What is film noir?

I would say it's a category of American black and white crime/drama film, made in the 1940s or 1950s, typified by terse, often sharp and wry dialogue, unhappy endings, hardboiled characters, double-crossing, murder, femmes fatale, night settings, and unusual and interesting situations, e.g. unemployed post-war soldiers, criminals, and people down on their luck and in the shadows of society.

I Wake Up Screaming, photographed by Edward Cronjager

Martin Scorsese specifically states the film noir began in 1944 with Double Indemnity and ended in 1955 with Kiss Me Deadly, though I'd argue it began earlier, in 1940, with Stranger on the Third Floor (and 1941's I Wake Up Screaming.)

The Oxford English Dictionary gives us 'a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace'.

My old 1970s edition Halliwell is silent on the subject.

Mark Cousins suggests they are often the work of European emigrés who love the freedom of the USA but are cynical about the worship of money. They are suffering from a 'double estrangement' - at home neither in Europe nor in California. (Hollywood had a long history of absorbing European talent from the silents and twenties on, so I'm not sure how much I'd go along with that.) Their view of America is troubled and ambiguous, 'men whose lust for money or women take them beyond the borders of the so-called civilised world'. With Expressionist roots, film noir lighting is usually a 'lattice of expressionistic beams and dark shadows'. The influence of writers like Raymond Chandler are apparent in the dialogue and voiceover.

An idea coming off this I'd buy is emigrés channeling the horror of Nazism and war into dark post-war films.. Though we should always remember, many directors were not writers, they don't come up with the material, just interpret it...

And the Expressionist bit I would go along with - dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and shadows, especially from blinds, as well as weird montages - Powell being drugged in Farewell My Lovely, or dream sequence in Stranger on the Third Floor.

I love FN expert Eddie Muller's description, in his great book 'Dark City' (1998), that they are '..distress flares launched onto America's movie screens by artists working the night shift at the Dream Factory. Some of the more shell-shocked craftsmen discharged mortars, blasting their message with an urgency aimed at shaking up the status quo. Others went off like firecrackers - startling but playful diversions.' Post WW2 should have produced feel-good films, but 'some had seen too much warfare, poverty, greed and unfinished business from the Depression... mean human nature'. Films noir are 'gritty, bitter dramas which smacked romantic illusions in the face.'

More modern - and foreign films - may be said to be noiry, but a true one is specifically American, like jazz and cowboys (and Camel cigarettes).

Apart from those mentioned above, favourite representatives are those by A.I. Bezzerides - On Dangerous Ground, They Drive By Night and Thieves' Highway; and They Live By Night, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killers, Force of Evil, The Big Sleep, Detour, Farewell My Lovely, Out of the Past, Try and Get Me! / The Sound of Fury, Pickup on South Street, Raw Deal, Johnny O'Clock, Act of Violence, The Big Combo, Criss Cross...

The best ones always have something a bit different about them.

Oh - by the way - where's the term come from in the first place? Apparently Nino Frank was the first person to use the term in 1946, when all the wartime Hollywood output suddenly was allowed into France, in 'L'ecran Français'. In writing about films like Double Indemnity, Murder My Sweet  and Laura, he wrote '"these 'dark' films, these films noirs, no longer have anything in common with the ordinary run of detective movies". The term may have even pre-dated this in discussion of French films like Quai des Brumes. It wasn't picked up in America until the seventies.