Neo-noir

Neo-noir is a postwar style of crime film that revisits and alters classic film noir’s themes and visual conventions, often using later settings, technologies, and social perspectives.

Film noir: A cycle of crime films marked by fatalism, moral ambiguity, urban settings, and stylized shadow. Neo-noir takes shape by revising this earlier cycle’s conventions.
Low-key lighting: A lighting approach that uses deep shadows and strong contrast to shape a scene. Neo-noir reuses and varies noir’s shadow-heavy visual design.
Chinatown: Roman Polanski’s 1974 crime film about a private detective uncovering corruption in 1930s Los Angeles. It revives period noir while making civic power and investigative failure central.
Classic Hollywood: The studio-centered American film industry and its dominant production style from the 1920s through the 1960s. Neo-noir emerged after the studio era and could challenge its conventions more openly.
New Queer Cinema: An independent film movement of the early 1990s that foregrounded queer characters and challenged conventional representation. Its filmmakers and neo-noir works alike used genre to unsettle fixed identities and social norms.
Chiaroscuro: A visual technique that models forms through sharp contrasts between light and darkness. Its stark lighting became one of noir’s most recognizable visual resources.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account is compromised by limited knowledge, bias, or deception. Uncertain testimony turns neo-noir plots into investigations of how stories mislead.
Blade Runner: Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction film about a detective hunting humanlike androids in a dystopian Los Angeles. Its futuristic city and detective plot carry noir conventions into science fiction.
New Hollywood: A period of American filmmaking, chiefly from the late 1960s through the 1970s, marked by director-driven films and formal experimentation. Its creative freedoms helped establish the conditions for influential neo-noir films.
Blaxploitation: A cycle of American films from the 1970s made for Black audiences and featuring Black protagonists. Its crime films shifted screen power and perspective beyond noir’s earlier racial conventions.

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