Mildred Pierce, Film Noir, & Visual Style

1. German Expressionism
& WWII historical
context

2. Film Noir

3. Visual style in Mildred

Pierce
 Film Noir: Historical Background
 German Expressionism (1920s)
 Aesthetic movement in painting, literature, film. Generally
defined as an artist’s attempt to find a way to visualize
subjective dread & despair.
 In literature, Franz Kafka’s works are good examples: The
Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle
 The best-known examples of German Expressionist film
include: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu
(1922), Faust (1926)
 German expatriates in Hollywood (e.g. Josef von
Sternberg, who directed 1932’s Blonde Venus)
The Scream, by Edvard Munch
Stills from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Clip from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
 Nosferatu (1922):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6jFoYm3xs.
  Post- World War II
 1940s-1950s
Historical  War trauma
Background  Anxieties about
(cont’d) masculinity
 femme fatale: woman as
threat
The Hollywood era of film noir begins with
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

 PBS documentary on Film Noir
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaeA1jHt0X8&t=822s.

Post-WWII: 4:30 – 6:30

Femme Fatale: 19:00 – 23:00
Lighting: 26:00 – 30:00
  low-key lighting creates
high contrasts of light vs.
dark

Film  night-for-night shooting

Noir:
Lighting  Expressive “Venetian
blind” effects
A typical three-
point lighting
system would
look like this:
Low-key lighting
Touch of Evil: low-key lighting
*notice all the shadows
2 examples of low-key lighting w/ lots of shadows:
Citizen Kane & Veronica Mars
Day-for-night shooting (artificially darkened
sky in The Searchers, 1956)
Night-for-night shooting: notice the black sky
 Quality of light
 hard lighting: “creates clearly defined
shadows, crisp textures, and sharp edges”

 soft lighting: characterized by “diffused

illumination”
Old-timey “glamour” portraits
(soft lighting)
North by Northwest – soft lighting
Casablanca (1942) – Soft Lighting
Hard lighting on Barbara Soft lighting on Ingrid
Stanwyck in Double Bergman in Casablanca
Indemnity (1944) (1942)
 Film Noir Mise-en-scène

 Setting as visual correlative to subjective,

emotional states

 The “double” motif: framed portraits, mirror

reflections, etc.

 Spacing: foreground/background planes

 Closed-form composition, tight framing

Dark, “underworld”
places
Closed-form composition
Mirroring / doubling
1. Two planes: foreground/background
2. Compositional balance
3. Use of deep focus (cinematography)
“Entrapment”: vertical & horizontal “bars” motif
 What do you notice about lighting?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p
RCxfj7Ms0I&list=PLB4WK71CsuubbUf
B2Rece4VJcVD1_MJQC&index=3
.