![]() It was a boon for the scores of independent producers who made noirs on a shoestring. The style was also cheap - lots of shadows means less money spent on lights. It should come as no surprise that some of the best noir directors – Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and especially Billy Wilder – fled Germany for the warmer climes of Hollywood. Its stark style melded perfectly with noir’s bleak cynicism. It’s German Expressionism cast through the lens of Orson Welles. The spare lighting, the canted angles, the grotesque shadows. Of course, the reason film noir has proved to be so enduring is because of its look. And film noir articulated those fears better than just about anything else. Add to that existential anxieties over the bomb and the Red Scare’s corrosive paranoia and you have a whole toxic stew of cultural fears burbling out of the American collective unconscious. Though those gender roles were quickly reshuffled and women were, for a time, banished back to the realm of domesticity, cracks remained in the brittle veneer of American masculinity. ![]() Is it any wonder then that perhaps the most frequent trope in noir is of a man, seemingly tough but riven with weakness, undone by a powerful, sexually-dominating femme fatale? A generation of men returned from Europe and the Pacific scarred and dazed by the mind-boggling carnage of the war only to discover that their women were doing just fine working in factories and offices. The time was just after World War II when the foundations of that optimism were severely tested. In this case, the culture was the inherently optimistic one of the United States. Like French Poetic Realism during that same decade, film noir is fixed in a particular culture during a particular time. ![]() Like German Expressionism during the 1930s, it was a cultural processing of a historic trauma. Its elements are so well known that they border on self-parody.
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