Maltese Falcon as a Film Noir
Film Noir is a French word which means: dark or black film. This is
very fitting as Film Noir and the Maltese falcon are stories of dark
deceptive people who often cannot be trusted. Film Noir is a good
example of this as the story is about a detective called Sam Spade who
gets dragged into the quest for the Maltese Falcon with a compulsive
liar Kasper Gutman. The Maltese Falcon is a large bird made of solid
gold worth millions. The main six conventions of Film Noir as I can
see are
The plot, lighting , dialogue, body language, stock characters and
camera angles.
The film is about a group of 5 people fighting to find and keep the
golden jewel encrusted Maltese Falcon which was a present for King
Charles 5th and is worth millions. The bird had been covered in a
black layer to keep it a secret. The story runs through many twists
and turns confusing each character and the viewer.
We are introduced to many different characters and it is hard to
remember which one is which. When Archer and Thursby are killed and
Spade does not act surprised or upset this leads to you thinking that
he could have performed the murders. The final and most important
twist is the very last scene which is one of the longest in film noir
history coming to a total of 27 minutes. In this scene we see Cairo,
Brigid, Wilmer and Kasper finally getting the sought after bird and
discovering it is in fact a fake. Kasper discovers this by taking out
a small knife and scraping away the top layer of black only to find
that the whole thing was made of lead.
A typical film noir convention is the use of low or shadowing light...
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...d threatening. This works because the larger character takes
up the majority of the screen and so we automatically think of them
being more dominant. Often the females would be made to look a lot
smaller than the males. This made us think of the girls as innocent
and helpless towards the men as they were half the size of them. As in
the cases of most Film Noir this was not true but actually a carefully
crafted way of fooling us when actually the females were ruling over
the males. A good example of the camera angle being used to gain
emotion and atmosphere is the part where Spade and Kasper are in
Gutmans house and are having a conversation about the bird. The camera
is placed so that it is looking up to Kasper, he looks tall and
overpowering. It is at this stage we realise that he is not the good
man but actually bad.
escape from a chicken farm. The film is a spoof of the film 'The Great
Nicholas Ray's films frequently address a competition between a 'father' and 'son' (whether literal or figurative filial relationship). More importantly, Ray has an ideological approach to these struggles. In his films, homosocial struggles are always supplanted by Ray's desired outcome of an idealized heterosexual coupling. That is, the threat of prolonged homosocial desire between his characters is usually eradicated by the death of one of the dueling men. The deus ex machina nature of the deaths implies that the resulting heterosexual coupling is somehow the way things "ought to be". In Bitter Victory and The Lusty Men, the women are clearly the people over whom the men fight in their struggle to establish a 'home' or security (with that woman). In Rebel Without a Cause, however, the male-male-female love triangle is complicated by the on-screen presence of a nuclear family that effectively literalizes Freud's Oedipal conflict.
submissive, powerless objects of their husbands. Equality and balance within their marriages were of no
As a society we value and admire heroes who represent the idealized version of ourselves whom we stride every day to become. This is why they are sometimes scrutinized, unless they are an anti-hero, of course. The anti-hero is also admired by some even if he utilizes unlawful methods to achieve his goal, because he represents the good in a corrupt world. But this is not always the case as it is seen in some Noir stories. In Noir stories, the anti-hero is supposed to be a modern knight. Transgressing society's corrupt rules in order to reaffirm for its male audience the need to act justly do rightly; however, the anti-hero through this false nobility and sexism reinforces the social problems that plague contemporary society.
The genre film noir has some classical elements that make these films easily identifiable. These elements are displayed in the prototypical film noir, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. These elements include being filmed in black and white, a morally ambiguous protagonist, and a prominent darkness. However, the most striking part of a film noir is the femme fatale, a woman who craves independence through sexual and economic liberation. In his film, Chinatown, Roman Polanski uses many of the classic elements of a film noir, however he twists many of them to reflect the time period. This is particularly evident in his depiction of his “femme fatale,” Evelyn Mulwray.
Often regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Citizen Kane written and directed by Orson Welles is a classic film that defied the conventional styles of the Hollywood Cinema. Welles was committed to the Mise-En-Scene of his movies by using his characters, props, settings, and even the camera to tell the story of his characters. The Lighting, the camera shots, and the character 's actions to depict the life of Charles Foster Kane. The Mise-En-Scene of this narrative creates a film that is ahead of it’s time and a genius innovation to the cinema.
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Italian cinema is conventionally associated with neorealist films and their contribution to the international art film movement. However, while these films tend to draw on the ideas and artistic creativity of individual directors such as Fellini, Antonioni, and De Sica; there is also a strong tradition of genre cinema evident in more popularized examples of Italian film. Emerging in the post-war era, these filone, or formula films, were inspired by established American models such as the "sword and sandal" hero epic, the western, and the gangster film. Consequently, the international success of the peplum films of the 1950's, the spaghetti westerns of the next decade, and later, the Italian-American gangster film, are a collective testament to the post-war financial success of Italian Cinema as an exportable product.
During the course of this essay it is my intention to discuss the differences between Classical Hollywood and post-Classical Hollywood. Although these terms refer to theoretical movements of which they are not definitive it is my goal to show that they are applicable in a broad way to a cinema tradition that dominated Hollywood production between 1916 and 1960 and which also pervaded Western Mainstream Cinema (Classical Hollywood or Classic Narrative Cinema) and to the movement and changes that came about following this time period (Post-Classical or New Hollywood). I intend to do this by first analysing and defining aspects of Classical Hollywood and having done that, examining post classical at which time the relationship between them will become evident. It is my intention to reference films from both movements and also published texts relative to the subject matter. In order to illustrate the structures involved I will be writing about the subjects of genre and genre transformation, the representation of gender, postmodernism and the relationship between style, form and content.
When we look at the experiences of the men one can start to notice some key points of notice that are pointed out. One of these experiences is that the men were
1959 was an exciting year in the history of filmmaking. An extraordinary conjunction of talent throughout the globe existed. In France, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, and Resnais all directed their first films, thus establishing the French New Wave. In Italy, Fellini created the elegant La Dolce Vita, and Antonioni gave us L’avventura. Most importantly, though, in America, famed British director Alfred Hitchcock gave us the classic thriller North by Northwest, the father of the modern action film.
What does it mean to give yourself completely to your vocation or life? We find in a fictional story from Wes Anderson, his eighth feature presentation, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” What it means to be completely giving of oneself. Even though Wes’s movie is fictional, we find many deep and underlying themes, tones, and values. these are values are applications that anyone male or female that one can implicate in ones life to any situation. The main values we can find in the movie are simple, but can improve life ten-fold. Three easy steps to improving ones life are as stated: gratitude, positivity, and you must contribute yourself 100% of the time no matter how hard the road in front of you is going to
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Film Noir was extremely trendy during the 1940’s. People were captivated by the way it expresses a mood of disillusionment and indistinctness between good and evil. Film Noir have key elements; crime, mystery, an anti-hero, femme fatale, and chiaroscuro lighting and camera angles. The Maltese Falcon is an example of film noir because of the usage of camera angles, lighting and ominous settings, as well as sinister characters as Samuel Spade, the anti-hero on a quest for meaning, who encounters the death of his partner but does not show any signs of remorse but instead for his greed for riches.
John Q. Dir. Nick Cassavetes. By James Kearns. Perf. Denzel Washington. New Line Cinema, 2002. DVD.