NOIR

“Noir” is French for “Black” and in noir films —at least the old ones— huge swaths of darkness, eerie or symbolic shadows, bands and blobs of light and darkness are part of the visual language.

That these films center around crime, violence, mystery and suspense helps make sense of these tropes, tho…
Well, the term “noir” itself likely refers to the fact that french publishers bound the stories of “hard boiled” detectives, produced by writers like Raymond Chandler and the Dashiell Hammett in black covers, to indicate the genre these books represented.
(Similarly, “naughty”, “decadent” or “perverse” books were often bound in yellow.)

Noir films of the “classic” or black-and-white era feature, visually: trenchcoats, fedoras, rain and night. But they also hover around themes of fear, cruelty, drugs and madness.
They feature hard men, femmes fatales, dangerous psychopaths and few innocents.

Its important to remember that these old films mostly represent the world as it existed at the time: the fashions, the “classic” cars, the seedy neighborhoods weren’t created for these films, but —even if filmed on studio lots— were meant to simulate the current reality, perhaps slightly intensified.

In later, color films, sometimes an effort was made to reproduce this vanished world. The clothes, the cars, the hair styles. But sometimes not. The madness, the subtext of violence, coiled and ready, never went away however:

David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991) puts us into a 1950s world, but with much of it set in Tangiers (Morocco) there is an a more ancient flavor. In this scene the protagonist (in the brown suit) who says he “writes reports”, meets an novelist who shares a secret

But David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway is set solidly in late 90s’ Los Angeles. Nevertheless, the madness is familiar…