Film Noir. Icon(ic).

Iconic images and motifs are important to the film noir genre because they show us more about the scene and the characters. The visual motif is so iconic that homages and parodies are almost universally delibarately monochrome using a transition between colour and black and white where necessary. A big iconic image would be the gun. Like I've said in the signifier post, the gun will tell us a lot about the character and their background. For example, it will show the viewer that the person holding the gun and using it to distress people and delibarately make them uncomfortable because that is the type villian that they are. But if we saw the hero with the gun we would know that they would probably be using it to save another human or to kill the villian. Typical icons in the film noir genre would also be the fact that it's in black and white and not in colour. This is quite effective because we can see the dark and light shadows between characters and it tells us a lot more about the character that what they are wearing.