GENRE CONVENTIONSFilm Noir

Narrative

Double Indemnity has an abnormal narrative as it is shown through flashbacks.

Gun crazy has a more linear narrative as the film is told from beginning to end in chronological order.

The big sleep also has a linear narrative that is chronological from beginning to end.

The typical story lines for Noir movies are some disruption happens at the beginning of the movie, this is where you are introduced to the main character. Next the main character, normally a male detective or inspector of some kind, investigates the disruption. Normally around about here they meet the femme fatal character and the antagonist or anti-hero of the movie. Something would normally happen around about half way through that would cause the hero’s attempt at fixing the disruption to be halted, this could be the hero being captured or one of their main companions being killed. In the end the main character would have a victory over the villain of the movie, this would even be sometimes at the cost of his or the femme fatal’s life.

Iconography

All three movies share similar iconography, such as the appearance of guns and cigarettes. As well as these there are other objects that connote iconography, such as Venetian blinds that create atmosphere by fragmenting the light in a room, dark alleyways, bars, rain, red lipstick and trench coats.

Characters

There are similar character in all three movies, they all share a male protagonist that is normally the hero that you root for. They also have a female love interest who is more often than not normally useless in fights and helpless, Gun Crazy is an exception though as the female is very hardy in fights and capable of using weapons. There is also a female protagonist in most movies of this genre, a Femme Fatal, who is not like other females in the way that she is a lot more intelligent and slightly more ruthless and more helpful to the main character.

Camerawork, sound, Lighting and Editing

All of the movies are filmed in black and white, this is due to the fact that they are low budget “B” movies. This lead them to having a much more raw visual style that didn’t look as crisp and clean as bigger budget movies so the Black and white was used to save money. However this became popular and lead to it becoming a classic film trope. The sound is very foreboding tension building that is mainly ‘big band’ style instruments. The technology they had was slightly primitive when it came to the editing so it was basic. The lighting is commonly chiaroscuro which helps add drama and tension to the clips. Common film noir camera angles are low and high angle shots, for example the movie ‘Touch of Evil’ (pictured here) has a high angle shot to show that one character is above another and has more power in the situation.

Setting The settings for all three

movies are quite similar, they are often in offices, normally owned by the main character. They also normally take place in cities, this links back to the alleyways iconography as they are more common in big cities. There is normally and interior shot of a home belonging to the victim, femme fatale, detective or villain.