A Quote by Otto Penzler
Like art, love, and pornography, noir is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. For the purposes of the book and my longtime working understanding and definition of it, noir stories are bleak, existential, alienated, pessimistic tales about losers--people who are so morally challenged that they cannot help but bring about their own ruin.
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You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.
At the very least, noir offers an alternate reality - moments of real passion, a bleak code of honor, and a need for freedom amid corruption. At its best, noir offers a map of subversion.
It's possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it's possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir.
Noir deals with the disenfranchised: people who can't catch a break under normal circumstances. In noir books, you root for these people, but you know they are going to fail. That's what makes them so compellingly human. I can relate to that kind of stuff.
Anything that has to do with noir and space, I'm gonna love. When you've got a noir-ish, pulpy detective in a science fiction show, I'm all in, in that regard.
Flawed characters... a ticking clock... morally questionable acts on all sides... moody, evocative art... oh yeah, this the stuff crime noir fans love!
In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.'
I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.
I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.
Whether my acting was obscene, or whether it was distasteful, well, Judge Rehnquist, who just recently passed away couldn't define pornography. His comment on pornography was, "I may not be able to define it but I know it when I see it." That's not law. That's definitely not law. Really, this trial should have been an organized crime trial. About murder and tax evasion and brutalizing people. Not about obscenity.
I guess what's most surprised me in most of the reviews is that they don't seem to get the noir story in the dream sequence, so they analyze it like a straight noir movie.
When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Ox Bow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross that defines what kind of drama it is.
I like people that define their own values. I am much more interested in somebody who has their own definition of what they value, their own definition of what success is, their own definition of what love is.
Noir' has been talked about a great deal in the discussion of 'The Black Dahlia,' but De Palma's palllete couldn't be less monochrome; it's the very definition of garish.
Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.
There are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.
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