Art Noir and its central inspiration Film Noir are artistic titles that describe hard boiled fiction and works of art and drama. They combine a dark and romantic aesthetic style that has roots in German expressionist cinematography with cynical and corrupt attitudes, and tragically passionate storylines. Noir themes and moods include despair, paranoia, and nihilism; an atmosphere of claustrophobic entrapment; a nightmarish sense of loneliness and alienation; a purposelessness fostered in part by feelings of estrangement from one's own past even as one seems to driven to a compulsive confrontation with that past