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Crime Mystery Noir Thriller

• Film noir

• Definition

• Problems of definition

• From the gangster film to the police procedural

• Thomas Schatz

• The prehistory of noir

• Michael Curtiz

• Josef von Sternberg

• French poetic realism

• Literary sources

• Raymond Chandler

• W. R. Burnett

• The classic period

• Film noirs of the classic period

• The noirs of the 1940s and the 1950s

• Sense of the absurd

• Directors and the business of noir

• Orson Welles

• Naked City

• Hollywood films classic noirs

• Detour

• Classical Film Noir Directors

• Classical Film Noir Filmakers

• Robert Siodmak

• Film noir outside the United States

• Thrillers produced in Great Britain

• Italian and French Film Noir Directors

• Neo-noir and echoes of the classic mode

• The 1960s and 1970s

• Jean-Luc Godard

• Roman Polanski

• The 1980s through the present

• Joel and Ethan Coen

• Quentin Tarantino

• The Dark Men

• Psycho-noir

• Science fiction noir

• Science fiction noir

• Film noir parodies

• Murder by Contract

• Sledge Hammer

• Approaches to defining noir

• Visual style

• Structure and narrational devices

• Plots, characters, and settings

• Film Noir Cities

• Worldview, morality, and tone

• The tone of film noir

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A more analogous case is that of the screwball comedy, widely accepted by film historians as constituting a "genre"—the screwball is defined not by a fundamental attribute, but by a general disposition and a group of elements, some (but rarely and perhaps never all) of which are found in each of the genre's films.

Criss Cross (1949)

However, because of the diversity of noir (much greater than that of the screwball comedy), certain scholars in the field, such as film historian Thomas Schatz, treat it as not a genre but a "style."

Alain Silver, the most widely published American critic specializing in film noir studies, refers to it as a "cycle" and a "phenomenon," even as he argues that it has—like certain genres—a consistent set of visual and thematic codes. Other critics treat film noir as a "mood," a "movement," or a "series," or simply address a chosen set of movies from the "period." There is no consensus on the matter.

Film noir - The prehistory of noir