LOS ANGELES: Dark City and Film Noir
Imagining the City in the American “Dream Factory.”
Films to be considered and discussed…
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
Bladerunner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Readings…
2010 > Flashback (Chapters 12, 13)
2014 / 2024 > Cities and Cinema (Chapter 2: The dark city and film noir: Los Angeles)
Each week in preparation for the next film city we explore, I will ask you to submit and complete as a reading assignment. The questions are designed to test for your ability to offer analysis and demonstrate comprehension of the main ideas communicated. Over the semester, you will be asked to submit SEVEN assignments out of NINE.
You can choose which of the assignments you prefer to submit, but it is important that you make the choice and submit a total of SEVEN assignments over the duration of the course. Please refer to the “Assignment Response Instructions and Rubric” doc in Moodle under “Course Documents”for more help with putting these responses together. Write your response directly into this document and/or make sure to include all questions in your submission that must be uploaded as a WORD or PDF file.
DEADLINE: September 18th in class @ 1pm with PRINTED HARD COPY I will review and return same class and then you will have 48 hours to submit final version on Moodle.
**note** all page numbers noted are aligned with the digital pages on the eBook version.
What are the defining characteristics of "film noir" aesthetics as described in the opening to this chapter (p. 39) and characteristics of “film noir” themes and stories (p. 42)?
Professor of Film and German Studies at the University of Florida, Barbara Mennel opens her discussion of Los Angeles and film noir by providing a definition of film noir. Mennel explains how the concept of film noir (a term coined by French film critics in the 1950s) shared many characteristics, defining aesthetics, and themes with the German Expressionist ‘Weimar’ city films of the 1920s (39). Shooting on black & white film was one shared formal characteristic, while other shared characteristics Mennel mentioned included: using low-key and chiaroscuro lighting (39); as well as extreme, skewered, and wide camera angles (39), with sweeping camera movements and aerial shots of the city skyline (43). Mennel also describes how “noir films usually show the city at night and in the rain” (39), and she explains how film noirs usually feature the film’s protagonist telling the film’s story through a voice-over narration and the use of flashbacks (39).
These formal choices add layers to the content of the stories that film noir is exploring. To this end, Mennel noted how: the lighting choices affect a film’s mood, specifically, “…a dark mood with extreme and proliferating shadows (39); the skewered camera angles “…evoke a sense of urban alienation” (39), and underscores the significance of space, where cities are seen“…as both alluring and dangerous” (43); and the choices about how a city is portrayed reveals “…a city devoid of emotion” (43). These formal portrayals of blasé, emotionless cities help to mirror the genre’s use of lonely individuals and the alienation they feel inhabiting their empty urban spaces (39). Furthermore, by formally showing the city at night and in the rain, noir films reveal the morally corrupt, seedy, transitional, and underground world its characters inhabit. Another key aspect of a film noir story lies in how these lonely characters come from incomplete and often broken families, which results in the characters betraying one another as the stories progress. Mennel describes this further as standing for a “…crisis of masculinity (that) coincides wit the presence of the femme fatale, a sexualized, duplicitous, dominant female character” (39).
These ideas tie into the context that film noirs explored, as Mennell notes how: “Film noir associates the city with alienation, isolation, danger, moral decay, and a suppressed but forceful sexuality” (43). Mennel relates this to ideas discussed by sociologist Georg Simmel, where links exist between “…the city, alienation, and emotional detachment” which Simmel considered “…unconditionally reserved to the metropolis.”
Header Photo > Hawks, Howard. Film Still from The Big Sleep. 1946.