film noir
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
"Film Noir"
A film noir has consistent features, one most recognized is the visual technique, and another is the protagonist within film. Noir films detour from the norm, erosion of values and relations is common within them, but happy endings somehow still permeate.
When one reads Jessica Hagedorn's excerpt, "Film Noir" they read the surface story of a watchful man who looks over his ageing neighbor. On the other hand, "Film Noir" is a parallel between the lives of Marlon Rivera and Isabel L'Ange, and how it reflects the cinematic genre of noir films. The life of one is shadowed by the other in many regards and the influence of noir films is present within their story.
In a stucco bungalow within Hollywood lives Marlon Rivera, an actor, singer, and dancer, who is often given background parts in movies or in "second-rate dinner theater". Next door to him lives Isabel L'Ange "the famous dead director's wife", a former starlet who was noted by her tremendous beauty in her youth, which she still carries even in her senior years. Both of them live alone without spouse or children, and both of them are performers, one past one present. The aloneness in their lives contributes to their loneliness which may illustrate their afternoon meetings for drinks each day. "It is their daily ritual", "they been meeting every afternoon for tea ever since Marlon could remember"...