Narrative Conventions: Genre (film noir)

Another set of conventions that shape reader response is genre. You're probably familiar with many traditional ways of classifying both written and visual narratives: bookstores and video/DVD rental outlets often group their wares in loosely genre-defined sections. And too, you're probably aware of many of the conventions that structure specific genres when you stop and think about them. When you see a sci-fi film, or read a detective novel, or watch a horror movie, you know that there are certain situations, characters, themes, visual imagery and soundtrack styles that you expect to encounter.

Christopher and Jonathan Nolan's narratives reference and riff on the conventions of the hard-boiled detective story and its cinema counterpart, film noir. The wikipedia entry on noir is quite a good and extensive look at the genre's origin, history and major exemplars like Out of the Past (from which the screenshots above are taken). The conventions of film noir are not only thematic, but also visual.

Noir's signature dark and moody mise en scene is paired with stories of crime which unfold in a thoroughly corrupt world. Fatalistically doomed characters enact violent and brutal dramas of betrayal and double crossing. A lone hero confronts a world where nothing and no one can be trusted, where identity itself is the most unstable element of all. The world of noir is also a world of sexual menace where the threat posed by the femme fatale---a beautiful and sexually powerful woman---often turns out to be more dangerous than any fist fight, gun fire or master-minded conspiracy. Film noir is also characterized by its particular use of narrative structure: a first-person POV (often cemented with a voice-over narration), multiple flashbacks and plot twists, and other complications feed into the overall suspense of the plot.

Here is a short description and discussion of Out of the Past, as I said before, one of the classic examples of the genre. Think about what Memento may have in common with this film, and also where it breaks with or subverts genre convention:

(Also note that we will be seeing a film by Jacques Tourneur later in the semester, his noir-ish horror film, Cat People.)

"Out of the Past (1947) is one of the greatest, multi-layered film noirs of all time. The downbeat screenplay was based on Geoffrey Homes' 1946 novel Build My Gallows High, a book that consciously imitated Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1941). (An uncredited James M. Cain wrote some of the script.)

Director Jacques Tourneur, who collaborated with legendary producer Val Lewton, was well-known for his subtle horror films, including Cat People (1942) and I Walked With A Zombie (1943). (And this film marked the third and final time that Tourneur worked with cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca.) His masterful ability to create a doom-laden, dark, shadowy mood of terror, assisted by black and white cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, is perfectly blended into this tragic film noir classic.

The quintessential classic film noir masterpiece from RKO, a definitive flashback film of melodramatic doom, contains all the elements of the genre. First and foremost, there is an irresistible but deadly, chameleon-like femme fatale (Greer) who is the object of romantic fascination for both a detective Mitchum) and a gangster (Douglas). Themes of betrayal, passion, and a cynical, perverse, and a morally ambiguous atmosphere are all interwoven and entangled together in a confusing and convoluted dark plot (mixing narrative flashback with linear narrative) with both double- and triple-crosses. Eventually, all three individuals meet their inescapable, tragic ends typical of a Shakespearean-level tragedy." Tim Dirks, from filmsite.org.