Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction By Stephen Fa ...

Cycle advocates consider film noir a series of crime films that appeared between 1940 and 1959. They clash with genre and style advocates over the acceptable period of film noir. While cycle advocates tend to agree with style advocates about the narrative and visual features of noir, they insist that by the end of the 1950s the cycle had run its course. The studio sets and artificial lighting common during the 1940s that gave the films their distinctive look gradually yielded to location photography, monochrome visuals, and more natural lighting during the late 1950s. Early noir films present activity from the point of view of the criminals, or the private detective, but during the 1950s, the emphasis gradually shifts to the perspective of the police investigation.

There are problems with each of these definitions. While wardrobe and setting are enough to identify a film as a member of the Western genre, the visual cues for film noir are less definitive. Presences of a mystery, private detective, or duplicitous woman are not enough to label a movie film noir; nor are criminal activities and seamy locations. There are plenty of movies with these features that do not qualify as film noir, such as the Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone. The style position is inadequate because it dismisses the origin of the term, which was originally created for the wave of crime films that first appeared during the 1940s. If any film with dark photography, unusual plot twists, and an ambiguous ending is allowed, including comedy, the definition of film noir is stretched to the point of meaninglessness. Even some cycle advocates contribute to this problem because they seem willing to admit almost any suspenseful melodrama released within the accepted range of years. Furthermore, if film noir is a cycle limited to the 1940s and 1950s, we are left with the problem of classifying later films like Chinatown (1974) and The Grifters (1992), which seem to contain all the elements of film noir except black and white cinematography.

These definitions are so liberal that almost any film can qualify as noir. As a result, hundreds of movies are now classified as film noir, and the list continues to expand. Alain Silver and Margaret Ward edited the first comprehensive guide, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, published in 1979.