La Confidential and Film Noir Essay Example

LA Confidential and Film Noir One of the most influential film movements in the 1940's was a genre that is known today as film noir. Film noir was a recognizable style of filmmaking, which was created in response to the rising cost of typical Hollywood movies (Buss 67). Film noir movies were often low budget films; they used on location shoots, small casts, and black and white film. The use of black and white film stock not only lowered production costs, but also displayed a out of place disposition that the conventions of film noir played upon. It is these conventions: themes, characters, lighting, sound, and composition, which are seen in the movie LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997). This paper discusses the techniques used in LA Confidential that link the movie with the typical cinematic conventions of the film noir style. Film noir often tackled subjects that dealt with common underlying themes: corruption, deceit, mystery, etc (Sobchack, 271). One of the most well known and acclaimed pioneers in film noir is the movie The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941). This film was based on a private investigator, Sam Spade, hired to investigate a case. The Maltese Falcon is now viewed as the typical film noir style movie because it contains traits and qualities of filmmaking that were adapted by film noir filmmakers. Film noir started during the mid 1940's and has been a popular film style ever since, yielding such contemporary movies like The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998). These films have proved that film noir is not a method dedicated to past decades, but rather an innovative style of film that influences movies today. LA Confidential, like other contemporary film noirs utilize many stylistic qualities that the earlier film noir movies grasped. Often times film noir movies were based upon corruption, usually in an urban type setting.