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The prehistory of noir
Film noir has sources not only in cinema but other
artistic media as well. The low-key lighting schemes
commonly linked with the classic mode are in the
tradition of chiaroscuro and tenebrism, techniques using
high contrasts of light and dark developed by 15th- and
16th-century painters associated with Mannerism and the
Baroque. Film noir's aesthetics are deeply influenced by
German Expressionism, a cinematic movement of the 1910s
and 1920s closely related to contemporaneous
developments in theater, photography, painting,
sculpture, and architecture.
The opportunities offered
by the booming Hollywood film industry and, later, the
threat of growing Nazi power led to the emigration of
many important film artists working in Germany who had
either been directly involved in the Expressionist
movement or studied with its practitioners. Directors
such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Michael Curtiz
brought dramatic lighting techniques and a
psychologically expressive approach to mise-en-scène
with them to Hollywood, where they would make some of
the most famous of classic noirs.
Lang's 1931
masterwork, the German M, is among the first major crime
films of the sound era to join a characteristically noirish visual style with a noir-type plot, one in which
the protagonist is a criminal (as are his most
successful pursuers). M was also the occasion for the
first star performance by Peter Lorre, who would go on
to act in several formative American noirs of the
classic era.
Film noir - Michael Curtiz |
