Film Noir

According to Schrader, “Hollywood’s film noir has recently become the subject of renewed interest among moviegoers and critics.” Currently, Film noir is a more familiar term and its use is widespread, but still there are ongoing debates concerning its status. There are some critics that view film noir as a genre; thus it will rely upon a system of well defined conventions and expectations like other genre defined movies. If film noir is referred to as a genre, there is a number of problems that arises. First, genres tend to cross periods instead of being bounded by them and the film noir is generally very closely connected with the 1940s Hollywood. This particular criticism of noir as a genre relies upon whether one regards the more recent films as a continuation of the noir tradition or not. A critique against regarding film noir as a genre is that it will not include all the films that have been seen as noirs. But this may also be a reflection of problems within the methodology of film criticism. Film noir has also been regarded as a series. In this case the noir is seen as a cycle, and viewed as an aesthetic movement. Here the cycle has been seen as lying within the boundaries of the crime film, but this creates a problem since these borders themselves are difficult to determine. These different views on film noir try to define and capture the essence of noir. Maybe it would be best to simply state that all of the above describe some aspects of what one can call the film noir phenomenon. Overall, a film phenomenon with both generic, stylistic and cyclic parts is the best way to define the term film noir.