Date of Award

Fall 1994

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

English

Committee Director

Edward Jacobs

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E64R53

Abstract

Flourishing in America between 1941-58, film noir became a major cinematic movement prophetically focusing on urban crime, corruption, and an unraveling social fabric. Film noir became so major, in fact, that the genre defied definition and reached an all encompassing ambiguity; continually, some critics refuse to accept it as a genre, or a fad, or a cycle, or even as simply existing. To include here any specific delineation of the genre would be impossible because there are so many possible choices; what is generally regarded to be true of all the motion pictures so haphazardly grouped under the heading ''film noir" is the element of realism and of a pessimistic, sometimes brutal, view of human existence.

The cinematic visualization of experience simulates both natural reality and those conditions that govern behavior; virtual experiences are played out on a cinema's wall as distorted extensions of actual reality. As running images, like shadows but more defined, films portray a separate reality by offering a constructed visual humanization of what could be. The possible reality that films build may be either good or bad. One situation might portray a benevolent, but strict, mystical nanny who makes medicine taste good. Another reality, this one quite a bit darker, attempts to find the motives behind a benevolent, but strict, serial killer's compulsion to viscerate. Putting images on screen (or putting words down on paper) opens the "text" up to interpretation. Because of a film image's closeness to reality, films are often thought to be more accessible to examination than books, paintings, sculpture, or any other medium. As reality's unnatural kin, a film can show those aspects of its parent society that would rather be forgotten and ignored, and in the acknowledgment of these chaotic, desolate traits, the proper film can trigger a warning against continuing along destructive impulses. A film can never be exclusively transparent or even totally reflective for between the images there is a fashioned narrative with an intent, or a meaning, and the narrative gets its purpose from the direction of this discourse. Like a faint beacon of gray in an otherwise impervious night, film noir stands as a signal against the sliding, falling, fading conditions of society.

Narrative patterns in film noir are different and distinctive from any other motion picture genre. These patterns violate accepted patterns of cultural order while at the same time providing support and validation for their violation. Some critics purport that the imagistic content of film noir provides a commentary on humanity. I propose that the narrative discourse provides the vehicle through which represented symbols transmit knowledge. Also, the ironic principles of film noir discourse point out a clearer definition of what may or may not be considered. Film noir. By using six films (all released between the years 1988-1994), I will trace the film noir narrative discourse to show it to be an entity born out of the social conditions that repeatedly give rise to film noir and how the discourse provides the ironic existence to undermine all story existents, according to Seymour Chatman's and Gerard Genette's descriptions of the variant differences between the functions of story and the functions of discourse. Under to the direction of film noir discourse, the films' inherently shocking contents have the ability to be even more abrasive and horrible; the discourse often reverses accepted forms to make the grotesque palatable. By doing this, film noir possess the ability to focus on the reasons behind horrible actions and provide the means through which the audience may look into their own reality to stop the downward spiral of society so evident in the film noir subject.

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DOI

10.25777/azzm-7a48

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