4. Money, critics, and the art of noir

‘Money, critics, and the art of noir’ explains how the cheapness of B pictures was one reason why sophisticated critics praised them. B-movie noir seemed to fly under the radar of the culture industry, uncontaminated by spectacle and big studio promotion; low economic value sometimes became high artistic value. Until the late 1940s, there was a stable marketplace for low-budget thrillers. By 1955 the B-picture industry that could support a production like Detour had ended, but a few films in the late 1950s prefigured the development of independently produced, low-budget thrillers that would appeal to the emerging market for art-cinema.

3. Censorship and politics in Hollywood noir

During the period when American film noir was at its zenith, Hollywood’s self-appointed censorship agency, the Production Code Administration (PCA), exercised control over the movie studios. The PCA’s standard report form of the 1940s was manifestly puritanical and ideological. ‘Censorship and politics in Hollywood noir’ explains the strategies used to get past the strict censorship rules and considers the impact of political censorship, especially the concern with communism, and the general culture’s treatment of women and minorities on Hollywood noir through the 1940s and 1950s, a period of time that saw probably the most regulated, censored, and morally scrutinized pictures of the kind in American history.

5. Styles of film noir

Contrary to what has sometimes been said, there never was a single narrative or visual style of film noir, even in the 1940s. The major directors played the movie game in slightly different ways and each of the studios also had something of their own style because of the photographers, designers, and musical composers they employed. ‘Styles of film noir’ explains that classic film noirs were as stylistically heterogeneous as any other kind of picture, but they were governed by a generally agreed upon ‘mysterious’ look. Film noir has persisted, but it doesn’t look the same in different periods. The shift from black and white to color is discussed along with parody, pastiche, and postmodern noir.

1. The idea of film noir

The term ‘film noir’ originated with French film critics during the 1930s, but it soon became associated with American films in the mid-1940s. ‘The idea of film noir’ explains the strong influence of the Surrealists on French attitudes toward the new American films. The first and most important book on film noir was A Panorama of the American Film Noir: 1941–1953, compiled by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton. They define noir in terms of five affective qualities typical of Surrealist art: oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. Film noir continued through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and forms of the genre have spread all around the world.

2. The modernist crime novel and Hollywood noir

‘The modernist crime novel and Hollywood noir’ considers how an atmosphere of ‘modernism’ in 1940s American film noir is largely due to the ‘thriller genre’ in literature. Many aspects of modernity—the interest in subjectivity and multiple points of view, the unorthodox handling of time, the stripping away of genteel rhetoric, the critique of modernity, explicit sex, and fears of women—came together in film noir, but were a potential threat to the entertainment industry. The tension was evident in Hollywood adaptations of four influential crime writers and major contributors to film noir—Samuel Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler—whose work needed to be lightened or ameliorated.

6. The afterlife of noir

Noir continues to be an unusually flexible, pervasive, and durable mood or narrative tendency, embracing different media and different national cultures. Its moods and imagery have been appropriated across the range of filmmaking practice. Will film noir—or indeed any film—survive in the decades to come? ‘The afterlife of noir’ explains that feature-length noir hasn’t disappeared, but the new digital media environment may impact the genre. It considers the problems with creating lists of film noirs and sub-categorization. Depending on how we use the term noir, we can make it stand for a dead period, a nostalgia for something that never quite existed, or an ongoing form.