Classical Narration And Art Narration

Or: Hollywood vs Western Europe in 1950s
by Yigit Yuksel

Narrative is, simply put, what 'happens' in a film. It is the chain of events that occur in the filmic universe. It consists of everything we see and hear, as well as everything we deduce of the things happening in the diegetic world. It is the fabula of the film, hence always in chronological order, unlike narration. Narration (in other words syuzhet or the plot), on the other hand, is how this is rendered, how the narrative information is being conveyed to the audience. It’s how a director phrases everything happening in a story, in order for his/her film to have the desired effect on audience. Camera movements, angles, lighting, editing, acting style, shooting locations, soundtrack are all parts of narration. Varying usage of these components will help a director to determine a specific type of narration (and hence a style) for his movie.

Most of the films today use widely recognized classical narration, which gained dominance decades ago, consequential to the domination of Hollywood over other film industries. It is a canon of various narrational means, and inaugurates the formation of a series of standardized movies. For instance, defragment of scenes in classical Hollywood films always creates a distinctive time-line. Sequences are oftentimes in chronological order and their linkages to each other are overtly marked, together with the removal of unnecessary time periods and events in the editing of time line (unnecessary in terms of not directly serving to the development of the narrative). There are also rules concerning the combination of shots to maintain continuity in editing. There is generally a structural order in the sense of shot sizes, advancing from general to more specific. The establishment shots of the sequences are usually long or even extremely long, which are followed by medium shots that will focus on the characters, successively developing into close-ups, extreme close-ups and point of view shots to make audience understand the character. Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind is constitutes a typical example to this technique. Another prominent attribute of classical narration concerns the state of the camera, which is always placed as an invisible observer that pursues the story as it’s told in the film; the characters never interact with it (and therefore with the audience), as opposed to ‘art films’ where this technique is often employed, and most of the times to attain an alienating effect. This state of camera, and the film’s unawareness of it, causes most of the films that uses this type of narration to be highly unselfconscious.


Although classical Hollywood films and classical narration has been extremely dominant, “film history is not a monolith” as Bordwell states in his article. After the post war era (late 1950’s), with the explosive increase in the number of televisions, film attendance has declined significantly. Furthermore, a ‘youth culture’ that had been spreading from Western Europe had grasped the younger audiences worldwide. This caused the producers to look for something new, bringing up opportunities to young filmmakers, who were thought to be capable of satisfying the demand of this growing ‘youth culture’ better than anybody else. As a result of all this and with the rise of art-cinema that had been practiced by these young directors, new modes of film narrations have emerged, most notably in Western Europe (Thompson and Bordwell 517-523).

French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), whose outputs are characterized fundamentally by their styles, is one of these movements. Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) (France, 1960), which is directed by Godard and co-authored by Truffaut (the duo that also happens to be the most significant driving force behind this movement), is one of the most innovative films of Nouvelle Vague. Godard, no doubt, benefited from the most recent technological advances in the camera industry. First generation of professional hand-held cameras, which started to appear in late 1950’s, helped directors to get rid of their dependence to studios and enabled them to shoot their films outdoors, in more “natural” and “real” locations without complication (Thompson and Bordwell 518). We can trace examples of this development in Breathless as well: The primary location for the events in the film is Paris; yet Godard uses the city more like a character than a mere location. The city and the intricate set of interactions with it determine what characters do and how they behave. When Godard uses distance shots, audience can observe the city alive in the background with real people, and even hear the genuine sound of the city whenever it’s recorded on soundtrack; which makes the scenes more “real”, resembling documentaries (Sterrit 54). This type of usage of locations is very revolutionary when compared to classical Hollywood Cinema’s opting for studios, incorporating exaggerated lighting and fake backgrounds like photographs or paintings.


Another distinguishable characteristic of art-cinema narration is the disinclination to omit the “unimportant” actions a la classical narration, culminating in the syuzhet being “not as redundant as in the classical film” (Bordwell). In fact, some directors went as far as shooting their films in real-time, keeping not only a couple of details but editing out nothing, no matter what. Antonioni’s use of this technique in The Adventure (L’avventura) (Italy, 1960) can be considered an example.

Contrary to this, the narration that art-cinema directors use in their movies does not always bring up reality. The continuity on editing is a tradition that has been violated by Godard and many other directors. Godard for example, adds different long shots to each other, thereby breaking the structural hierarchy of combining shots that is quite discernible in classical narration. Also, his invention of 'jump cuts', which is created by removing frames from the middle parts of the shots, messes up the continuity in editing.

Needless to say, many other distinctions can be listed. The acting styles and the ways of shooting actors, for instance, are considerably different. In Breathless, in some particular scenes, protagonists turn and talk to the camera, which causes a shocking effect on audience and also turns the movie into a self-reflexive one. Also, in contradistinction to classical examples, the narration of Nouvelle Vague films adds additional aspects and layers to the narrative. Again in Antonioni’s The Adventure, in most of the scenes, women are shot from behind, which culminates in a series of interpretations and discussions on the axis of sexuality and feminism (Brunette 36).


Narrative information is not necessarily transferred to the audience only by occurrence of events and/or characters’ behaviors. Fellini, for instance, uses symbolism authentically in his movies. There are certain themes and objects he repeatedly uses to convey narrative information. A character from The Road (La Strada) (Italy, 1954) ‘The Fool’ is first introduced to audience with angel wings on his back, which arguably boils down to the message that he is a ‘good’ character in the film. The circus, on the other hand, is a much-discussed image he makes use of in many of his movies.


In line with the meaningful use of locations described a few paragraphs before, what type of location to shoot in is also an essential question. Antonioni’s description of The Adventure’s famous ending is the following: “On one side of the frame is Mount Etna in all its snowy whiteness and on the other is a concrete wall. The wall corresponds to the man and Mount Etna corresponds somewhat to the situation of the woman. Thus the frame is divided exactly in half: one half containing the concrete wall which represents the pessimistic side, while the other half showing Mount Etna represents the optimistic. But I really don't know if the relationship between these two halves will endure or not, though it is quite evident the two protagonists will remain together and not separate. The girl will definitely not leave the man; she will stay with him and forgive him. For she realizes that she too, in a certain sense, is somewhat like him.” (Brunette 49).


Fellini uses similar type of symbolism combined with locations; at the last quarter of The Road two protagonists of the movie - Gelsomnia and Zampano - are traveling on the countryside; Fellini’s camera focuses to the scenery, which is covered with beautiful trees and a lake, but after the tragic death of The Fool when Fellini’s camera again focuses on the locations, and we see a darker environment with trees with no leaves and road sides covered with snow.


Again in The Road, there is the famous horse scene: a mysterious horse, without a rider walks past the alone, forlorn and abandoned Gelsomnia and disappears as mysteriously as he appeared, almost magically. This scene makes the audience feel a sense of loneliness and melancholy. According to Bondanella, with this scene Fellini “succeeds in evoking a poetic and lyric image that presents a surrealistic objective correlative for an important emotion, without superfluous dialogue.” (Bondonella 62)


Another important component of narration, which could serve expressional purposes, is the soundtrack of a film. In The Adventure, Antonioni makes a unique use of sound: The music starts playing suddenly, halfway in the film, when the search for Anna starts. This unusual method makes the audience feel distant to the characters of the movie, thereby creating a self-reflexive effect. Similarly, in the ending scene of the film, the self-conscious soundtrack includes a faint sound of bells and a train sound that belongs to two previous scenes that had defined the relationship of film‘s protagonists (Brunette 41). In The Road, the theme song of the movie is first identified with The Fool, afterwards with The Fool’s famed pebble talk, then the song passes to Gelsomnia and became hers and at the end of the film, when heartless Zampano starts to cry, the song passes to him, which conveys the message that “perhaps (and only perhaps) he has finally learned the lesson that Gelsomina’s life represented - that love can touch the hardest hearts, even his.” (Bondonella 58). The narration again gives covert information by making unfamiliar use of soundtrack.

To sum it all up, starting from 1950’s, art-cinema narration, which has been developed as an alternative, promising to counter classical narration and Hollywood’s domination, have brought up radical possibilities. The “subjective realism” of manifested in films characterizing this era created many possible pathways for subsequent styles, at the expense of getting at times to get too ambiguous for the taste and understanding of an audience that is used to classical narration.

Bibliography

*Bondonella, Peter. Films of Federico Fellini. West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
*Bordwell, David. "Art Cinema Narration." Narration in the Fiction Film (1985): 205-233.
*Brunette, Peter. "L'avventura." The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (1998): 28-51.
*Sterrit, David. "Breathless." The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible (1999): 30-60.
*Thompson, Kristin and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1994.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying About Digg And Love Reddit

Get Ready For A Rant, For I'm Really Fed Up

Chances are, most of you did not even realize this (which speaks volumes to me) but I have stopped using digg to promote/share the articles of The Long Take.

My case against it is so simple and clear that it doesn't even make me proud to have discovered that. Recently, I have posted a small announcement titled 'New Poll Open For Cannes vs. Oscars: 1974' where I talked a bit about why 1974 was a momentous year in terms of Cannes vs. Oscars and requested my readers to take 2 seconds to voice their opinions and vote for the film they like better. By the time there were 23 diggs, my poll had only 3 votes.

So how does this happen? After spending approximately five months dealing with the inner dynamics of Digg, I believe I have a simple answer to that question: Unlike popular belief, Digg is actually not a social bookmarking site but a weird network that is populated by lots of self-seeking individuals, who keep 'shouting' you about the articles that they want to make popular and demand, not ask, not request but demand you to digg them (those of you who consider themselves exceptions to this majority, please do not be offended). Your interests are irrelevant, since it's not really important whether you read the article or not - as long as you keep clicking that same magical button, everybody is your friend. As soon as you don't, you are nobody.

Eventually, Digg becomes a place where everyone promotes his/her friends' submissions/shouts, just preserve the right to ask the same from them. Your personal history does not really reflect what you like, what you have found interesting or what you enjoyed; it's more of a record of how meticulous you are about fulfilling your duties.

Needless to say, there might be some people whose experiences with Digg went much better than mine. I will not deny that. After all, it's a huge community and I'm sure there are some people who somehow managed to get into a network suitable for their tastes and purposes. But after all these months, I am really tired of all the digg requests in my e-mail regarding the good places I can put my dick, Thailand honeymoon vacation packages, how to get laid in Red Light Center, shallow and insincere environmentalism, populist political babble; of requests that are not only immature but also shameless when asking me to digg their articles "if I'm not a communist" or "if I'm not a fag".

The worst part is seeing yourself become a part of such community. When I realized I was digging, without reading, every "omg wow!! sooo funny!!!" articles like clockwork, I decided I had enough. My good friend Ibetolis's film reviews were the only things that kept me going, but at the end of the day, it's not hard to realize how big a loss of time and effort Digg actually is. If I wanted my dorky video to become popular I would definitely go for it but Digg is the last place on the internet to look for serious and mature readers for your blog.

Once I lost my faith in the article voting system in general, I also removed the 'Hype It Up' buttons of ShowHype from my blog. I am still an active member there but I have decided to restrict myself from spending excessive amount of time trying to get my articles 'hyped up'.


Approximately when I started discovering the real nature of Digg, a friend of mine suggested me to try reddit, and I did. Not only you get far more traffic redirected to your website (thanks to their new articles section that actually works) people who come in your direction do that in order to read what you have written. Its customization system works much better if you are more like a reader than a writer, and the articles you have submitted, commented or simply liked reflect your own taste as a reader and your own interests. The network of friends, which is a bit harder to get, is much more meaningful when eventually you do. And it's simple design is the cream on top.

Not that I can easily advocate reddit as a perfect example of a social bookmarking site, I am sure it has its flaws which will become clearer as time passes but the primary notion looks appealing for now.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, I'm unfortunately not paid at all by reddit or anyone else and this is not a sponsored review of any sort. I am just fed up with the whole experience of Digg and I wanted to inform any of you who are looking for the very same thing that I do: An intelligent reader base. Apparently, you don't have to dig really deep for that.

Burn After Reading (2008)

A Return To Comedy, But At What Cost?

Burn After Reading is comparable to nothing else that the cinematic art has had to offer so far. I have went through the list of the movies I have seen and even though that list includes a lot of absurd and quirky comedies, there is nothing I can relate this latest flick from the Coen brothers to, save for Intolerable Cruelty and The Big Lebowski, which are their own films anyway.

This is a new understanding of slapstick satire that imitates not a single conventional element from the past, for which it should be celebrated. There is no way you can define it without using the term 'Coenesque' or 'Typical Coens' or any suitable varient of these, which is what many critics and bloggers out there seems to be doing as far as I could observe. The analysis of this two-person genre requires an in-depth look that I am not able to provide within the limits of this review, so you might consider having a look at the excellent Coen brothers retrospective in MovieZeal for that, which was run only a couple of months ago.

The first thing I can say about Burn After Reading is that it's a hard film to grasp. Why? Because its brilliance is profoundly obvious but so is its crude simplicity. After one and a half hour and a very abrupt, anticlimactic ending, we get the point but was that a point worth making? We chuckled - even laughed, occasionally - but did Burn After Reading really satisfy us as a comedy? We admired the characters, the nonsensical plot and how it's handled in all aspects as if it's the most serious espionage thriller that we've ever got to see; but where does that eventually lead us? We don't know. It might be of revolutionary importance or pathetic insignificance. How can one decide?

Not easily is my answer. Because after their gigantic critical success with No Country For Old Men, the sincere feeling of watching a Coen Brothers film dissolved into an uptight experience. Theirs is now a certified style that most people feel hesistant to criticise. Chances are it's us, as the audience, who failed to understand the deep hidden meanings or technical innovations rather than them failing to match the success of Fargo or The Big Lebowski. And after No Country For Old Men, it's hard to come to terms with these guys' intention to loosen up. It's hard to accept that this is not an important conference on a matter of extreme significance but merely a casual chat around the bar table.

It is what it is though, and anyone pretending that it's more is still under heavy influence of No Country For Old Men. This is a film that embraces all the trademarks of a typical Coen film and stops short of being anything more. Infused with eccentric characters, examplary dialogue, minimal yet delicate cinematography and a comedic attribute that is intelligently hidden under thick layers of serious faces, tragic moments and dominant grave tones in the soundtrack, the film could've been much more but it chooses to stay more casual. This does not excuse Burn After Reading and allow it to be perceived as something more than any other 'average' film, but its evident potential does.

The point where J. K. Simmons asks the other CIA guy to "report back to him when it makes sense" is the most important scene by a long shot; and I can list three reasons for that: 1) It's the funniest scene, 2) It's a single sentence and a gesture that manages to summarize the whole point of the film and 3) It's the point where it becomes obvious that without all that recapping of events done by the CIA officer, making sense of or laughing at all the things we have seen up until that point would've been much more difficult. This is probably the film's biggest flaw, for if you imagine it without that single scene, Burn After Reading wouldn't be half as funny or coherent as it is; and that suggests a serious amount of wasted time and opportunities.

6/10

Exploring Nolan

Introduction

Although I'm aware that some of you are constantly questioning my credibility when it comes to running long-term series of articles (for which I cannot blame you, there are some features which I had been ignoring for a long time), nothing stops the new ideas popping into my head all the time. And after leaving behind an 8-month period of reviews, articles, top lists and lots of ramblings, I have decided it's time for The Long Take to engage in serious and in depth analysis of some important directors.

The idea was born when I recently re-watched a couple of films by Kubrick, who also happens to be my favorite director, and started to see some patterns in his films like anybody else who obsesses over one thing so much that he/she either becomes delusional or a prophet. Well, I don't have a holy book to preach but, needless to say, delusions are more tolerable when they're shared. So in all my malevolence, I have decided to expose you to the results of this madness and contaminate your innocent minds with cinematic infatuation and lunacy.

Before I could even start planning that, came The Dark Knight and I have decided to run my review of Christopher Nolan's Batman films together as a two-volume article. And while gathering my thoughts on this new notion, Cihan came up with the idea of running a 'Modern Masterpieces' series, which would start with The Prestige. Still occupied with the idea of analyzing directors of importance here in The Long Take, I immediately conjured the idea of postponing my semi-planned prattle about Kubrick and replacing him with Nolan, since we would cover much of his films in our upcoming reviews anyway.

What can I say; when life gets in the way of things, cheap pragmatism goes a long way.

Long story short, you will be seeing Christopher Nolan's films reviewed here during the upcoming x months (where x is a variable that depends on how much other stuff I'll have to do and the pop-up rate of new ideas for exciting new features) while me and Cihan will be doing our best to run this whole thing as less arbitrary as possible. If the eventual product feels more like the chapters of the same book rather than a collection of random texts, well, that's about as good as it gets.

The films you'll be seeing include:

* Doodlebug (1997) - watch it here
* Following (1998)
* Memento (2000)
* Insomnia (2002)
* Batman Begins (2005)
* The Prestige (2006)
* The Dark Knight (2008)

although chances are, following this chronological order will not be possible.

I have also included a small list to the left-side bar so you can easily track/find which of these films are reviewed during any of your visits to The Long Take. As we progress, the listed films will be linked to the reviews we have written.

A seperate announcement regarding the 'Modern Masterpieces' series will be posted soon.

Last but not the least, in order to convince you that not a good memory but sufficient amount time is what I'm lacking regarding the long-ignored article series of this blog, here is a list of ongoing but not-updated-for-quite-some-time features of The Long Take:

* Oscars vs. Cannes: The polls have been up for a long time and one was even concluded long time ago. A response to your votes is the least you deserve.

* 25th Istanbul Film Festival Full Coverage: When the excitement of the event dies down, the priorities seem to be changing as well. But there are a lot of films of which I've had the chance to enjoy an early screening in this festival (which include An American Crime, The Fall and Sukiyaki Western Django) and even many more that I want to talk about. So the feature stays, the time of its revival is not far.

* The Funny Games Experience: I haven't forgot that I promised to run a second volume to Haneke's much-discussed film(s).

* Most Anticipated List: Although keeping it up-to-date all the time, not only I am lagging behind in terms of most of the films that I have been dying to see (Teeth leaves a major mark of shame for instance) but also I haven't been able to review all the ones I have seen or talk a bit about the new entries. I know the list needs more love.

* TV: In merely the 3rd post of this whole blog, I have promised to cover TV shows from time to time. Blog archive proves me wrong.

Enough confessions padre. Now, back to earthly matters.

Rain, Guns & Cigarettes

Noir's Past And Present

Originally, I have written this article for the Noir Month in MovieZeal which ended just recently. You can view the original here. If you are into this sort of thing, I recommend you to check out all the articles posted in MovieZeal which consist of a film noir review for every day and some supplementary articles like this one. Enjoy.

If you have started reading this article here, then you probably know what a film-noir is. Chances are, you are also knowledgeable about the basic elements and characteristics of a film-noir to some satisfactory extent. Initially, I have intended this article to be informative and exhaustive; I wanted talk about the thematic and stylistic attributes of this genre as well as the whole timespan of influences and spin-offs; but then I decided it would be a little boring and completely unnecessary to do so, considering the intellectual capacity of our target audience. You have been told numerous times, I'm sure, by various other articles in the blogosphere that a film is not a film-noir without shadows, light-dark contrast, a femme fatale, a detective/private investigator, morally ambiguous existentialist undertones, complicated plots and an overall sense of pessimism. Therefore I will not merely remind you what I presume that you already know.

Instead, with your permission, I would like to wind the clocks back to 700 years ago.

Noir Always Existed

In 1300s, Europe witnessed the birth of probably the grandest artistic revolution in the history of mankind, which would later on be called and known as 'The Renaissance'. Neither time nor the feasibility limits of these blog spaces will allow me to talk about all the aspects of this upheaval, but there was one technical innovation that was critical to the development of the whole idea; something that is also closely related to the stylistic attributes of film-noir which automatically places it in the scope of this article. Tired from the conventions preceding them and in search for more natural and realist depictions of whatever constituted their subject matter, passionate Renaissance artists discovered the secret appeal of contrasts, especially that between white and dark; between light and shadows. Leonardo da Vinci blended this technique with his command over the anatomical details of humans to create some of the most impressive and lifelike depictions of people he knew or more legendary figures that he read about. Raphael used it with his delicate linear perspective to illustrate buildings, locations or simply portraits with more crowded backgrounds. Michelangelo was their reflection on architecture and sculpture.

The technique I'm talking about is of course 'Chiaroscuro' - 'Tenebrism' if the contrast is more dramatic. It is denial of harmony as the central element in painting and of two dimensionality as the basic principle. Since scholasticism was the predominant doctrine during the early Renaissance and religion was the agency that was most sceptical to accurate depictions of humans in paintings, it is also an indirect refusal of extreme fundamentalist limitations on art. But more important than all these aspects, chiaroscuro aesthetics was a trend that was going to persevere and endure even the most unfavorable circumstances. Before influencing cinema, it would be exaggerated in Baroque visuality by painters like Caravaggio and Rembrandt and prove for the first time its permanency in different artistic movements.

Fast forward 600 years: Germans are in trouble. Devastated after World War I and torn apart by extreme social and economical humiliation, depression is the color of human spirit. That, and the darkest of blacks. In the meantime, painting ceases to be the one and only visual art form: Louis Daguerre introduces photography -the first rival- and a couple of years later come the moving pictures. Audiences, who sneered at even the most wonderful paintings of their time, now scatter at the mere sight of a train approaching to the station. During more or less the same times; fueled both by their profound depression and the exhilarating potency of these new mediums, all German artists but especially the filmmakers create a movement known to us today as 'Expressionism' (or as 'German Expressionism' as far as cinema is concerned), where expressing emotions -often those that are dark, bizarre and gloomy- becomes the primary concern. These new generation artists oppose the views of the Renaissance people in nearly all aspects; naturalism is abandoned in favor of surrealist imagery that aim to capture the essence rather than merely copy what's visible; reality is distorted and religious themes are alleviated or at times completely replaced by humans and their earthly desperation. The understanding is so different that art historians today categorize Renaissance paintings under the 'Classical Period' while expressionists are considered 'Modernist'. Only one thing from the past endures and somehow manages to survive in this vastly dissimilar artistic movement.

One little idea that was also the aesthetical forefather of the film-noir genre.

Yes, you guessed right. Especially directors and cinematographers but also 20th century painters never renounced the magical beauty of chiaroscuro; on the contrary, they enhanced and emphasized this visuality with sharp angles, exaggerated makeup, surrealist set pieces and more daring compositions. With the help of new technological developments, they played with light and darkness in so many different ways that as a result, truly original and audacious pieces were created. As far as the movies are concerned, directors like Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau and Robert Wiene channeled the overall feeling of despair that haunted their country into their works; dealing with the notions of madness, insanity, betrayal, injustice and moral ambiguity with an intellectual complexity that Hollywood would fail to reach even decades after the first expressionist film. They also invented the first modernist narrative elements in cinema such as flashbacks, visual effects, plot twists and surprise endings. From then on, more complex and nonlinear stories would make their way towards the cinematical medium. Their vision was unprecedented, is still unsurpassed but unfortunately short-lived.

Due to lack of major funding opportunities and marketing support as opposed to the gigantic proportions of the movies industry in Hollywood (which was reached thanks to the golden age of studio system) these gems failed to survive against their American contemporaries; despite vastly surpassing them intellectually and artistically. The German government of the time was in no shape to take measures that would support its artists as well - more basic needs regarding its ordinary citizens were at stake. A few years later Nazis came to power and that was the last drop that spilled the cup. Nearly all expressionist cinema artists (primarily the aforementioned three) migrated to United States, one after another like an endless stream, in order to escape from the numerous difficulties that infested their homeland; and to better fund the movies they would make in the future. Not that it would be remarkably easy to do that in America - they had brought their unique vision with themselves but they were forced to trim their extremities in order to please the public and therefore the wallets of the studio bosses. Their idealist European perspective would be challenged by cold, hard cash. And they would have to blend those two in order to survive.

Prevailing at more or less the same time in United States was the American pulp novel tradition. These inexpensive, thin, paperback books/magazines, which had no intellectual value whatsoever, were widely published and read from 1920s through the 1950s. This eventually turned them into a legitimate phenomenon, which would be frequently quoted, pastiched and paid tribute to by American postmodernists (the best example of which is undoubtedly Tarantino's Pulp Fiction). This should not be surprising, considering how these pieces were blatantly typical in terms of their narratives, dialogues and literary styles - when a trend becomes as distinctly ridiculous as this, it is bound to be parodied once its heyday is over.

Admittedly, the whole thing was quite tedious and inane, but the variety in subcategories was nonetheless astonishing. Among the uncountable many were sword & sorcery fables, horror tales, mythical adventures, science fiction, westerns, war chronicles and sports stories; but it soon became apparent that only two of these genres were the real deal: softcore erotic romances occupied the number one spot (with the support of the rare female readers of these pulp magazines), followed closely by detective mysteries. Needless to say, the whole fad was extremely male-centric.


The detective fiction of this era was marked by the dominance of hardboiled crime stories, thanks to a bunch of guys like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose novels would later on would be adapted into quintessential film-noirs. Complex and enigmatic plots of the whodunits, which primarily consisted of a central riddle and its logical solution as the climax, were replaced by relentless action and gritty realism. Unsolved puzzles, unanswered questions and failed protagonists became more and more common. Crimes were unsentimental and plots became more sexual-driven. Surprise endings were superseded by pessimistic anti-climaxes. The overall writing style was more lean and direct.

It was around this time that cocky American crime fiction impregnated delicate European sensuality that had been dispersing towards United States since the rise of Hitler in Germany. While the baby would inherit his plot devices and existentialist undertones from his father, the mother gave him the unique technical magnificence that had been dominating a continent for more than 6 centuries. He would be loved and praised by the masses due to his father's popularity; while retaining the intellectual quality of the maternal side. The birth took place in the hands of a couple of German immigrants who had been working as filmmakers in U.S. for some time and had been greatly anticipating a half-breed with such potency. Impressed by the beauty of the baby, some French guys lost no time naming him themselves. He was called 'film-noir' and no one objected.

The rest of the story, up until 1960s, has been told in MovieZeal since the beginning of this month with an impossible attention to detail and in dazzling variety. "Why did you write about all this" you might be asking at this point; "Why the history lesson?" Because, like Joker says in The Killing Joke, "I want to make a point." I want you to realize that noir has been out there much longer then we tend to believe and in places outside where it was born. Since Renaissance and probably even before, you can track traces of noir in nearly all the artistic achievements of humanity; constantly changing, evolving, splitting and merging; constantly disguised under many different shapes and forms. The story of noir is a continuous one and that's exactly why it's hard to pin down the exact period of its existence or to come up with precise definitions as to what a typical film-noir really is. That is also why you hear a lot of discussions regarding what films can be included in this movement as neo-noir or retro-noir: how can you evaluate an organic entity using synthetic terms? How can you divide the lifetime of a natural phenomenon into abstract periods? Needless to say, it's impossible and the proof to that is everywhere.

Why then? What makes noir so different from all the other movements we have seen in the history of film? What makes it so unique? The answer to that is indeed many and none of them is truer than another. My own observation is that the noir mentality, not only the films but everything related, deals with human condition more honestly and intensely than all the other artistic movements mankind has ever seen. It had a direct relationship to us, to the meaning of our existence on this planet (or the lack thereof) and has evolved with the humanity itself; adapted constantly to the changing conditions, survived and existed. Not one nor a group of people created it, so it has never been a temporary artistic movement that would be abandoned at the first sight of a major change. It does not tie itself to minute and unimportant earthly matters like politics, social conditions or technical issues related a certain art forms. Thematically and stylistically its concern is the human spirit, therefore it endures; constantly looking for best narrative and visual elements to do justice to its significant subject matter. And like humans, it never stays the same.

But that's not all I had in mind when telling you all these. I also wanted you to realize that noir is not the result of an immediate discovery, an instant revelation or an innovation; which finally brings me to the second point that I want to make.

Noir Is A Postmodern Concept

Film-noir is not something original, nor it is a influential novelty. There is absolutely nothing new about it, technically or otherwise. What it does beautifully and where its real success lies is how it manages to blend fantasy and real-life drama; how it melds realism and surrealism together so smoothly that these two opposing ends of the same artistic spectrum fit into each other as gracefully as never before. Also, being a movement that has been founded by Italians, improved by Germans, brought to life by Americans and named by French, noir definitely enjoys the multicultural influences in its formation. American pulp novel tradition feeds on two different European movements in order to ascend and become noir: French poetic realism and German expressionism. As you can see, film-noir did not come out of nowhere like Dogma 95 did (which was probably the most artificial and shortest-lived movements in film history), nor it reflected the collective understanding of a group of filmmakers like Italian neo-realism did. The first noir artists borrowed techniques, recycled themes and looked for the perfect blend as opposing to their contemporaries who were seeking to discover the purest single malt.

Periodically, classical noirs should be considered modernist avant-garde; but the way I see it, noir represent altogether a different concept. The term 'Avant-garde' refers to works that are experimental and innovative and it represents "a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as norm or the status-quo". This means denial of the past movements in favor of discoveries and new styles. In this sense, German expressionism is definitely an avant-garde concept, because although it borrowed a lot from Renaissance techniques, certain visual elements it embodies such as heavily-emphasized angles, surrealist sets and exaggerated gothic makeup were new; not only to the cinematical tradition but to all branches of visual arts. What constituted their subject matter, which I have mentioned a bit in roughly the 7th paragraph of this article, was never before touched upon in any art form by any artist. It was the denial of all preceding ideals (including but not limited to Renaissance, Baroque and Neo-classicism) and was pushing of the limits for something much more.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have the postmodernist agenda and its intertextuality principle, which refers to "an author's borrowing and transformation of a prior text" to be used in his/her work. Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard completes this definition with his statement that goes: "Everything has already happened... Nothing new can occur"; asserting that the attempts to create, produce and invent have become futile after a certain point in history. What we can do is merely recycle and use the older texts/styles, use them in different contexts or merge them together to come up with something sensible and worthwhile to pay attention to. Same principle applies to all the technical aspects as well. Considering the fact that postmodernism originally arose as a reaction to modernism, this kind of a declaration seems hardly surprising.

Whatever new or exciting we see in the film-noir movement is completely back-traceable. There are no gaps between postmodern art and the classical noir examples, save for the fact that in a real postmodern work, the intertextual attitude I have been talking about would be deliberate. In noir's case, it's more of a natural evolution. And this is exactly the reason why I have refrained myself from calling it 'a part of the postmodern movement' and contented with the term 'concept'. Still, it has been my intention to prove this assertion by deconstructing all the so-called 'originalities' of a film-noir to show where they have been inherited from. Noir poses no innovation or invention; instead it constantly looks back and emulates past themes/techniques. The way all these things from the past blend together and are adapted for silver screen is what deserves the praise; along with the exhilarating idea that noir artists contributed to the formation of a postmodern concept way before the postmodernist movement started gaining momentum. Has any movement in the history of film ever been so much ahead of its time?

What Happens Today?

After passing through the mirror of postmodernity in 1960s, the classical period of film-noir ended when it ceased to be the outcome of the intertextual approach and became the source that much of the inspiration is drawn from. The brilliant collage of chiaroscuro, mannerism, low-key lighting, complex narrative, fatalistic realism, moral ambiguity, hardboiled attitude, mystery stories, existential loneliness, labyrinthine urban settings and sexually motivated, self-destructive endings now hardened into a shell until all these segmented components became indistinguishable. With its increasing popularity due to its nostalgic quality and swanky French name (which, when uttered, immediately makes you appear more intellectually capable than you actually are) the notion of film-noir was encapsulated into a mass that is more important than the sum of its parts. And that inseparable mass influenced a lot of new-age filmmakers.

It has always been profitable to pay homage to the noir style because noir clichés are so much fun to watch and play with. On a more depressing level though, noir-stained films always worked because it's extremely hip nowadays to appreciate this genre and all its spin-offs. Because aside from everything else, noir has become a tool, used by film buffs all around the globe to convincingly fake an intellectual orgasm. Because cunningly hidden in its simple name are allusions to cinema's most recent history, to stylized black&white visuality and to European understanding of art. Because a sentence that contains this word at least once will imply your listener/reader that you are well-informed about movies; that you are capable of evaluating older and more intellectual films; and that you have a firm grasp over film history as a whole. It has become the table around which many cinephiles like to circle-jerk all the time. Consequently, if you have referenced a film-noir in your movie, people should better like it; because if they don't, it becomes evident that they are a bunch of illiterates who simply don't get it.

This should not be read as my complaint regarding the noir-influenced films of our day, for they are great. It's the holy and almighty quality that is attributed to noir and the untouchable status it has reached is what's bothering me. But it seems to be the prominent intellectual trend of our day, so I guess I must learn how to deal with it. On a final note, those of you who like noir for what it is and who are not afraid to criticise certain examples of it whenever necessary, please don't be offended by my remarks. I am aware that people such as yourselves do exist, but you have to realize that you are not as big a majority as you would like to believe.