In the investigative flashback of films noirs, the process of gathering and deciphering clues motivates the journey through the past with the investigator’s own desire to know the truth becoming a major narrative motivation (172)ĦThis is obvious in The Killers. Thus the investigation itself is conducted with a certain degree of objectivity, yet each testimony leads to a subjective account more or less marked visually by means of subjective shots or emphasis on the protagonist’s situation in the scene or by means of language. This narrative pattern obviously derives from Citizen Kane in which Thompson, the questing journalist, inquires about Kane’s past, trying to solve the mystery of his dying words: “rose bud”. All these fragmented testimonies constitute a kind of jigsaw puzzle that needs to be completed. This constitutes as many clues for the disclosure of enigma or enigmas.ĥThe investigative structure is usually connected with a detective type character who encounters various witnesses, each of whom tells his part of this past story. We have to be careful to what the flashback tells us, to the conditions in which it occurs, how it is enunciated and the way it is rendered visually and in the sound track. It then leads us through a maze of clues and false leads that are constructed within the flashbacks. One is related to the investigative structure of the criminal plot and it helps probe into the past in order to solve a mystery (often related to a murder). This is often emphasized, as we shall see, by a shift in terms of mise en scène.ĤMaureen Turim distinguishes two basic types of film noir flashbacks. The use of dissolve and of voice over marks off the past as distinct and different. The flashback introduces a reversed temporal order that creates the past as the other locus of the fiction, as a privileged subjective realm. The film explores what is hidden behind those words.ģWe must first point out that most “films noirs” are adaptations of stories or novels whose use of narrative voice is more or less directly transferred to the films. As he is being warned by one of his colleagues while expecting inevitable death, he just says: “I did something bad once”. As we shall see, The Killers (1946) by Robert Siodmak is a good case in point since a man, the Swede, is killed at the outset of the film by two hired killers. Through a return to the past, the frame narrative may open with an event (either shown on screen or not), for instance a murder in which there is an enigma involved.
#NOIR FILMS SERIES#
Some flashbacks directly involve a quest for the answer to an enigma or a series of enigmas posed in the beginning of a narrative. Memory is one of the mental processes involved in flashback which is thus often related to the subjectivity of consciousness.ĢThe notion of haunting, obsessive memory is an essential feature of film noir. The flashback consists in the insertion of a past scene within the present flow of film narrative, interrupting that flow. Voice over or (in silent films) inter-titles that mark anteriority through language, often reinforce the visual and sound elements representing a return to the past.
#NOIR FILMS FULL#
If we're going down the line from Night Moves to Heat to Dark Knight, we can see the full spectrum of good versus evil, love versus duty, trust versus betrayal, all raging an internal and external and eternal war.1In its classic form, the flashback is introduced when the image in the present dissolves (or shifts) to an image in the past, understood either as a story being told or a subjective memory. It’s not just vacant cynicism there’s hope.Christopher Nolan drew influence from Heat, and it shows. His heroism can escalate beyond Travis Bickle's vigilantism ( Taxi Driver) or David Mills' wrath ( Se7en). There’s been some debate lately as to whether or not superhero movies are “cinema.” Dark Knight is given credibility because it’s so serious, but I think the theatricality adds a lot too. Sometimes I feel like Dark Knighthas become such a cornerstone in the validation of superhero movies that it's easy to forget that it actually is one of the best modern noir films.Īnd it's not JUST because of Heath Ledger's Joker, though that's a factor.īatman has always been billed as the World's Greatest Detective! While he can punch a face with the best of them, he’s just as engrossing when he's digitally un-shattering a bullet or mass-surveilling an entire city.
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