Tag: neo-noir 421f2f

Neo-noir is a style that prominently utilizes elements of the now declined film noir, but with updated themes, content, style, visual elements, or media that were absent in films noirs of the 1940s and 1950s.

Films noirs were typically crime dramas or psychological thrillers featuring a pessimistic worldview and starring conflicted antiheroes trapped in difficult situations and making choices out of desperation or nihilistic moral systems, with crime, especially murder, being featured on the majority of them. Some of the most obvious visual elements included low-key lighting, striking use of light and shadow, black-and-white filming, and unusual camera placement such as low-angle, wide-angle, and Dutch angle shots.

Film noir is often associated with urban settings, private detectives, femmes fatales, and bleak endings, but they are not necessary to the genre; a large number of these films, including some of the genre classics, take place in small towns, suburbia, rural areas, or on the open road, feature neither character type, and have clearly happy endings.

Film noir and the early neo-noir would come to influence the formation of tech noir, a crossover of neo-noir and science fiction, in the late 1970s; some the most influencial tech noir works are the American movies Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), and The Terminator (1984). Tech noir itself would also help form cyberpunk in the early 1980s.