ABSTRACT
In the mid-1940s a new genre developed, though it might be more correct to say that it invented itself. The genre, which was named film noir some years after it appeared, changed some elements of melodrama and disrupted some Hollywood stereotypes about gender and the inevitability of sacrifice and suffering. Hollywood didn’t know it was making a new genre as the elements of noir were put into place. Few filmmakers or film viewers were aware, at least on a conscious, articulate level, that a new story was being told to them in a new visual style. It was the French in the 1950s who finally recognized that something was happening and gave it a name. But this does not mean that film noir was born out of nothing. Like any other genre, it came forth as a response to cultural need and developed out of cinematic elements already in existence.
