Featured Guest:
Sheri Chinen Biesen     

Author of four books, including Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir and Film Censorship, Professor Sheri Chinen Biesen teaches film history at Rowan University. After completing her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the University of Southern California, she went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Texas in Austin. A frequent contributor to documentaries and academic journals, she serves as Founding Chair of the Stars & Screen Film & Media History Conference as well as an Editorial Board member for Film Criticism.

We talked to her about her book Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Many scholars have written books on film noir, but you have a new angle. You focus on technology as it intersects – even influences – noir's evolution.

Yes, I consider how technology and industrial considerations as well as the material conditions of the filmmaking production process intersect and influence film noir's evolution. I decided to write this book because, for years, as an archival cinema historian and film noir scholar, I was amazed by the evolution and complexity of the distinctive film noir visual style in terms of its gorgeous, shadowy aesthetic and its profound influence on and trajectory across many different films, shows, and genres – from its classic 1940s pinnacle during and just after World War II to other films and cinematic long-form media productions in later decades through the digital streaming era. 

I was also fascinated by why, how, and when did film noir become so dark, that is visually in terms of its iconic aesthetic style and cinematography, which to me is what was really striking and distinctive and uniquely beautiful about film noir and what truly made these cinematic productions film noir. In other words, what was going on when the film noir pictures were being made to make them so dark, shadowy, and expressionistic in that way? And – just as we might think about a painting – what factors contributed to the visual style, deep shadows, blackened, high-contrast, chiaroscuro composition and cinematography in these films noir? How did the film noir style come into being and how did the visual aesthetic style change and evolve? 

In fact, many years ago, when I was doing archival cinema research at USC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), I was surprised to find how many primary filmmaking documents – from filmmakers as they were producing the films noir – script files and production memos on the actual making of the films, and circumstances related to their production, revealed how the unique wartime and postwar 1940s cultural, industrial, and technological conditions as well as new cinematic developments significantly contributed to the creation of the dark, brooding, shadowy film noir style and its evolution.

With these archival discoveries and historical revelations in mind, I realized many things about film noir which changed my whole perspective. For one thing, it became evident to me that film noir is a complex, evolving visual style that was incredibly influential as it affected and transformed many different film genres – for instance, the fact that it was not a simple, single genre – such as only being generically limited to hard-boiled detective pictures. I also realized that film noir reached its pinnacle in the 1940s nitrate film era – shot on gorgeous, blackened nitrate film stock with silver in the actual film itself to create its beautiful, high-contrast aesthetic – and the unique shadowy style was catalyzed by World War II filmmaking production conditions and constraints, which I discuss in this book and in my earlier study, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. 

Due to these new, exciting archival discoveries about film noir, this  study traces the aesthetic visual style, technique, technological, and industrial history of film noir from its shadowy 1940s nitrate heyday – its wartime emergence, postwar technical changes, color noir – to the contemporary Netflix era of streaming video and niche marketing of digital neo-noir darkness. The volume explores the enduring legacy of film noir visual style – for example, how neo-noir reimagines iconic noir shadowy imagery and aesthetic technique vis-à-vis new technology and transnational noir production/reception context via contemporary digital streaming a la Netflix. The book relies on extensive primary archival and trade research to historically contextualize these stylistic, technological, aesthetic, industrial, and material production issues regarding film noir visual style vis-à-vis cinema history, technology, and global convergent culture. 

In terms of its significance, Through a Noir Lens is the first study of film noir that spans the 1940s and continues through the digital streaming era. It explores how the noir impulse persists by considering its emergent technological, industrial production, distribution, and reception context: adapting, producing, and streaming classic film noir, color noir, neo-noir, and long-form Netflix original streaming dramas worldwide to reimagine classic noir visual style and aesthetic technique in the new millennium. The book is very distinctive and different from other existing books in the field and is designed for readers, students, film buffs, cineastes, and scholars.

What was lost as the technology changed?

Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. I was intrigued by these iconic elements of film noir in terms of its dark, brooding thematics and visual style. Yes, I was fascinated by how the postwar noir trend would continue to move away from chiaroscuro imagery and the brooding expressionistic shadows of the earlier war years to increasingly employ bright, sunlit, documentary-style photography. 

The evolution of film technology and pervasive outdoor location shooting would affect the noir visual style as the actual nitrate film stock shifted to lighter acetate safety film. The initial 1940s dark cinema trend entered its closing stages as the classic cycle started to ebb, and its box office success eventually receded over the course of the next decade. Films noir were reimagined in the 1950s in relation to brighter, low-contrast, televisual conventions as the noir visual aesthetic faded to gray and color imagery. Classic film noir visual style changed after the global conflict and ebbed in the postwar 1950s as the aesthetic changed narratively and thematically, as well as visually and technologically. Noir influenced a vast number of different films with a lighter visual style across a diverse array of genres despite dark themes of violence, suicide, self-destructive obsession, misogyny, psychological instability, or trauma. 

Grayer black-and-white films gris also often became more masculine and macho, and its point of view even changed from earlier wartime 1940s films noir. In fact, the actual film stock that film noir was shot on changed from nitrate to acetate safety film after 1950, which contributed to this changing incarnation of noir amid extensive brighter movies shot on outdoor sunlit locations in broad daylight. With this in mind, I was fascinated by how film noir visual style adapted to new technologies and was redeployed with color film when eventually color noir visual style emerged in the postwar and later neo-noir eras and how Hollywood adopting television conventions also initially mitigated against noir style in adapting to lighter, grayer, low-contrast images restricted to the low resolution constraints of limited televisual technology at the time. 

Noir shifts as gender roles shift in American culture.

Of course, gender, gendered labor, gender images on screen, and opportunities for women on and off camera behind the scenes were also affected and changed in films noir as Hollywood and broader cultural gender roles changed, shifted, and evolved from the strong wartime Rosie the Riveter female images of the World War II era – targeting women and a prominent female-dominated audience on the home front – to a more masculine postwar demographic as and after men returned home from war. Women like Rosie the Riveter also filled a manpower shortage in Hollywood and assumed positions previously held by men as combat-aged males left for military service in World War II. 

Women were involved in writing, editing, producing, and directing, even serving as studio production executives running studios during and just after the war. Particularly interesting examples were writer Catherine Turney adapting the film noir Mildred Piece, hyphenate writer turned producer Joan Harrison who produced the film noir Phantom Lady after working with Alfred Hitchcock adapting Rebecca and Suspicion, and Virginia Van Upp who rose up from writer to producer and studio production executive running Columbia Pictures during the war from January 1945 into the postwar period in 1947. Van Upp  personally produced and supervised the production of the film noir Gilda, grooming star Rita Hayworth. She tried to hire Humphrey Bogart in Gilda then eventually cast Bogart in another film noir Dead Reckoning. Writer Leigh Brackett also adapted The Big Sleep.

Of course, other famous capable women like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino were also directing films. I was especially intrigued by how even as a star actress Lupino – after headlining the film noir The Man I Love – was also already basically functioning as a hyphenate in-house independent producer acquiring properties and setting up production deals behind the scenes on noir films such as Road House before moving into directing films noir such as The Hitch-Hiker. Notably, the visual style changes from the darker, shadowy terrain of her earlier noir films to her lighter, grayer gris style films shot on location in the 1950s. The legacy of these noir gender and gendered labor considerations are also seen in the digital new media streaming era in productions such as the Netflix-Marvel coproduction Jessica Jones created and directed by women, such as directors S.J. Clarkson and Rosemary Rodriguez, producer Hilly Hicks, and series creator Melissa Rosenberg.

What technological advances – in terms of noir's visual style – were the most important and why?

There are many significant innovative technological advances that influenced the development and evolution of film noir visual style and its iconic shadows and blackened chiaroscuro aesthetic. First, I was fascinated by how film noir was originally shot on nitrate film stock in the 1940s through 1950, which was highly flammable and explosive – so much so that nitrate film was actually rationed during the war and used to make bombs – but it created that distinctive brooding style.         

Second, I think in addition to nitrate film stock, in terms of color filmmaking, three-strip Technicolor and the Technicolor dye-transfer imbibition (I-B) process – which involved sending Eastmancolor monopack film to Technicolor for processing to create three color separated strips – were also extremely important, influential technological developments that contributed to the evolution of color noir visual style in the postwar and later neo-noir eras.

How did Billy Wilder change noir mid-century? Discuss his impact in the history of noir.          

Wow, where do I even begin? In the book, I discuss how Billy Wilder was truly a visionary filmmaker who was really ahead of his time. Indeed, Wilder was such an amazing, incredibly influential auteur and hyphenate writer-director-producer, especially concerning important contributions to the development and evolution of film noir. Significantly, Wilder made four films noir and if you consider the span of what he accomplished only in these four films – without even considering his entire vast career – his immense contribution to and influence on film noir and its visual aesthetic style would nevertheless be extraordinary. In fact, Wilder is perhaps the most influential noir director. For instance, think about what film noir would be without Wilder's pictures Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Lost Weekend, or Ace in the Hole.

Indeed, Wilder spans the trajectory of classic film noir style: from the nitrate film era of the 1940s with the deep shadowy newsreel style and hard-boiled repartee – collaborating with Raymond Chandler – of Double Indemnity shot amid the blackouts and rationing of lighting and electricity during World War II, to the topical social realism of The Lost Weekend – which won Best Picture and Director Oscars – to one of the last major nitrate films shot in Hollywood,  Sunset Boulevard, with its scathing, baroque critique of the film industry signifying the end of an era, and finally to the new 1950s acetate film era with Ace in the Hole, revealing the ebbing of the classic noir visual style with its bright, sunlit, exterior landscape shot on stark locations in the New Mexico desert with an abundance of harsh, scorching daylight. 

Director Alfred Hitchcock noted that Wilder made motion picture history in adapting hard-boiled writer James M. Cain's Double Indemnity ending a nearly decade long ban by Production Code Administration (PCA) censors on the author's racy, salacious, pulp fiction. Cain also praised Wilder's brilliant, shady, noir adaptation. In particular, Wilder's Double Indemnity was so successful and influential that it was recognized at the time as spurring the film noir "red meat" crime trend in Hollywood – incentivizing other noir films to be produced even before French critics later coined the term "film noir" in 1946.

Speaking of Hitchcock, share with our readers why he's important in your monograph.

Hitchcock, of course, was an incredibly important auteur filmmaker who, as I mentioned earlier, I discuss extensively in the book. Hitchcock worked in the noir tradition, both in black-and-white, Gothic noir pictures and in color films. Hitchcock's suspense thrillers were often unique and a bit distinct from noir, but he was very influential to the noir style with his shadowy, dark, brooding noir variations on the female, Gothic thriller as we see in Spellbound and Notorious, which I consider in the classic 1940s nitrate noir era section of the book. Hitchcock certainly also invoked elements of noir style and experimented with the classic noir aesthetic in later films such as Rear Window and North by Northwest in which he adopted and adapted color noir to new color film technologies and widescreen formats to heighten spectacle in a more brooding noir vein. 

When you stop and think about it, it was really amazing what Hitchcock was able to achieve in Rear Window creating a huge set to emulate noir style in color and simulate actual New York City locations entirely on a Hollywood soundstage where he could control the look of the film to emphasize its shadows. It was also incredibly impressive how in North by Northwest Hitchcock brilliantly recreated locations where he wasn't permitted to film to invoke noir style in color widescreen VistaVision. In this sense, Hitchcock really historically spans the trajectory of the Hollywood film industry's shift from classic, black and white, 1940s nitrate era, noir visual style to changes as the industry, films, and noir itself shifted to color in the postwar era.

You have mentioned the gris style several times. Let's circle back to that. Television was influential here, yes?

The grainy, gray, fuzzy, small-screen, low-resolution, black and white, monochrome television images back then were not very high quality compared to the exquisite look of nitrate film and because of these limitations filming images on the new acetate stock were constrained at the time and required shooting with very bright, even, high key lighting to flood the set with an abundance of light for flat, low resolution images, so they could be seen on 1950s TVs. 

As Hollywood adopted and adapted to these conventions, even in feature films, this more limited, constrained, televisual aesthetic required that the beautifully iconic deep shadows, sharp deep-focus, high-contrast images, complex compositions, dynamic montages and visual effects, moody, low key lighting, stunning cinematography, and elaborate visual compositions so vividly evocative of film noir and its classic visual style be avoided when filming so that film images would be visible on television, and this limitation consequently contributed to the fading of the classic 1940s film noir visual style ebbing to lighter gris shades of gray during the 1950s, as we see in lighter, grayer, 1950s noir films. 

So by the early 1950s, the beautiful, black, expressionistic, classic nitrate noir visual style of the 1940s with its deep shadows and gorgeous high contrast images were really fading away, ebbing and dying as the film industry shifted to a lighter, grayer acetate and television conventions, often with bright outdoor sunlight shot on location.

Discuss the color noir.

I was really intrigued by how postwar filmmakers invoked and, in a sense, reinvented the influential noir visual style in adapting it to acetate and color film. The color noir aesthetic is really extraordinary and beautiful, for instance, in the three-strip Technicolor nitrate film The Red Shoes, which was recently restored a few years ago to enhance its deep brooding noir shadows in color. Niagara and The Barefoot Contessa also employ three-strip Technicolor noir style. Other films such as Hitchcock's Rear Window and North by Northwest, as well as innovative color noir musical films like A Star Is Born and West Side Story, and later neo-noir crime films like The Godfather, Mean Streets, and Godfather Part II were shot with single-strip Kodak Eastmancolor monopack color film stock then developed using the Technicolor dye-transfer imbibition (I-B) process by sending film to Technicolor for processing to create three color separated strips in the film lab to create and emulate color noir visual style and invoke a classic noir aesthetic and composition. These films were then promoted as being shot in Technicolor. Later neo-noir films such as 'Round Midnight, L.A. Confidential, Dark City, and the Coen brothers' Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski also evoke color noir conventions. 

Explain to our readers how streaming plays into the noir story.  

Certainly, although I consider myself to be an archival film historian and do work on classic film noir style as well as classical Hollywood cinema, in recent years I've also been doing quite a bit of work researching and writing about evolving new media industry studies, the digital revolution, the rise of Netflix, and the industry shift to digital streaming and global media platforms. As I was researching and writing about Netflix and the digital streaming era – and of course watching lots of long form and streaming productions – I became really fascinated and struck by how prolific and influential and pervasive the legacy and longevity of the noir style aesthetic was, and how consistently new iterations of various aspects of the classic noir visual aesthetic style and zeitgeist were being evoked, appropriated, and incorporated into recent digital streaming productions on Netflix and across other streaming platforms. And after binge watching a plethora of noir media, these streaming digital noir productions seemed to emulate a longer, expanded, serial noir movie, especially on Netflix where noir style media was dropped all at once to binge intensively with no commercial interruptions in a kind of cinematic noir streaming production that was very different from conventional old school TV. And I realized that these new media digital streaming productions were inherently related to – and intentionally invoking – classic noir visual style and conventions of the original 1940s and 1950s films. 

I was also quite intrigued by how digital streaming services like Netflix over the past decade or so have shifted from digitally streaming classic noir films to instead incorporate noir aesthetic visual style and elements into new original long form media from The Queen's Gambit to House of Cards, Ozark, Babylon Berlin, Jessica Jones, and Daredevil. Other examples include the pitch black darkness of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and digitally streamed neo-noir films like The Irishman, a new iteration of the Hitchcock Gothic noir classic Rebecca, Nightmare Alley, Bridge of Spies, Warner Bros. productions like The Batman and the HBO cinematic long form series Perry Mason, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, and Disney's The Mandalorian.

You have done a lot of work in the field of noir. Do you consider yourself a fan? What are your favorite films and why?

Yes, I am definitely a fan of film noir. I do really love Double Indemnity as you can probably tell from my description above, perhaps because it is such a beautifully shot Billy Wilder film noir photographed in exquisite deep brooding, shadowy darkness by the great cinematographer John Seitz. It's such an important film. To me, it really captures the pinnacle of noir style. And the wonderful clever writing and repartee in the film really ran circles around the PCA  censorship with its racy innuendo and spicy suggestion. 

There are many other wonderful noir films that I also love such as Out of the Past, The Big Sleep, Sunset Boulevard, Dead Reckoning, The Lady from Shanghai, and even lesser known noir film gems like Fred Zinnemann's underrated classic Act of Violence, which is an incredibly impressive noir that I discuss extensively in the book – and is certainly worthy and deserving of a proper DVD release – it is so difficult to find right now. 

It was a pleasure to explore and engage with film noir style in working on this monograph study. I hope readers enjoy the book, and – in thinking about and reading about film noir – I hope that this volume may spur a renewed interest in and passionate rediscovery of noir style and the pervasive ongoing legacy of its influence on contemporary digital streaming media in the new millennium.  

Leslie Kreiner Wilson, Interviewer and Editor

https://americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2024/biesen.htm

Back to Top
Journal Home