First to post….quite daunting….as is the task of figuring out HOW to post when you’ve never blogged before….here it goes nonetheless….
Before this class, I’ve never heard of film noir, nor have I seen any. So I decided to read the notes about film noir prior to watching DOA. I was surprised to find that not many of the recurring techniques outlined in the reading were used in DOA.
First off, for a film noir, the movie set was pretty light. Most of the movie took place during the day as he was doing his detective work. There was no rain nor any wet streets. And the movie followed a simple chronological order.
In line with the reading, the movie employed compositional tension rather than violence. As the main character was (interestingly) solving his own murder, the tension was definitely felt. But is that enough to make it a film noir?
As a ps though, what I did find in the movie was a lot of irony. The man solving his own murder case, standing by “Life” magazine right after the doctors pronounced him dying,…
Lisa, I think you bring up many interestig points, but overall I have to disagree with your assessment of the film as not being a film noir. To my inexperienced, untrained eye, there were a few scenes that didn’t seem to strictly adhere to the definition of film noir– for example, that well-lit outdoor chase/firefight scene in the construction site/warehouse area more than halfway into the film. Taken as a whole, and especially balanced against the Paul Schrader “Notes on Film Noir” reading (hereafter referred to as “Schrader”), I think D.O.A. is a part of the film noir tradition.
One of your arguments that struck me the most was the sentence “And the movie followed a simple chronological order.” According to Schrader, the manipulation of chronological order, no matter how slight, serves to outline a common film noir principle: “the how is always more important than the what” (221). Recall that the main story (taking place in the past) of D.O.A. is framed in Bigelow’s appearance at the police station in the present. I haven’t thought too deeply into what the “what” might actually be in this case, but I will definitely get back to you on that when I think of something.
As for the lack of a focus on water, a part of the movie which I really liked was near the beginning, when Bigelow is in the club. The camera closes up to a member of a jazz ensemble dripping with sweat. When I first saw that setting, the crowded club full of hip, well-dressed people with a miasma of smoke hanging over the entire set and the jazz players playing, I thought to myself: “now this must be noir.” This was before I read Schrader, and that wet jazz player in particular and the song he and his bandmates play sounds pretty fast-paced and wild. I think this scene might serve to help Schrader’s argument of noir’s third phase, in that the themes of disintegration and underyling psychosis are really underlined with that crazed band man and his music.
I came into this post wanting to bring more to the table in opposition to your argument, but I came up pretty short. Hopefully someone else will pick up the slack– or I myself will come back to some of my ideas later. It might actually be true that one sweaty jazz player does not a noir make, but my gut tells me there’s more both of us are missing.
Er–
In paragraph one I meant to write “interesting,” and in paragraph three I meant to convey that I haven’t thought too deeply into what the “how” might actually be. My mistake(s).
Lisa brings up a number of interesting questions and points to a profound problem in trying to classify films as noir. Film noir is a tricky category and one can argue that just about any movie that can be considered a film noir misses one or more of the elements often associated with with that genre/style/period. After all, no filmmaker of the period ever set out to create a “film noir.” Jane Greer, the star of several classically “noir” films including Out of the Past, famously said that she and her co-stars never referred to their movies as “film noir” because there wasn’t such a thing. It’s a category that emerged after the fact in the writings of a handful of critics — no wonder it’s problematic.
Regarding water in D.O.A., notice that the long flashback begins and ends with what looks like swirling water.
I agree, I think you have a point Lisa. But, I think that D.O.A definitely has at least some of the Noir aspects, especially when it comes to theme. Anyways, according to Schrader, Noir is more about themes over techniques, allowing for a less rigid set of guidelines for classifying such movies.
Fitting films into neat boxes determined by one or more specific elements is a very difficult task. There is no direct science to it and thus we are forced into some guess work. D.O.A., in my opinion, does have many features of the film noir genre in that it uses flashback to guide it’s plot. Furthermore, there is a fatalism in the situation of the protagonist as he has already ingested a deadly poison and fights to find his killer until he, inevitably, collapses. The protagonist is also a “regular joe” as is hinted at by his entering this complicated predicament by merely notarizing a document. He is a small business owner seeking to escape commitment for the moment by avoiding his partner. The fantastic situation eventually forces his hand and perhaps sincerely, but possibly out of fear, he proclaims his love for his secretary. There is no right or wrong in terms of classification, especially when there is ambiguity in the criteria that is used to create that classification. We can merely analyze certain elements and obtain a general feel of a film. The pleasure and value is in the analysis itself and recognizing how the film addresses the sociology of it’s historical and cultural context.