Film noir-a genre that encompasses a large number of suspenseful crime thrillers from the forties and fifties-was a reaction against a political climate of fear, paranoia, and corruption. As a creative counter-tradition in the American cinema-directed against Hollywood's usual optimism, idealism, and heroism-film noir was in large part inspired by German filmmakers in exile (Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Edgar G. Ulmer, among many others) who brought to the American cinema a specific sensibility that was informed by the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic. Stylistically indebted to German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s, with its play of shadows, low-key and high-contrast lighting, extreme camera angles, and its emphasis on compositional tension rather than physical action, film noir created a dark world of violence and urban crime, expressing postwar disillusionment, hopelessness, and cynicism.
If film noir allowed filmmakers to be critical about the "dark" side of the American dream, it also has an affinity to the experience of German exile film artists (directors, producers, cinematographers, writers, and actors) themselves, who felt a sense of alienation, paranoia, and failure in the foreign country; the genre articulated the exiles' fears and anxieties in an impenetrable environment.
In a Monday night series presented through April, PFA explores the German exile tradition and the debt to Expressionism in American film noir. The film noir theme is continued as well in January-February's installment of The Primal Screen.
-Anton Kaes
Anton Kaes is Professor of German and Chair, Film Studies at UC Berkeley.
