film noir paragraph
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Dark City page 58, "And for an actress, let me tell you the way those sets were lit, the house, Walter's apartment, those dark shadows, those slices of harsh light at strange angles all that helped my performance. The way Billy staged it and John Seitz lit it, it was all one sensational mood."
"All one sensational mood." Which, to me, film noir is: Quite moody. The characters, hero's and villains alike. A lot times watching film noir makes me uncomfortable because the characters are so moody, and moody people make me nervous. It's almost as if the director's obsessive-compulsiveness was rubbing off on his/her actor/actress's. One minute Bogart and some 'knockout' would be cool and sarcastic, and then in the blink of an eye they would be embraced in such a tense flight of passion enough to make me shift in my seat cross my legs and blush. Oddly enough provocative actions or suggestions were subtle compared to today's media, but the directors and actor's used every asset available to bring the intensity home- and it does hit home. Genius...