Films have always represented a field of art that many have found interesting, intriguing and worthy of exploration and interpretation, examining their various aspects and components. Film noir has left a strong legacy in world cinema, particularly American, which is still felt today. With its distinct aesthetics, narrative style, and themes, it continues to influence contemporary cinematography. We aim to explore film noir, specifically the roles of smoking and smoking rituals in these films. For film noir, as both a historical period, in which they were filmed, smoking was highly characteristic. In films, not just in noir, everyone smokes. Always and everywhere. We were interested in whether smoking in noir films carried certain (additional) meanings that helped us understand the character, relationships and situations in which the characters found themselves, and whether these meanings form a consistent part of noir films. Following the introduction and description of film noir itself, along with an explanation of its specificities and basic concepts related to film noir, we presented analysis of smoking in films, with the help of a review of existing literature. In the empirical part of the master's thesis, we interpreted ten film noirs using semiotic analysis and compared the film analyses with each other. We learned that in the analyzed films smoking carries certain meanings and similar meanings appear in almost all films and thus form a consistent part of the (analyzed) noir films.
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