미국적 가치의 정체성 혼란, 필름느와르(film noir, 1941~1958년)

Abstract

American value and identity, Film Noir(1941～1958) Under the age of the Second World War and Cold War, Film Noir appeared transfigured into characters and visual styles patently different from the preceding figures of American cinema. The woman, as it were, was transfigured from a woman of virtue into a image of the femme fatale, the man that had been the symbol of strong order in American family and society into immoral character, the one falling into desire and then facing death. In addition, a family, which should be protected, was showed figures not embossing the importance of its existence, and complete narrative structures of American cinema were transfigured into structures entangled without a chronological order. These transfigurations are cinematic marks and phenomena that are revealed by Film Noir, which superficially stands for and expresses confusions about American value and identity, unlike the Classical Hollywood cinema; Going through the Second World War and the Cold War, Film Noir reflects them as it stands. But, Various figures appeared in Film Noir must be distinguished from the political flows of the United States which would secure a traditional and essential identity of American society value through different historical events, such as McCarthyism, and disarrays of American identity and value under the Second World War and Cold War. Although Film Noir are related to such confusions resulted from the Second World War and Cold War, it does not initiate fundamental problems and issues about these confusions. In conclusion, Film Noir is a unique trend of American cinema basing on and corresponding with superficial social phenomena menacing the traditional American value and identity, passing through the Second World War, Cold War, and Great Slump of the 1930s.