Narrating the City in Film Noir

Abstract

The first film critics to study film noir emphasized the interplay between its formal characteristics and the cynical worldview of plot and character development, underlining the influence of German Expressionism, particularly concerning lighting and camerawork, and the bleak outlook on life resulting from a post-war context. Pursuing the literary lineage of this genre, the American hardboiled style of crime fiction, pioneered by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain during the 1920s and 1930s has also been seen as its direct precursor. Urban settings are the norm in film noir, framing the exploration of themes of moral decay and corruption.

In Narrative Discourse (1983), Gérard Genette introduces the concept of external focalization to describe a narrative voice that emphasizes the actions of characters, rather than their thoughts, giving Hammett as one of the foremost practitioners of this literary technique in the twentieth century. The term would go on to be incorporated in the field of film studies, and it is taking this into consideration that this entry surveys how opening scenes of major examples of film noir, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and The Naked City, portray the urban environment into more than a backdrop, shaping the construction of main characters and, occasionally, turning cities themselves into characters. As film noir became international, the depiction of American settings and American characters influenced stories set in other cities, as can be seen in Odd Man Out (1947), Stray Dog (1948), The Third Man (1949), and Elevator to the Gallows (1958).