A list crafted for Joshua Briond — and anyone who enjoys noir but would like to learn more about the genre and its impeccable vibes. This list has everything from Hollywood classics of the ‘40s that cemented the genre as a genre, ‘50s dynamos that brought further brutality and harsh depictions of socio-political relations, to films spanning the globe that demonstrate how the genre transforms in different geographic and cultural contexts. Some well known hits but many off the beaten path, weird as fuck shit. Some well known shit isn’t on here either because I know Joshua has seen it or I decided to leave off because I didn’t want this list getting too long and overwhelming!
This list isn’t…
A list crafted for Joshua Briond — and anyone who enjoys noir but would like to learn more about the genre and its impeccable vibes. This list has everything from Hollywood classics of the ‘40s that cemented the genre as a genre, ‘50s dynamos that brought further brutality and harsh depictions of socio-political relations, to films spanning the globe that demonstrate how the genre transforms in different geographic and cultural contexts. Some well known hits but many off the beaten path, weird as fuck shit. Some well known shit isn’t on here either because I know Joshua has seen it or I decided to leave off because I didn’t want this list getting too long and overwhelming!
This list isn’t crafted with any order in mind or ranking. But I would suggest watching some of the ‘40s and ‘50s films first then moving chronologically from there if you’re interested in the genre on the level of scholarship.
The first essay I ever wrote for Vulture when I was still a freelancer in 2015 was about noir and how the genre atrophied in choosing to learn only surface level dynamics of the genre’s classic visual bravura rather than understanding its aesthetics and political dimensions are deeply wedded. From the piece titled “Modern Noir Has Atrophied (And It’s Not All True Detective’s Fault)”, excerpt quoted below. I recommend reading my full essay because it’s amazing and I think it offers a vital perspective on noir’s evolution. Read it in full here.
“In the early 1940s, noir began as a movement born of a number of factors: the changing gender and racial landscape of America during and after World War II, the Expressionist influence of European-refugee filmmakers like Billy Wilder, and studio-system economics. To quote City of Nets by Otto Friedrich, “At Warners, a studio so frugal some of its employees called it ‘San Quentin,’ shooting a film in the moody darkness and rain tended to disguise the cheapness of the sets.” (Warner Brothers gave us arguably the earliest noir in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart.) In the 1940s and 1950s, films like Ace in the Hole and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers viciously skewered the American Dream, and exposed the weaknesses and contradictions of the American psyche. It removed the masks of modern men and women to reveal the horrors below, challenging notions of gender, race, and desire.
Noir quickly solidified itself as a genre with a series of consistent stylistic (voice-over, high-contrast lighting, poetic and rhythmic dialogue), thematic (existentialism, free will, gender politics, fear of the “other,” white men losing or gaining power, obsession with the past, dread of the future), narrative (non-linear storytelling), and character archetypes (detectives, femmes fatales, criminals, people on the fringes of society), all typically within urban settings. Noir’s elasticity is its greatest strength, but it also makes it hard to define. You know it when you see it. Save for the theme, these attributes can be laid on thick or nearly nonexistent, which is why films as vastly different as In a Lonely Place, L.A. Confidential, and The Letter can all be called noir. It can twist from pulpy vulgarity to gritty realism. But at its core, noir has always been a political genre.”
Edit: I took off The Letter (1940).
