Pattern Recognition

Wikipedia defines pattern recognition as, "the act of taking in raw data and taking an action based on the category of the data." Our discussion of pattern recognition throughout this semester, and Katie's mention of film noir, made me contemplate Jack Nicholson's character in Chinatown. Most detectives, including Nicholson and Bogart, use pattern recognition to solve the mystery. I use these two examples because Chinatown has been defined as "neo-noir" (one of the first movies after the period defined as film noir) and Maltese Falcon was the first American film to fit into the film noir genre. Both detectives use patterns they recognize in other people to decipher the mystery. So what is it about film noir and neo noir movies that hook people? Why do students and universities devote so much time to this particular median? (of course there are others, but I'll try to focus of noir movies) I believe there are a variety of reasons. One, as Gibson writes on page one hundred and nine, "It's impossible to describe, but if you live with it for a while, it starts to get to you. It's just such a powerful effect, induced by so little actual screen time." I believe this is the exact reason why femme fatales hold so much power in film noir movies. They are mysterious, different, vengeful, and most of the time extremely sexual. Their actual screen time becomes so powerful because there's not much of it. Noir movies have also become cult classics because as you start to live with these movies they become "art". All the subtleties each has in common, what each is able to do cinematically, and the differences from one movie to the next is extraordinary. All the mise-scene elements such as lighting, the use of shadows, dress, a confused plot line, and setting all add to the mystique.
As Katie mentioned, most of the early film noir movies are adaptations of books. Dashiell Hammett has been described as a writer of hard boiled detective novels. Having spent time in the Continental Operations Unit, Hammett held first hand knowledge of the stories he relayed. John Huston , the director of the Maltese Falcon, had to transform the raw material Hammett had written into action. The more I look at written text and movies the more I realize pattern recognition is all around us. It's something we, as humans, do everyday.