By: Maor Goihberg
The term “neo-noir” is not used in the same way as it would be for other genres. For example, “neo-Western” refers to a specific type of Western set in the present day, whereas “neo-noir” refers to any noir film made after 1960 onwards. When people hear the term, they usually think of such films as Chinatown, Fargo, and Seven.
But I believe Seven is a good example of how oftentimes audiences and critics misunderstand the term noir. This is such a vague term, and for this, I refer to Paul Schrader, who in “Notes on Film Noir” noted how film noir is defined by “the more subtle qualities of tone and mood,” indeed “more interested in style than theme” as “it worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically…”
However, what is the noir style? Mainly, it refers to such aspects as lighting; as Schrader explained, “the majority of scenes are lit for night… the shades pulled and the lights off,” whereas “light enters the dingy rooms of film noir in such odd shapes…” Indeed, “the actors and setting are often given equal lighting emphasis” so as to “create[sic] a fatalistic, hopeless mood… the city will outlast and even negate even his best efforts.”
However, these guidelines were created during a specific period in film. Since then, the way we create films has changed, whether it be color processing replacing black-and-white or the permeation of handheld cameras into mainstream movies. The style of noir at the time has become archaic, and so those creating noirs thereafter have had to figure out how to update the genre. It would be counterproductive to hold a crime film made after 1959 and determine its stature within noir based on style without considering the fact that to survive noir needed to grow.
Such was the task facing David Fincher. Having made many music videos and one movie (which he looks back on with distaste), he now had what at the time, (before the 2000’s introduced extremely graphic procedurals) was a very controversial screenplay. If he leaned too much into certain influences, it would come off as homage; but since the material obviously drew from old noirs, it would make sense to engage with them.
Thus, Fincher and his cinematographer Darius Khondji attempted to filter the unnamed city through chiaroscuro: crisp shadows on a character’s face, silhouettes through backlighting, much as Schrader described. In fact, went as far as to put the footage through bleach bypassing, so that the silver would be retained in the film and therefore be able to maximize contrast and minimize saturation, giving it such a dark and monochromatic look.
However, while the lighting certainly (and perhaps exceeded) met the criteria, I would argue that the rest of the mise-en-scene was another matter. Fincher clearly wanted to emphasize the realism of the city, not in the way in which Carol Reed or Jules Dassin attempted to exaggerate the nightmarish qualities within real locations (as Schrader explained “the best noir technicians simply made all the world a sound stage”) but to document them through the dark lens.
Let me offer a comparison. Steve Sekely’s Hollow Triumph (1948), shot by John Alton, featured a very memorable chase scene through Los Angeles. The protagonist, John, is fleeing a couple of hired thugs, leading him through an alley where he is temporarily silhouetted by the lights of an oncoming truck, and engages in a brief gunfight with the gangsters until he is able to escape to a very steep hill where the Angel Flight is running; it’s a perfectly Expressionist shot, with a strange square trolly running up a smooth street while intimidating towers loom over. John boards the car, kicking the thug off and thus making his way up to temporary safety.
On the other hand, take the chase scene in Seven. Our gumshoes Mills and Somerset found the apartment of serial killer John Doe, and when he sees them, he shoots and flees. While Somerset takes the stairs, Mills pursues the suspect through the hallway and another family’s apartment; he sees that he has jumped off the fire escape, and follows in the same manner, landing on a pile of garbage. He pursues him into an alley, slowly circumventing a truck until Doe surprises him and holds the detective at gunpoint yet does not kill him and disappears.
While the sequence in that noir classic leaned heavily into what Schrader referred to as “the German expressionist influence,” using camera angles and lighting to evoke the sense of an expansive yet crushing cityscape, Fincher’s sequence is extremely claustrophobic, with Richard Francis-Bruce’s editing splitting the crashing of a car into several shots while Khondji’s camera never looks beyond eye-level. Sekely’s chase was also more brief, true to Schrader’s observation that “compositional tension is preferred to physical action.”
Of course, while noir is principally driven by style, it does express themes within that style: “the greatest noir theme,” argues Schrader, is “a passion for the past and present, but also a fear of the future. The noir hero dreads to look ahead but instead tries to survive by the day, and if unsuccessful at that, he retreats to the past.”
This is very much the case with Somerset, who looks back sadly on a failed romance in his past: “I came close, once,” he remarks upon being questioned on his marital status. Many critics note the innocence in the old noirs, the way it was naive to be so cynical as if the world was really that out to get you. Somerset, with his fedora and trench coat, represents the most heightened form of that sensibility, not having been consumed as much as having simply surrendered to the city.
Maybe that was the point of the film’s approach to the physicality of its location: he has given up fighting it, and so it would be pointless to exaggerate it, instead he’s huddled within the streets. Perhaps this is inevitable, given how the genre has seeped into the cultural subconscious that it often manifests in a somewhat postmodern fashion. The funny thing about the bleach bypass is that in the end you end up imposing a black-and-white image over the color one.
Hollow Triumph (1948)