On the occasion of this course-seminar, we will explore a genre that flourished in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s and still persists today in the most diverse forms: film noir. From its beginnings in the 1930s to the present day, by way of the Hollywood golden age and then neo-noir, we will examine what makes its specificity: gloomy and pessimistic atmospheres carried by an often harsh and rigorous style. Marked by the Great Depression, the Second World War, and McCarthyism, these films also bear witness to the traumas of an era. John Huston, Fritz Lang, and Howard Hawks signed some of the masterpieces of the genre. Cynical detectives, jaded journalists, "fatal" women, losers, or psychopathic killers, but also non-linear narratives, flashbacks, and voice-overs characterize these films. Drawing its sources from noir fiction (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, or James M. Cain), influenced by German expressionism, from which it keeps the play of shadows and light, by French poetic realism, marked by a strong social determinism, but also by postwar Italian neorealism, the genre seemed to have died out in the 1950s with the end of B movies. Yet, from the 1970s onward, a new generation of filmmakers would revisit the genre: Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, or Martin Scorsese would give it new colors. Closer to us, Ridley Scott, David Lynch, or the Coen brothers would grant it its letters of nobility. The genre would also inspire followers in France, Japan, China, or South Korea, still today.