Working in a pair with Charlie, we started to produce some ideas for our opening to a film. We threw a lot of ideas around and tried to specify a couple of them, but couldn't find anything we really liked and felt comfortable with. So we did a bit more research, looking closely into film openings for westerns, musicals and crime genres. After a loose, faux idea for a Musical Western, we scrapped that in favour of a Film noir thriller. We wanted to create a mixture of 1940s noir with a present setting, but keep the essential elements of what it is about the 40s Film Noirs that make them so great. We looked at some pieces of music and also some films, such as the classic Double Indemnity(1944) and The Big Sleep(1946)
High Rankin - The Tale Of Clarence Baskerville
The Big Sleep
Double Indemnity
These films are extremely helpful in understanding the genre as they are generally considered a few of the best films in the canon. Double indemnity is a defining film noir text, with all the conventions of film noir; the femme fatale, the flawed protagonist, the witty, sharp dialogue and the complicated plot twists. The Big Sleep is also a big part of film noir, with Humphrey Bogart one of the leading faces of the genre. It's use of the MacGuffin is also a convention to the genre; a MacGuffin is a plot device that has no other function than moving the plot and characters forward i.e the stolen money in Psycho (Hitchcock: 1960) or the falcon in The Maltese Falcon (Huston: 1941). A device used in many film noirs, the MacGuffin for our film would of course be the murder that occurs before the start of the film, which the detective is introduced as investigating.
Also, the inclusion of the dubstep song The Tale of Clarence Baskerville in this list is simply because it was part of our inspiration. When stuck for ideas, we were playing music and Charlie played the song. It has a narration from a film noir detective character, who meets a femme fatale and then gets a phone call from an old enemy. Then the music drops as the detective says "although I didn't know it, things were about to get very, very heavy". Although not really useful to our film, it shows the film noir genre can adapt and change to all texts, with music being present here.
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