Sunset Boulevard Film Noir Essay

Sunset Boulevard is a classic film noir with all the noir likings and tropes present. I will focus on three characteristics of film noir and how they manifest in this film and our post-1970 film. Most noirs found themselves to greatly take place at night or maybe a back alley or dimly lit rooms or maybe the PI’s office or a bar. The lighting in these films is the most noticeable as they greatly utilized low-key lighting. Low-key lighting is a lighting technique used to create a chiaroscuro effect. Chiaroscuro is a technique that uses strong tonal contrasts to create three-dimensional objects. As opposed to traditional three-point lighting, low-key lighting usually just uses a fill light and a reflector. The point of low-key lighting is to accentuate

These are contemporary crime films, so that means they’re filmed in color. Neo-noir films such as L.A. Confidential utilize the California sun. These noir films are now bathed in Southern Californian light. The lighting in these films are akin closely to the pulp novels that they all originate from, cause in the books, most PI’s were from L.A., and lots of the story took place during the day in the Californian sun. This type of natural lighting created a new look for noir films. It ushered them into their own form. The setting sun backdrops and orange hues gave us an understanding of our location: Los Angeles. It shattered the idea of La La Land, the promised land for all those that dream and made us realize a real, urban sprawl with a grim underbelly. The lighting of neo-noir films was a stark contrast in that sense. It was almost ironic in a sense because how could somewhere so sunny and lively be so shady? Low-key lighting was completely eradicated though. If you did eradicate low-key lighting from a noir film, something would be greatly missed, like a chain with a missing link. Low-key lighting became more appropriate, at night, in dark rooms, when it needed to reflect the darkness and moodiness of the scene. Light would cut through Venetian blinds and illuminate the character’s eyes. Their mouths tell you nothing, but their eyes say everything, that’s the idea at

Now, you can make the argument that what isn’t shown to you is better than showing it as your mind creates whatever terror it can conjure, but violence in noir films have always been blunt and frequent. As mentioned before, Hollywood was burdened by the Hayes Code from the mid-30s to the late 1960s so filmmakers had to get creative with how violence was depicted on screen. Surely, if filmmakers had our modern rating system then, those classic noir films probably would have been as violent as the ones we have now. Classic noirs, being some of the most violent films of the time, masked lots of it in low-key lighting or the violence happened or continued off-screen. If violence did happen on screen, it wasn’t explicit as blood was something that couldn’t have been used to that extent. The most violent scene in Sunset Boulevard is the very end when we witness Norma Desmond gun down Joe Gillis in cold blood. The scene is mostly shot in wide angles which does mask some the impact and of course, no blood was used in the scene. L.A. Confidential is completely free with the modern day rating system and was able to depict explicit violence that is truly more in line with the pulp magazines and novels