Film noir and constraint
I come upon this stuff even when I’m not looking for it.
From “Out of What Past? Notes on B Film Noir” by Paul Kerr (1979) in the Film Noir Reader, Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (NY: Limelight Editions, 1996) (107-27):
Artistic ingenuity in the face of economic intransigence is one critical commonplace about the B film noir (and about people like Lewton and Ulmer in particular). Against this, I have suggested that a number of noir characteristics can at least be associated with–if not directly attributed to–economic and therefore technological constraints. The paucity of “production values” (sets, stars, and so forth) may even have encouraged low budget production units to compensate with complicated plots and convoluted atmosphere. Realist denotation would have thus been de-emphasized in favour of expressionist connotation… (116)
Some of the other noir characteristics he mentions in connection are: the use of shooting at night (uncommon at the time) to get production finished much quicker; small casts and lack of crowd scenes; reuse of sets from other films and using less lighting to cover it up; working around lack of special effects; and the use of stock footage as a replacement for things like car chases.
This kind of constraint is different than what I normally talk about, but it had a similar effect of forcing the creators to work in different ways than the norm and thus contributing to the establishment of the noir style.
Tags: Constraint, filmnoir
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