Da Fuck is Art Cinema and Film Noir?
Although Art Cinema can seem, as the term indicates, separate from Hollywood tradition, it is in fact closely linked, despite being born as a kind of reaction against the Hollywood money-making machine. Likewise Film Noir is a branch of the Hollywood system, often used by its originators in ways that became indelibly linked to Hollywood thrillers of the time as well as those to come. Each of these filmmaking traditions have distinct elements, but fundamentally come from an emphasis on character and understanding human beings as they are, not as Hollywood would like us to believe.
Art Cinema films utilize subjective camera angles, unconventional narratives, and often lacks clear cut goals for main characters. They, the creators of this form, “softened modernism’s attack on narrative creativity by creating mediating structures—‘reality,’character subjectivity, authorial vision—that allowed a fresh coherence of meaning” (Bordwell). The style continues to be characterized by an ambiguity and sense of exploration that may or may not come to a conclusion.
Naturally mainstream cinema accumulated different aspects of Art Cinema, as in the case of noir. But still the true intent of Art Cinema stays the same. Unusual camera angles demonstrate their desire to take a different perspective on their characters and stories.
What both Film Noir and Art Cinema have in common is their willingness to see the unpleasant if not evil sides of human beings. Whereas the plots of Art Cinema may be thin or ambivalent, the plot structures of Film Noir are often driven by a categorical necessity to reveal the nature of their characters.
Film Noir was also very much about loneliness, isolation, and trying to create ones own sense of honor in a world gone corrupt and that ultimately humans are evil. It's about the dark emotion’s human beings have — they are at least half bad, desperate for money and power and willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want. Noir has a point of view on the world which is that it’s corrupt and that the strong crush the weak and the only victory a man or woman can exact from such a position is an existential sense of having lived up to their own code. Noir is plot driven as part of the entertainment value is to see how bad human beings can behave when tempted. It also has a sociopolitical view in that it sees the world as a kind of jungle in which the rich and powerful win.
Art Cinema has to do with things like the ambivalence of life, and this existential lack of meaning. It never really takes a position on if humans are good or bad, just here are these ambivalent, confused, people searching for meaning, and that the world does not have a definite answer—government, religion, tradition will not rescue them from this state of uncertainty. Art Cinema’s goal is to rebel against the mainstream and play with the medium of film, discovering new ways to tell stories in the process. Characters in both noir and Art Cinema live in a unpredictable world where simple, moralistic solutions are unavailable. “Put crudely, the slogan of Art Cinema might be, when in doubt, read for maximum ambiguity” (Bordwell). As opposed to art films ambivalence, Film Noir has a real point of view.
Some historians consider Film Noir a genre and others don’t. Those who don’t might call Noir “a style”, “a trend”, or “a mood” but there is no definite answer or agreement on a definition. A quality that Art Films and Noir Films share is that they see the world more chaotic then ordered. In Body Heat, an example of Film Noir, the femme fatal wins. She gets the money and impunity and there is no truly moralistic resolution, implying that if not all, at least more then half of human beings are evil spirited.
In Roshomon, an example of Art Cinema, we are left with a similar sense of ambiguity, however, an upbeat ambiguity. It presents us with many sides of a human beings, allowing us to celebrate human strengths even as we observe human weakness. Each character perceives the story differently and believes their story is the truth. In the end of the film, the woodcutter takes the child home and has renewed the priest’s hope inhumanity. This may imply no matter how many evil humans exist there will always be the good ones.
The implications and values in Art Cinema are more ambiguous then in noir, noir takes a darker more pessimistic approach and seems far more calculated. In a more basic sense both Noir and Art Cinema are interested in what makes human beings tick—they are as much characters studies as anything else. Their core similarity is the interest in human emotions, behavior, and psychology without the distortion of societal expectations or moral beliefs. Unlike other forms of popular cinema they take their subjects as they are, warts and all. In the case of noir, however, there is an underlying supposition that, given the opportunities, most human beings will behave badly. In Art Cinema however, no such prejudice exists. The stories simply follow characters, allowing them to behave contradictory if not hypocritically without judgment.
areudirty
gamechangershow
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
2087
titsay
izzy806