Film Noir – Institution research

David Leighton,Bradley Hope

& Sophie Gilroy

Brief History

It would seem that Neo Noir (Post 1950’s) filming has become the predominant and most popular subgenre in the Film Noir genre of film making, as seen by a list of the top three grossing film Noir hits.

Analysis.

I am now going to analyze why these are the top three grossing box office films, starting with “Sin City”.

Sin City.

Here are several of the reasons Sin City grossed so high.

Sin City had two major film directors, Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez. They were able to apply there skill to this film and make it so popular.

In Sin City Robert Rodriguez said he wanted to “Use colour as a weapon”. In this he meant he wanted to use a grayscale colour scheme and then anything that was symbolic or to be highlighted by certain colours against the black background. For example blood could be different colours, when Rodriguez wanted blood to signify pain he would colour it a deep red, as averse the the aesthetic blood of yellow.

Big name actors such as Jessica Alba and Mickey Rourke helped to promote the films popularity.Using tag lines such as “There is no justice without sin” helped emphasize the message the film

was trying to get across, a dark neo noir film complimented this and it was a huge hit with the audience.

Filming it entirely on greenscrene made the absolutely any effects possible, this was then all edited with CGI and the effects created looked incredible and helped the film gain popularity and gross so high.

La Confidential

Why was LA confidential so popular?Much like “Dracula” is to vampires, La confidential is to the film

noir industry. It is essentially every aspect of classic noir combined. With big name actors such as Danny de Vito and Kevin Spacey helped ramp up its popularity. As did taglines such as “Everything is suspect…everything is for sale…” which helped encapsulate the message of “gritty” realism of which the film was trying to promote. The use of stereotypical femme fatales in this case Lynne Bracken (Played by Kim Basinger) would appeal to the male audience as well helping boost the box office ratings and making it the second most popular film noir film of all time.

Blade Runner

Immediately using actors such as Harrison Ford and using Ridley Scott as the director immediately created hype within the film industries audience even before Blade Runner was released.

The futuristic sci-fi hybrid of genres created interest within the audience also, idea’s such as “replicants” helped to create an entirely new genre which dominated the market for some time, creating a very high grossing box office film.

Of course with a budget of twenty eight million dollars special effects and casting were not an issue either, making this film easily one of the best neo noir films of all time.

Spirit?

The only recent film in the Noir industry to be released an box office is “Spirit” which did not get very high ratings. This could suggest noir films are not very popular at the moment, and in order four ours to gross well we have decided to merge it with the “Action/Horror” genre, which is predominant at the moment even at times such as Valentines (Films like My Bloody Valentine) show this. Hopefully this will help create more hype about our film and therefore help it get higher ratings and more of a return in the money department.