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A dark street in the early morning hours, splashed with a sudden downpour. Lamps form haloes in the murk. In a walk-up room, filled with the intermittent flashing of a neon sign from across the street, a man is waiting to murder or be murdered . . . shadow upon shadow upon shadow . . . every shot in glistening low-key, so that rain always glittered across windows or windscreens like quicksilver, furs shone with a faint halo, faces were barred deeply with those shadows that usually symbolized some imprisonment of body or soul.
Joel Greenberg and Charles Higham
-Hollywood in the Forties
Nearly every attempt to define film noir has agreed that visual style is the consistent thread that unites the very diverse films that together comprise this phenomenon. Indeed, no pat political or sociological explanations-"postwar disillusionment," "fear of the bomb," "modern alienation"-can coalesce in a satisfactory way such disparate yet essential film noir as DOUBLE INDEMNITY, LAURA, IN A LONELY PLACE, THE BIG COMBO and KISS ME DEADLY. The characteristic film noir moods of claustrophobia, paranoia, despair, and nihilism constitute a world view that is expressed not through the films' terse, elliptical dialogue, nor through their confusing, often insoluble plots, but ultimately through their remarkable style.
But how can we discuss style? Without the films before us it is difficult to isolate the elements of the noir visual style and examine how they operate. Furthermore, while film critics and students would like to speak of the shots and the images, we often lack a language for communicating these visual ideas. This article is an attempt to employ in a critical context the technical terminology commonly used for fifty years by Hollywood directors and cameramen, in the hope that it might be a good step toward the implementation of such a critical language. The article is not meant to be either exhaustive or exacting. It is merely a discussion-with actual frame enlargements from the films-of some of the visual motifs of the film noir style: why they are used, how they work, and what we can call them.
The "Noir" Photographic Style: Antitraditional Lighting and Camera
In order to photograph a character in a simple, basic lighting set-up, three different kinds of light, called...