Filled With Doom: Roger Ebert once named the “most American film genre”
With a career that spanned decades, Roger Ebert was around to see the evolution of American cinema’s interpretations of various genre frameworks. Having written extensively on comedies, tragedies and everything in between, Ebert had a particularly all-encompassing understanding of the contemporary cinematic landscape because he believed that it was the duty of film critics to cover everything that there is to cover.
Ebert started writing for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967, at a time when the New Hollywood movement was garnering significant momentum. He championed subversive masterpieces such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, as well as burgeoning young filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, drawing mainstream attention to the rapidly changing identity of American cinema. However, just because he kept up with the news doesn’t mean he neglected the old.
One genre that had a defining impact on Hollywood was film noir, a term retrospectively applied to movies from the 1940s and ’50s that were united by similar aesthetic frameworks and narrative concerns. Incorporating elements from German Expressionism to depict gritty stories about moral decadence, criminal downfall and other bleak portraits of the human condition. According to Ebert, this was the body of work that was most representative of American society.
In an article, he wrote: “The most American film genre because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal unless it were essentially naive and optimistic”. With cigarette smoke filling frames and thugs along with femme fatales waiting to ambush you in seedy bars, film noir is undoubtedly a unique form of cinematic expression that garnered popularity during a period when traditional systems of belief were being widely questioned due to shocking world events.
While many critics believed this cinematic trend to be specific to Hollywood, different countries had their own approaches to noir. In Japan, auteurs such as Seijun Suzuki managed to start a similar yet markedly distinct body of noir cinema through highly stylised gems such as Branded to Kill. European cinema also didn’t shy away from noir exercises, which is evident in the works of filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville, who took it to the next level.
Looking back at the movies that are usually classified under the label, it’s still difficult to come up with a uniform definition of the genre, but Ebert tried his best in his guide to noir. He noted that one common element was the shadowy environments that hosted the characters: “Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.”
Younger generations of audiences might dismiss noir as a thing of the past, but that’s far from the truth, especially when you look at the sheer volume of neo-noir projects that surface each year. Ranging from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, it’s simply impossible to escape the genre’s influence. Modern directors might have replaced the striking black-and-white visions that characterised noir with neon-drenched visuals, but the moral explorations remain consistent.
The legacy of film noir has transcended the cinematic medium, with many video games choosing to adapt the genre to a new kind of interactive experience. For fans of classics such as The Third Man, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for noir.
