Morally ambiguous crime, black realism and sultry, dangerous women — all of it is coming to a theater near you.
Starting July 14 the Guild Cinema will host its Festival of Film Noir, a two-week event crammed with double features about the grittiness of the Great Depression era.
Former co-owner Peter Conheim and owner Kief Henley started the festival because they believe in the genre. Henley said the films explore off-limits topics in a diplomatic manner.
“To me, it runs the gamut from the aesthetic pleasure of the black-and-white photography, the coded behavior,” he said. “You had to express discontent with the American way of doing things without being called a ‘Commie’.”
The genre, coined ‘film noir’ by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946, is characterized by dramatic lighting techniques, cinematography and morally suspect characters in unsavory situations, Guild manager Chris Woodworth said.
“Film noir isn’t really a genre, per se,” he said. “Usually what people think of are films from the 30s and 40s with the detectives looking for a solution to a mystery or murder, or an object.”
Josephine Scherer, the Guild’s tech woman and projectionist, said film noir captures the disillusionment Americans felt when the Great Depression hit. Around that time, she said, escapist musicals and the more hard-boiled, violent crime movies became popular.
“This was the beginning of where, on some level, the audience really identified with the villain of the piece,” she said. “The criminal was no longer some detestable character. Now, you’re sort of rooting for him. There was some level of identification.
I think this was one of the big factors that sort of attracts audiences. On some level, we all know we’re corruptible.”
Rather than being a conscious movement, Scherer said film noir is a mutation of the traditional crime or gangster film, the by-product of filmmakers wanting to push the envelope while contending with the Hayes code, a set of moral censorship guidelines at the time. She said this tension resulted in two main elements that distinguish film noir from other crime/mystery films.
“One, most notably, is that the ‘hero’ characters didn’t have such pure motives,” she said. “Secondly, you weren’t always sure they were going to come out ahead. They were breaking conventions of what had happened before in crime dramas and they were kind of pushing the limit of what the production code would allow.”
Henley said most people associate film noir with the gritty black-and-white films of the 40s and think the genre is exclusively American, but the British, French and Germans have all contributed to noir.
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Even today, the genre enjoys popularity, Henley said.
“There’s a need to indulge in bad behavior and misbehavior, crooked situations, situations of trying to outwit somebody,” Henley said. “People like to feel something, and film noir, they’re probably interested in crime situation and trying to beat the system, trying to go up against the status quo.”
8th Annual Festival of Film Noir
The Guild Cinema
3405 Central Ave. NE
July 14-28
Show times vary
$7 General admission
$5 Students with valid I.D.
Cash Only
GuildCinema.com
