My favorite noir are the overripe ones like Sunset Boulevard and Touch of Evil. They're a little too baroque and mannered to qualify as a benchmark. My Ur-Noir would come from a pool of Criss Cross (Burt Lancaster and Yvonne Decarlo), The Killing (Sterling Hayden rules!), Nightmare Alley, The Big Heat, Gun Crazy or Detour.
Maybe The Killing. It's got the fatalism, the downer ending, a great femme fatale (Marie Windsor as the ultimate in castrating bitches), a fascinating plot and great, twisted minor characters like Timothy Carey. Also it's been very influential.
It now appears that Adrienne Shelly was murdered.
Fuck. Fucking humans. They never cease to disappoint me.
genre describes the product. What happens in the artist's head is irrelevant to that, as far as I'm concerned. [...] Well, sure. All classifications simplify. That is what they're for.
It's like the difference between a priest and a rabbi walking into a community center, and a priest and a rabbi walking into a bar. Different expectations in the audience; different set of references.
You're describing the noir pictures as if they were actors walking together in a power-shot, but they weren't. At the time, they were a varied bunch that all used different methods and spoke to different traditions: crime, thriller, procedural, gangster. After the cycle, people looked at them and said they had a lot in common, but that commonality is more like a family-resemblance theory than a strict set of generic constraints.
Urbanity:
The Postman Always Rings Twice
takes place entirely in the countryside.
B&W:
Vertigo
is in gorgeous color.
The femme fatale dies at the end:
Gilda
runs away home with her husband.
Crazy time structure: lots of them don't have crazy time structures.
Lots of them don't have cops; don't have regretful narrators; don't have downer endings; don't have arty shadows; don't have mirrors and doppelganger imagery; don't have an alienated protagonist; don't have extensive dealings with the criminal underworld. Some films noirs are expressionistic, and some are devoted to neorealism. Some take place mostly in the day, and some entirely at night. The movies we're talking about are
wildly
diverse, so diverse that it's extremely difficult to say what is and what is not in the category.
To call it a genre is to ascribe to it a fairly standard set of generic constraints. The above list is part of why it's hard to describe generic constraints for a genre called "noir." Whereas, using time-constraints to bound the category at least makes the boundaries clear and obvious (if still somewhat debatable).
You rule. Seriously, it's so overrated.
Yay! We will sit in our corner of rightness and be right.
You're describing the noir pictures as if they were actors walking together in a power-shot, but they weren't.
...What? Where did I describe noir at all?
It now appears that Adrienne Shelly was murdered.
Oh for fuck's sake. Hec's right - fucking humans suck.
standard set of generic constraints
I'd still argue that by these standards, genre is pretty much a null term. You can make a list of the things any genre is supposed to have, and then pull out half a dozen films which clearly count as Genre X but don't have them. Once you get beyond "cop movie = is about cops," (which isn't a very useful definition for crit purposes) you're not going to be able to construct an airtight classification system.
Fucking humans. They never cease to disappoint me.
I've been feeling that way a lot lately.
Where did I describe noir at all?
Well, by saying it was a genre rather than a cycle. (Other people were putting up specific criteria that described what they thought defined the boundaries of the genre.)
You can make a list of the things any genre is supposed to have, and then pull out half a dozen films which clearly count as Genre X but don't have them.
But noir is kind of an extreme example, don't you think? They're a lot more diverse than, say, westerns or disaster movies or war movies.
(It's the same kind of problem that science fiction novels have: mystery and romance and most of the rest of the genres are very strongly defined; but SF is so big and diverse, and it's so hard to define its core components, that many people prefer not to call it a genre at all.)
They're a lot more diverse than, say, westerns or disaster movies or war movies.
I'm not so sure that's true. At the very least, the conventions seem to change to reflect the current mood. Looking at Westerns, Silverado, say, looks at themes that would never have come up in the days of Roy Rogers.
