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So, what is film noir? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop? The world may never know on both counts, but there are certainly several legitimate postulations for the former. Film still from THIS GUN FOR HIRE, our NOIR CITY '17 opening night film. Film noir, translating to “black film” in French, was a term bestowed retroactively to features generally referred to as melodramas or crime dramas at the time of their production; at first, the moniker was usually reserved for American titles that fit the bill made after World War II. Coined in Nino Frank’s 1946 essay and explored in depth by French critics Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton in their 1955 work   Panorama du film noir américain   1941–1953 ( A Panorama of American Film Noir ) the label has, in the ensuring six decades, been alternatively referred to as a genre, style, cycle, period, mood and so on. Certainly, some of these identifiers hold more water than others, but overall, film no...