AT IL CINEMA RITROVATO - Noir and its iterations and abuses.....

Eight O'Clock Sharp/På slaget åtte (Nils R. Muller, Norway, 1957)

A much anticipated strand of the Ritrovato selection was that devoted to so-called Nordern Noir - "the cinematic forerunners of today's popular Nordic noir TV series". ..whoa...hold on a minute... expert advice called for here and where is Rod Bishop when needed... Well I do have to hand Rod's words in the Cinema Reborn 2025 catalogue and its website: "Born at the start of World War II, film noir mixed up numerous influences, including German expressionism and hard-boiled American crime fiction. As disillusioned war veterans returned home, their bitter experiences helped to propel noir’s fatalist, doom-laden view of life, until 1958 when noir concluded with Touch of Evil. Filmmaker Paul Schrader called it ‘film noir’s epitaph’.  

"Noir’s uniqueness lay in its bracing antidote to the feel-good/happy endings of Hollywood films during the 1940s and 1950s. It is often mistakenly called a genre – like rom-coms, westerns, science fiction or horror. Noir is a film movement, like German expressionism, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, with agreed-upon historical periods and starting and ending dates. Like other film movements, noir films share thematic narratives, societal issues and artistic flourishes while often challenging the conventional filmmaking practices of the day." 

"Noir" is a much-abused and exploited term these days. For quite a while critics, but even more so, programmers, curators and fans have used the easy shorthand of "noir" as an apparent selling point of just about any film where someone gets killed. It's been going on for quite a while. I remember a couple of retrospectives that Quentin Turnour programmed for the Sydney Film Festival dubbed "Nikkatsu Noir" and "Brit Noir" respectively. I think Quentin's selection instructions went only as far as saying just be aware that this season is going to be dubbed 'noir'.

Bologna  offered us a stream denoted Nordern Noir which proved to be....well...not noir but rather a series of mysteries, melodramas and crime stories. They weren't entirely devoid of interest but they were not the real thing, not an undiscovered river of cinematic gold.