Some 70 years after the term 'film noir' was first coined to describe a uniquely American phenomenon, we found the 100 best.
Since its coining in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank, who observed from afar something dark, quite literally, going on at the American cinema, the term “film noir” has been debated and debated and debated some more. Is it a genre? A subgenre? A movement? A trend? A commentary? A style? For the purposes of this introduction, let’s call it a response.
But things get complicated here, and fast. See, noir didn’t play by any rules, not really. We think of noirs as urban stories, but that’s not always the case—for every L.A. and N.Y.C.-set saga, there’s a small, heartland tragedy. We think of a never-ending, rain-soaked night—sunlight replaced with neon and nocturnal reflections, the optical trickery of mirrors and shadows—but in contrast, the days of noir scorched its characters.
Except it wasn’t that easy. Like the ink on those yellow hard-boiled pages, film noir was a smeared affair from the start—hard to define and harder to reconcile. Its characters were dirty, displaced, disillusioned, distrustful, just plain dumb. Everyone was running some kind of scam, even the cops—especially the cops. Everyone was out for themselves, phonies subject to their basest fears and vices. The attraction was as ugly as the repulsion.
Was noir a conscious “response”? It’s pretty tough, given the very deliberation of filmmaking, to think noir was just a happenstance bunch of flicks that expressed the same anxieties and subverted the same sociopolitical conventions—at least after the first few years, when World War II had ended. And while by the time of 1958’snoir was a shrewdly self-aware conceit, it’s worth going back to who coined the term just 12 years earlier.
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