Now let's talk about the conventions of film noir. Just as a warning, there are a number of spoilers in this part of the lecture, so if you don't want to know what happens... Before you watch the film, stop now and then continue afterward. As I already mentioned, film noir's chief characteristic is its dark mise-en-scene, which expressed so clearly the dark mood permeating American society and filmmaking in the post-World War II period. So the mise-en-scene of classical film noir was greatly dependent upon black and white cinematography.
In fact, film noir was created for black and white, which was the standard type of film used throughout and during the classical period of Hollywood cinema. cinema. Color photography existed, but it was expensive and tended to be reserved for special effects or lavish musicals or sweeping epics. So film noir was shot in black and white, and the lighting, composition, set decor, makeup, costumes were all designed to be filmed and to be seen in black and white.
Also in keeping with the dark mood of the genre, the film settings are usually urban, alternating between the dirty downtown streets of the inner city and sometimes the manicured lawns and mansions of the wealthy suburbs within the city. These alternating settings echo the social and class tensions between the characters and drive forward much of the narrative. The most prominent technique for creating the film noir atmosphere is lighting.
The films are dark due to an absence of light. of light. Most of the scenes take place at night, again emphasizing darkness, and usually the interiors are dimly lit. Shades are pulled down. Venetian blinds close to admit only narrow strips of light.
All of this enhances the sense of mystery or suspense in film noir narrative, while at the same time contributing to its cloistered, claustrophobic atmosphere, similar to the tensions between characters and settings. Fillmore creates tensions between high and low contrast lighting. High contrast lighting involves the use of strong areas of contrast between deep shadow and bright light.
Not only did this make the set design and costumes pop, it also made the moral implications of the story very clear. As for low contrast lighting, which included a lot of shadow and very little light or contrast, this allowed characters and objects to blend into the darkness. making it difficult to discern shapes, but also difficult to discern the motivations of the characters.
So again, very well suited for suspense and mystery. As you'll see in numerous interior scenes, rooms with ceiling lamps hung low or floor lamps positioned shows only to cast small pools of light in a specific area, leaving the rest of the room to recede into darkness. Lighting is also used to cast shadows that create their own effects.
Typically, window blinds or other structures cast horizontal shadows reminiscent of the bars of a jail cell, or to create shadows and patterns of grids or webs, all of which suggest the entrapment of the central character, either by the law or another criminal or even the femme fatale. You can see many of these effects throughout Postman, even from the very start of the film, when Cor and Frank first meet. And we see the shadow cast by the lattice windows.
We see these shadows fall on the wall behind Frank and on the floor. It's an omen of his relationship with Cora and their coexistence like two wild animals in a cage. The darkness of Filmora also manifests itself in the interiors, particularly sites of crime and corruption, and works with set decor to establish mood but also social class and values.
For instance, the little roadside diner in Postman, which completely reflects Nick's tastes and values rather than Cora's, or the equally squalid jail cell where Cora and Frank await trial. In such instances, lighting a decor helped to invert traditional social values and vice versa. While Nick's roadside diner is a dream for him, representing his life's ambition, which he pours into its homey, cozy decor, designed to look like a little honeymoon cottage to attract weary or hungry customers, There's nothing homey or cozy or remotely domestic about Cora, his wife, who sees her life with Nick and work in the diner as a sentence of life imprisonment. She does have ambition, but it doesn't involve Nick or cooking and cleaning. As to that, the only customer who is attracted to the diner and stops in is Frank, but he's a drifter looking for work.
He has no money or ambition, only a nose for trouble. and an instinct for self-destruction, which suits Cora just fine. Film noir's inversion of typical or conventional social values and moral codes reminds us of the instability of its world and characters, and the notion that not everything is as it seems on the surface. Related to set decor are props. Think of the man-wanted sign which Nick puts outside and which causes Frank to stop.
It can be taken in two ways, and Nick takes it in the most obvious way as an advertisement for help in the diner. Then he meets Cora. who drops her lipstick to get his attention and poses provocatively for him in the doorway.
This is added incentive for him to take the job until he finds out that she's Nick's wife. Suddenly the man wanted sign takes on a whole new meaning, especially after Frank tosses it into the fire pit, which sets the letters ablaze with a burning hot flame. A glance back at Korok, still watching him seductively, confirms that he is playing with fire.
Good morning, my friend. I'll tell you all about that job. All you gotta do is, you know, help around the place.
Well, right now I got a certain trouble that keeps me from working. You look healthy. My feet. They keep itching for me to go places. Oh.
But it's a nice place you got around here. How's the food? I'll make you a wonderful hamburger, free of charge.
Yeah? Just to show you the kind of food that goes with the job. You know anything about automobiles? Oh, I'm a born mechanic.
Well. Sit down. Of course, the job doesn't pay all the money in the world, you know.
But you got no expenses. You eat and sleep right here. A fine bed, box, spring, and mattress. Fresh air, sunshine. Boy, you'll be living.
Suppose I try it for a couple of days. Yeah. Oh.
Uh-oh. Customer. Go ahead. We're not going to make any money in here.
I'll look after the hamburger. Thanks. Don't go away. You drop this. That's it?
Burn it up. I can tell my wife you're going to stay. Your wife? Of course, all of this is a sneaky way of getting around the Hays Code and suggesting what's really going on.
The real point of attraction between Frank and Cora, which is purely sexual. Man Wanted is a double entendre. Nick wants a man. to help him in the diner, while Cora wants a man to help her in the bedroom, and also to help her get rid of her husband. In that introductory sequence, the lipstick helps get that across, not only because it gets Frank's attention, or because it foreshadows the continual battle of dominance between them. She wants him to bring the lipstick to her, and he wants her to come and get it, but also because of its shape.
which is clearly phallic, and the way Cora uses it when she gets it back, applying the makeup to her lips as she poses for him, and then slamming the door in his face. So fixated is he on this display of sexual seductiveness and promise that he doesn't notice his burger is burning on the grill, another clever deke around the censorship code. The smell of the smoke and charred meat bring him back to reality.
As well, there are many references to water throughout the film. The bathtub, where they plan to electrocute and kill Nick. The ocean, where they swim and Cora nearly drowns.
Water is fluid, sensual, and occasionally sexual. But it is also tied to atmosphere, which is such a pervasive familiar trope in film noir mise-en-scene. There is always a lot of rain and fog in film noir, and the streets are always damp and slick.
This is used not only to add to the oppressive atmosphere, but also to offer another means of suggesting things that are hidden, submerged. Freudian film critics will tell you that water is a frequent symbol of the subconscious, or repressed memory, or submerged taboo desires. We've talked about the look of the camera in the cinema, and how it's an important concept of film technique and film theory. The look of the camera stands in for the look of the subject, the one who's doing the looking, and is automatically adopted by the viewer.
The look is key in identifying not only an important object of attention within a given shot, but also in establishing the respective positions of the looker and the lookee. As noted in a previous lecture, film scholars have tied the process and effect of cinema to scopophilia, which is the pleasure of looking. And also to voyeurism, which is the act of watching, watching someone who isn't aware that they're being watched.
In the cinema, the chief pleasures for the viewer derive not only from looking at the images on the screen, but also watching events unfold from a hidden vantage point in the dark. We can see the characters, but they can't see us. And that places the viewer, like the voyeur, in a position of power.
Also, as previously noted, in feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's landmark essay, Visual Pleasures and the Male Gaze, written in the 1970s, the look in Hollywood cinema can be seen as a specifically male-generated gaze and a targeted kind of looking. In one sense, the male gaze refers to the camera's gaze, which offers us perspective of the protagonist shared by the viewer. In another sense, the male gaze refers to the patriarchal Hollywood system in which the majority of filmmakers have been men. And thus the majority of narratives have imparted a masculine point of view.
And particularly, when the on-screen subject is female, the male gaze creates a kind of sexual objectification that goes above and beyond normal looking. The female is there simply to be looked at by the male behind the camera, and by extension, the viewer who identifies with that look. Male and female protagonists in film noir each are associated with a look.
but different kinds of looks. The male is associated with the scopophilic or voyeuristic look at the female form, which is displayed for his enjoyment, or male fantasy, and that of the spectator who shares that look, and by which the male gains control and possession of the woman within the story. The female protagonist is associated with the look aimed at her as a passive object. She's an isolated figure, alone in the story but also in the frame, especially when she is on display. When she inevitably gets caught up with the male protagonist, she becomes in a way his property, trapped by the look as she is trapped by their relationship and by the crime.
If they've committed the crime together, then it's a triple whammy of entrapment. Now let's think about that opening segment in The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which Nick and Cora first meet one another, as it provides concrete ideal examples of the look. If you watch the scene carefully, you'll note that it all begins when Frank, who is sitting at the lunch counter in the diner, waiting for his burger, hears the sounds of the lipstick dropping and rolling across the floor. He looks, and we the viewer follow his look. We see the lipstick rolling toward him.
Significantly through a couple of shadows or grids that resemble cages, symbols of entrapment. He then looks up to see where the lipstick came from, and we follow his gaze to see a pair of long female legs in the doorway. Cut to his face and stunned expression, and then we follow his gaze again as he looks back to see Cora standing there, obviously posed to be looked at. I should also point out that we see again that morning grid shadow pattern behind his head and on the doorway next to Cora.
Cut back to Frank as he gets up from his stool and walks toward her. Now he's surrounded by bar and grid patterns all over the place, behind him in the Venetian blinds in the window, on the wall, on his clothing, and on the floor. He bends down to pick up the lipstick, and in a reverse shot, we see the two of them together in the frame.
Cora still posed in the doorway, facing us. and Frank with his back to the camera. He asks if she dropped the lipstick and looking at her makeup compact and nod at him, nods and says mm-hmm and holds out her hand for the lipstick.
Cut to a long shot of Frank facing the camera. We can see from his body language and expression that he understands her game and he holds back. We cut to the reverse two shot again and see her surprise as she realizes he's not bringing her the lipstick.
We cut back to a shot of Frank as he watches her and waits. Then we cut to a close-up of Cora's face as she eyes him with a cold stare and a sultry smirk. Now she gets his game. Cut back to a long two-shot as she snaps her compact shut and walks slowly and angrily toward him, takes the lipstick, and turning her back on him, walks toward the doorway.
She opens her compact, puts on her lipstick, and then turning on her heel, goes through the doorway and shuts the door in his face. We cut back to the medium shot of Frank watching her until the spell is broken when he smells something. Cut to the burger burning and cut back to Frank leaping over the counter to take it off the griddle.
Throughout this sequence the look is key to what Mulvey was referring to with respect to the gaze of the female sub... sorry, the gaze of the male subject and the female object. Not only is Frank looking and Cora standing there to be looked at, but the implied power relationship is fulfilled with the whole game over the lipstick. They are vying for dominance, and ultimately Frank the male comes out on top, or so he thinks. In reality, she has played him, bagged him and tagged him, which suggests to some degree that the female object is not quite as passive as one might think, especially the femme fatale.
There's a reason she's so dangerous. With such overt uses of mise-en-scene and the look, understandably it was film noir that feminist film theorists of the 70s and 80s focused upon in their discussions of the male gaze and the problem that it posed for female subjectivity. No other genre besides noir so clearly evokes Freudian theories of sexuality and gender relations, particularly those in relation to power. But here's another bit of Freudian theory.
In psychoanalytical terms, the female figure in film noir poses an even deeper problem. As a female. who lacks a penis or the phallus, this symbolic membership card to patriarchy. She can only acquire social power secondarily, through men, through sex. Secondly, as someone who lacks the phallus, she is a continual reminder for the male of the potential for castration.
And so she represents pleasure and unpleasure, a source of desire, but also a whole world of pain. As such, the female figure in film noir always evokes a sense of anxiety. Which is dealt with in one of three ways.
Either she's cast as a femme fatale and punished for her sexuality and ambition, which is deemed castrating and threatening to the male. Generally, the punishment is meted out to a fair amount of physical abuse. She gets slapped around a lot, sometimes tortured or maimed, like Debbie Marsh in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, who gets a pot of hot coffee thrown in her face.
And sometimes the femme fatale gets killed. The second way in which the female is dealt with is that she's subjugated. tamed or domesticated, so as to be rendered non-sexual and thus non-threatening. The third way is to turn the female into a fetish object and build up her beauty to be both reassuring and pleasurable, rather than dangerous and unpleasurable.
In other words, make her a goddess rather than a sex symbol. While you're watching this week's film, think about whether the female protagonist is portrayed in any of these terms, and why that might be and how that relates to the overall mise-en-scene. of the film.
One final convention of film noir which is related to both the look and the narrative is narration. Frequently the films are narrated by the central character from the perspective of the present looking back on the past. This creates several effects. First it lends a more personal subjective note to the story.
Secondly it creates a mood of temps perdu, an irretrievable past and predetermined fate. This is especially the case when the subjective mode of narration is bookended. at the beginning and the end of the film, where the central character recounts his tale and then confesses his crime.
From the very beginning of The Postman Always Rings Twice, we hear the voice of Frank, recounting the story of how he came to meet Cora and describing the events that follow. This use of temps perdus helps to create a complex chronological time frame, manipulating time in a way which further destabilizes the narrative. and adds to the general air of anxiety and tension. In other words, by the time we get to hear the story, the events recounted have already occurred, and the inevitable has already befallen the protagonist.
But beyond that, it means that although there is closure, there's no salvation, no rays of hope, no help on the horizon. We find out, for example, that Frank is telling this story in the present from the prison where he sits on death row, awaiting execution. And we are made to understand the terrible meaning of the film's title, The Postman Always Rings Twice, alluding to the fact that though we may escape or cheat death once, we cannot do it twice. Eventually, it catches up with us.