The aesthetic of film noir was hugely influenced by German Expressionism of the 1910s and 1920s. Many of the major contributors to film noir were immigrants from Europe, who had been directly involved in the Expressionism movement who were fleeing Nazi Germany. Another underlying influence and definitive antecedent was 1930s French poetic realism and it’s [...]

World War I devastated everything – nothing could ever be the same again, there was no way back to what it was like before. Everybody had bought into the values of class-consciousness, the formalism of societal norms and the constraints of culture but in the end these axioms had failed humanity. Everybody had played ball and [...]