Art Techniques and Means of Expression of “Black Cinema”: From Neo-Noir to Post-Noir

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to study art techniques and means of expression of neo-noir and post-noir in the cinematography of the late XX — early XXI centuries. The subject of analysis are noir phenomena — the latest and postmodern processes in cinema, based on the aesthetic, genre and style canon of noir. Noir phenomena in the language of cinematography could not remain within the narrow limits of the aesthetics of “black” cinema. That is why they became a space of transformations: stylistic, genre, narrative, semantic, etc. The methodology of theoretical analysis in this article is based both on the whole complex of ideas related to the subject of research, and on specific scientific tools. The study is part of a more general research case, which focuses on the analysis of the phenomenology of “black cinema” (or noir) in the cinema of the late XX — early XXI centuries. In a separate publication, the authors of this study investigated the issue of “genre memory” of noir. Also, a part of the research case is the problem of analysis of expressive means and artistic techniques in cinematography of the late XX — early XXI centuries. This problem was also considered by the authors of the study in a series of publications devoted to the “collage” artistic language of the Ukrainian director S. Paradzhanov. The methodological basis of the article relies on the research of Western scientists: Gavin Smith, Charles Scruggs, Jean-Pierre Chartier, Simon P. Otieno, David Copenhafer, Mary P. Wood, Lisa Colpaert, Thomas Leitch, James McRoy, Emily R. Anderson. The results. Our definition of the set of basic techniques and expressive means of “noir” phenomena in the cinematography of the second half of the XX — beginning of the XXI centuries allows us to distinguish three spatial-compositional systems that characterize the specifics of noir, neo-noir and post-noir. In the first case, we observe a linear unfolding of the action, within which scenes and framing are in a direct cause-and-effect relationship. In the context of neo-noir, compositionality is a question of the specific action topos of the film; despite the existence of general rules and characteristics of working with planes and space, the general impression of “panoramity” and different scales is dominant. Post-noir aesthetics is formed in the plane of a greater variety of artistic techniques, which is connected with the practical absence of “canonical” boundaries and the property of post-aesthetics to combine various effects, means (and in some cases to resort to “citation” and “redefinition”). The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the formation of artistic symbolism and imagery of neo- and post-classical noir aesthetics as a system is investigated for the first time. The authors analyze the specifics of expressive means of neo-noir and post-noir, which unite the phenomena into one whole. The practical significance of the article is that the conducted scientific analysis makes it possible to reveal the forms of representation of “noir” phenomena in modern cinema.