neo noir

Before I give my spiel on neo noir, I'd like to make sure that you understand what film noir is. If you don't, check out my description.

Neo noir began in the late 1980s, early 1990s. The resurgence of this genre/movement/style of dark, ambiguous films from the 1940s and 50s was characterized by an even darker and more sinister worldview. The femme fatales of neo noir inhabit a world where men are simply a means to an end - that end being money, of course - and if they can satisfy the woman's sexual needs in the process, so much the better. The women are more evil than even Barbara Stanwyck could imagine - the men are weaker and more naive. Fabulous, dark, wonderful films.

Style/Narration conventions of neo noir:

Low-key lighting.
Shadows, mirrors, reflections, silhouettes, rainy city streets.
Complex chronological order (flashback narration).
Femme fatale and patsy - corruptible and ambiguous characters.
Femme fatale is usually portrayed as pure evil and sometimes ... sometimes she gets away with her crime.
Patsy is extremely dumb and naive. The femme fatale can bend him any way she wants.
All elements serve to confuse the viewer who is unable to find any of her normal points of orientation.
Postmodern in its constant reference to classic film noir.
No moral to the story as was required under the Production code in the 1940s and 1950s.
A helluva lot of fun.

Neo noir came about in an atmosphere similar to that of classic film noir - confusion over gender roles (women gaining ground politically and socially, talk of a "crisis of masculinity"),and a post-war period (the Cold War - raging since the 1950s - "ended" during this time with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union - this results in political anxiety and ideological instability). E. Ann Kaplan summarizes it well in her fabulous book Women in Film Noir (1998),"what links the 40s to the 90s is the political an social sense of something amiss in American culture - a sense of drift, of pointlessness, political helplessness and of inaccessible and hidden power creating generalised angst."