Film noir productions generally are associated with dark settings, either because action takes place at night or in unlit rooms, where street light creeps through Venetian blinds and struggles all the way to hit the protagonists on the set.
Originally, such an outcome on the set in part was caused by filming conditions during wartime, as blackouts demanded shooting with little light; furthermore, nitrate films, the standard stock then, would allow proper and intensive black, i.e. the digital copies of 1940s movies we watch today on DVD are much lighter. Cinema audiences of the 40s experienced considerably darker pictures.
And even today with the latest digital filming equipment and screening technology, directors and movie companies still try hard to recreate that style, as it has become such a strong visual property of melodrama, detective film and dystopian city tale.
In her latest volume on the genre, author Biesen convincingly argues, that neither in the late 1950s nor later had film noir style vanished, because it was deemed old-fashioned. Instead, the unique light and shadow combination and harsh contrasts in movie photography most elegantly were integrated in later styles of shooting pictures, and it silently entered many aspects of production design. Sheri Chinen Biesen is professor of film history at Rowan University and author of Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir, Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films and other scholarly texts on similar subjects.
Already in the 1950s, American noirs shot in broad daylight and liberated from wartime restrictions were a different story altogether. Later, technicolor movies adapted film noir contrasts and ironically many color noirs tried to recreate a black-and-white style and went all the way to make audiences forget they were watching a color film. American TV crime shows, purposely used low-contrast imagery to simulate production methods of the last decade.
Neo-noirs shot in color from the 1960s onward used similar techniques to accompany their darker, sinister and violent plots in such classics as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Mean Streets (1973) or The Godfather (1974).
Concerning the changing media and presentation modes, DVD, Blue-ray and streaming, those unique features today are part of a standard repertoire to create and recreate effects, moods and settings in film. Biesen highlights the influence of Netflix as a pioneering enterprise that successfully included many film noir settings and photography in their darker (and rougher) recent productions. “Producing and streaming classic film noir, color noir, neo-noir, and long-form neo-noir worldwide reimagines classic noir style and aesthetic technique in the new millennium. It is extraordinary how the noir impulse persists as we look forward to new incarnations of the iconic look and feel of film noir in the future.” Her focus is clearly defined, as the book “… investigates how the noir impulse presides. It considers the legacy of film noir in an evolving technological, industrial production, distribution, and reception context.”
Besides probing and listing details about movies and screening technology, Through a Noir Lens associates aesthetic with technological changes and advancements. “This volume is a technological and industrial history of the evolution of film noir visual style and how it was adapted throughout the decades. … and it traces film noir from the origins of the dark cinematic style to the present day. … The chiaroscuro imagery of classic noir style continues to be cinematically reimagined in later neo-noir films and digital iterations of noir darkness.” Among the many classic and brand new productions and series under inspection here, we find Nightmare Alley (2021), The Big Combo (1955), Bridge of Spies (2015), Perry Mason (2020), A Star is Born (1954), North by Northwest (1959), Daredevil (2015), Babylon Berlin (2017), Jessica Jones (2015), Rebecca (2020), and Ozark (2017).
The initial chapter basically is a highly condensed version of her first title Blackout, as here she enlarges on the original production contexts of the 40s, nitrate film, rationed electricity, raw film material, limited set equipment and costumes, censorship regulations and tight schedules. The following part is quite different and all fresh, as it highlights Sunset Boulevard (1950), Niagara (1953), and The Barefoot Contessa (1954) among others, as those movies were – technically – transitory productions, if they were shot in color but still had a noirish air. The 1950s were a key decade for the shift into a new set of films that had successfully upgraded the black-and-white style with Technicolor features.
Chapter three is essentially an evaluation of many neo-noirs that surfaced after the mid-sixties, with Eastman film stock that allowed even more extremely low lit shots and set the standard until the 1990s, if shot with analog equipment. Some focus here is on Bird (1988), ‘Round Midnight (1986), Barton Fink (1991), Dark City (1998) and The Big Lebowski (1998). With the last chapter, Biesen truly breaks new ground and sets a standard for future musings on digital productions of the genre, as here she discusses noir, neo-noirs and the many blends affiliated in the streaming era. This probably is the first long text on that setting, and she devotes lots of details to Netflix and the company’s filming strategies for its numerous noir series and movies. “The persistence of the noir impulse continues in this rapidly evolving digital landscape in an emergent era of what I call digital noir or streaming noir. Neftlix’s rise has been an exercise in nostalgia as well as creative disruption as its original programming reboots noir in both features and long-form series.”
Netflix has strongly promoted noir aesthetics and with their means of distribution worldwide, they have made the style visible to millions who very likely have never heard of it and its origins. We learn a lot about the approaches of the (young) producers and directors there, who have used every trick and technological gimmick to lend their shows authentic 40s’s style aesthetics to deliver films and series in a darker air, intentionally evading bright colors and sun light. Here, she also discusses the effect of COVID and lock downs on media reception. As bad as those years were, they fostered binge-watching; which in turn helped tremendously to make the new noirish Netflix shows popular, with basically no place to go at that time, and when watching films and series seemed a good compromise.
Through a Noir Lens is quite a fascinating read, as it compares traditional and digital/streaming methods that meet with a particular genre, namely classic films noir and anything after in great detail.
Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2024
Sheri Chinen Biesen. Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style. Columbia University Press, 2024, 264 p.