Identifying Films with Noir Characteristics Using Audience's Tags on MovieLens

08/24/2022

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by   Ziyue Zhu, et al.

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We consider the noir classification problem by exploring noir attributes and what films are likely to be regarded as noirish from the perspective of a wide Internet audience. We use a dataset consisting of more than 30,000 films with relevant tags added by users of MovieLens, a web-based recommendation system. Based on this data, we develop a statistical model to identify films with noir characteristics using these free-form tags. After retrieving information for describing films from tags, we implement a one-class nearest neighbors algorithm to recognize noirish films by learning from IMDb-labeled noirs. Our analysis evidences film noirs' close relationship with German Expressionism, French Poetic Realism, British thrillers, and American pre-code crime pictures, revealing the similarities and differences between neo noirs after 1960 and noirs in the classic period.