Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style

This erudite chronicle from Biesen (Music in the Shadows), a film history professor at Rowan University, examines the evolution of film noir, a genre and style defined by “shadowy iconography” and “bleak depictions of crime.” Some of these aesthetic hallmarks grew out of practical constraints, Biesen explains, noting that the first noir films, released in 1944, relied on dim lighting to stay within wartime electricity rations and disguise recycled sets. Biesen suggests that though noir’s first wave ended by the mid-1950s because the popularity of television incentivized filmmakers to use brighter imagery that would show up more clearly on the small screen, the genre was “repurposed and reconceived in other forms.” Close studies of noir-indebted films trace that transformation. For instance, Biesen contends that Alfred Hitchcock’s use of “muted tones and splashes of red” in 1954’s Rear Window showed other filmmakers how to translate the genre’s shadowy imagery to color film, and that 1998’s The Big Lebowski (the Coen Brothers’ riff on 1946’s The Big Sleep) heralded a “self-reflexive” turn in which neo-noirs became “openly derivative in their experimentation” with genre conventions. Biesen’s keen attention to how technological advances shaped film aesthetics enlightens, and her analysis of noir’s influence on the TV show Daredevil (2015–2018) and the Scorsese film The Irishman (2019) demonstrates the genre’s enduring appeal. Film scholars will want to add this to their shelf. Photos. (June)