Film Noir

The Third Man - often
considered the conventional
film noir

Typically Film Noir is a sub-genre resting somewhere between Crime and Drama that deal with mature themes such as corruption, sexual desire and lust, deceit and betrayal, crime and human nature and its capacity for cruelty. Born mostly out of the European, particularly German, directors fleeing to the USA before after and during World War Two, the genre is charactorised by darkness and long shadows and a prevailing sense of unease that had its routes in Post-War Europe. It could be said in film noir that the lighting is used to put emphasis on what is not there as oppose to what is there. The set is usual only lit up with two point lighting  - key and back lighting. Fill lighting is normally forgotten all together. The camera work is often sporadic and 'on the tilt' that creates a sense of unease and unnaturalness - two major qualities to film noir.  The sets and the locations are normally just as iconic as the camera style the moral ambiguity of the lead characters. Without exception film noirs are set in the city which help develop themes of urban alienation and isolation. Examples of cities regularly featured in film noir include LA, New York, Vienna and Chicago.

A still shot from The Third Man which
more or less sums up the traditional
camera work and lighting of film noir

     Yet there are definite borders to film noir - Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is not classified as traditional film noir despite being set in New York and dealing with themes such as alienation, disillusionment, lust and violence, where as Citizen Kane, that barely touches on themes such as violence and crime, is classified as film noir. This is partly because films like Citizen Kane was made in the first and main era of film noir in the forties and fifties, but also I believe because the characters fit more comfortably into the archetype of the morally ambiguous leads and the femme-fatale.