no family. Women in film noir destroy their men and their families.
THE WAR FILM
War films use the experience of men in war. They show superhuman feats of bravery and spectacular displays of mass destruction. War films enter a no-man's land of violence and death. The war film puts its characters i n situations in which any voluntary or involuntary action can lead to death. The enemy always causes death and the enemy is always the "other." It is we versus them. We are the good and the beautiful and they or "them" the evil and the ugly ones.
The traditional moral conventions are not valid in war. Most of the traditional beliefs about morality are suspended. Thus, a religious command such as Thou shall not kill is suspended at war. Killing in war is not only pe rmitted, it is imperative. However, the good guys or us tend to fight fair and the bad guys or them do not. Our war hero has a name, a significant emotional relation with someone, or is simply a person who we might meet in the street. The Others, or them are seldom individuals, they constitute mass of people with no identities. They are Germans, Arabs, or Japanese. Sometimes we fight against a particular person who is simply define as our enemy but who to us has no biography, no wife or children or any ot her important sign of humanness. Our hero is an individual but his character becomes even more attractive and admirable because he often puts his own desires and interests aside for the benefit of his troop (Sergeant York, 1941).
The war film is essentially masculine. Combat is an activity of men. Those who participate in combat often enter oedipal relationships with other soldiers. Also these movies expressed the repressed sexual desires of combat mates for each other. Men competing for one woman or "sharing" the same woman often represent this. In fact, in these films women often pose threats to men. The mere appearance of a wife (or a famil y) in the screen is usually a sign that a soldier is going to die. The psyche of the male soldier must be reshaped to repress the feminine elements in it. The hero should be a ruthless and unemotional killing machine.
In the war film the world of the family is an alien world. Usually the veterans have problems adapting themselves to the "Old World." War has over-masculinized men and, once the fighting is over, they re-enter society in full rage. Sometimes these films feminize the hero who returns home, presenting him as a handicapped veteran, unable to perform the roles of his gender.
The war film crosses over with other genres. There are war comedies such as M.A.S.H. and war musicals such as SOUTH PACIFIC. To a certain extent every film made during a war period or a film that depicts a war is a war fil m. However, the war film can be more precisely defined as a representation of war from the points of view of those who experience it.
