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Concept
Tech noir
Summary
Tech-noir (also known as cyber noir, future noir and science fiction noir) is a hybrid genre of fiction, particularly film, combining film noir and science fiction, epitomized by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and James Cameron's The Terminator (1984). The tech-noir presents "technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality".
Cameron coined the term in The Terminator, using it as the name of a nightclub, but also to invoke associations with both the film noir genre and with futuristic sci-fi.
The word noir, from film noir, is the French term (literally "black film" or "dark film") for American black-and-white films of the 1940s and 1950s, which always seemed to be set at night in an urban landscape, with a suitably dark subject-matter, although the treatment is often sexy and glamorous as well as stylised and violent. The genre was informed by a slew of crime novels, with Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely being notable examples. Being often typified by crime thrillers with a private detective hero and a succession of attractive, deadly heroines, the classic noir style may also be called "detective noir".
From this derive various related and subverted terms, such as neo-noir (resurgence of the form in 1960s and 1970s America); the Cold War noir (exploiting the tension and paranoia of the nuclear age); blaxploitation films, which some called black noir; Nordic noir, set in the stark landscape and apparently bland social environment of the Scandinavian countries, yet revealing a dark legacy of cruel misogyny, brutal sexual repression, and murder. From the same source comes cyber noir, also called tech noir, which may deal with intrigues and criminal enterprises in either the real world of computers and high technology, or in the virtual landscapes of a techno-generated underworld - and sometimes both.
Beginning in the 1960s, the most significant trend in film noir crossovers or hybrids has involved science fiction.
Official source
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