John Pierre-Melville’s carefully constructed, tense masterpiece Le Samouraï was the first time I ever saw French icon Alain Delon onscreen. But this is a noir by Fuller - so love gives way to depravity, proving that even in the quietest of suburbs, horror can bloom. She’s harassed by people who treat her terribly because of her former profession, but finds love with a high-profile scion that suggests a happily ever after is possible. Kelly (Constance Towers) is a former sex worker trying to reestablish her life in a small, buttoned-up town. The Naked Kiss is a gut punch with the rhythm of a dream. He was never better than when he was working in noir. Writer-director Samuel Fuller made a career out of using the excess and grotesquerie of pulp to interrogate controversial subject matter. These films (and two TV shows) are a blend of cult classics, canonized favorites, and personal obsessions I feel are particularly illustrative of the soul of this period of noir, and how it has evolved in recent decades. The below list doesn’t include some of the more obvious, highly regarded neo-noirs, including Chinatown, Drive, and Zodiac, in order to provide a more varied overview of the genre. In recent years, works like Top of the Lake, Destroyer, and others still care about style, but it’s grounded in the personal hells these characters navigate in their urban and rural landscapes. The noir of the aughts took this to an extreme, obsessing over the style of the genre’s past to the point where it can come across as empty pastiche á la Sin City (2005). Free of the original studio system, neo-noir also has more brutal violence and sexually explicit scenes, turning what was once subtext into text. By the 1960s, noir had become self-referential and stylistically more blunt in a way that introduced new mores to the genre, often remixing the past as if in conversation with history. Neo-noir places the genre in new contexts and settings, and even cross-pollinates with other genres, as Blade Runner (1982) demonstrates. But neo-noir marks a major shift for more than just the changes in color palette, visual grammar, and time. In its classic period, noir was primarily confined to moody black-and-white cinematography, with a few exceptions, like the Technicolor feast starring Gene Tierney, Leave Her to Heaven (1945). What’s the difference between noir and neo-noir?įor one, it comes down to timing. But this definition is a good frame of reference. More than anything, noir is a very flexible genre, even in its original Hollywood-based era. What remains most immediately iconic is noir’s archetypes - especially the femme fatale - which spoke to the darkest corners of the human psyche. Some noir tended more toward poetic realism, and others hewed toward an almost surreal expressionism. Noir is an intrinsically political and psychologically attuned genre.Įarly noir is most widely known for its moodiness, expressionism, rhythmic and stylized dialogue, chiaroscuro lighting, and tragic endings, where characters who trespassed societal mores met heartbreaking fates. Noir is perhaps most known as a genre obsessed with crime - not just in the form of its more recognizable figures, like Bogart’s Philip Marlowe and similarly morally complex detectives, but also crimes of the heart and mind that lead people to lose their very souls. It fully came into its own during, and especially after, World War II, reflecting the anxieties of this era, especially when it came to the agitation over women taking on roles that didn’t align with predominant gender norms. It originally spanned the 1940s and 1950s in Hollywood, but it was also present around the globe, with films like the 1949 British masterpiece The Third Man and Mexican fare like the 1946 Dolores del Río vehicle La Otra. Noir began as a style that quickly coalesced into a genre. How did noir grow into the genre we see today, which often trades the political and social unease that was the focus of older works for a more personally attuned, existential horror? Let’s start with a bit of a history lesson. With the latest installment of True Detective, which ended its third season Sunday night, and more recent works like TNT’s Chris Pine–led I Am the Night, it’s in the spotlight once more. It has evolved dramatically since its beginnings in 1940s Hollywood, drenched in shadows and led by actors like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Humphrey Bogart. Despite this quality, noir is an elusive category that ebbs and flows within the public imagination. No genre is shaped as potently by the political and social moment of its time quite like noir. Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture
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