A Companion to Film Noir

Andre Spicer, Helen Hanson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781444336276
• eBook ISBN: 9781118523711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

An authoritative companion that offers a wide-ranging thematic survey of this enduringly popular cultural form and includes scholarship from both established and emerging scholars as well as analysis of film noir's influence on other media including television and graphic novels.

• Covers a wealth of new approaches to film noir and neo-noir that explore issues ranging from conceptualization to cross-media influences
• Features chapters exploring the wider 'noir mediascape' of television, graphic novels and radio
• Reflects the historical and geographical reach of film noir, from the 1920s to the present and in a variety of national cinemas
• Includes contributions from both established and emerging scholars

Part I

Conceptualizing Film Noir

1

The Strange Case of Film Noir

Robert Porfirio

When I first began teaching a college course in film noir and researching it for my doctoral dissertation in the early seventies there was little on the subject in English and only one book-length study, Borde and Chaumeton’s yet-to-be translated monograph. Now, over thirty years later, there are numerous courses on the subject and a voluminous amount of written material in English, French, and many other languages. While I find the acclaim presently given film noir at both academic and popular levels a bit surprising, what is even more surprising to me is that film noir is still a contestable topic. Back then I would have thought that by now all ontological and epistemological controversies would be settled, yet the debate rages on, among scholars and fans alike. It is indeed tempting to simply give up the chase and agree with Peter Wollen who quipped that film noir is whatever Borde and Chaumeton say it is. But if there is no consensus it is certainly not due to any lack of effort on the part of Alain Silver, who, from the publication of the groundbreaking first edition of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style in 1979 through subsequent editions and revisions and a series of Film Noir Readers, has attempted, at the very least, to provide us with a sense of film noir if not a precise definition thereof.¹ And while that sense seems to favor film noir as a film movement, no extended case for such has found its way to publication, though it was been touched upon by others, myself included.²

In arguing for such a conception I am, understandably, restricting our attention to what of late has been termed the “classic period” of American film noir as opposed to that group of films now called neo-noir – a term coined by Todd Erickson who distinguishes them from classic film noir primarily by virtue of their use of new ­cinematic techniques and a self-consciousness generated by the awareness of contemporary filmmakers that they are working within an established “noir” convention. Erickson (correctly in my estimation) makes the case that because of this self-­consciousness classic film noir has generated an offspring, neo-noir, which today takes on all the auspices of a genre.³ How could it be otherwise? For once the defining “marks” of a particular cultural practice are recognized and deemed marketable there is the inevitable rush to popularize and peddle as practice becomes product, and art movements are certainly no exception (surrealism being a prime example). Indeed, it was in the 1930s that the major commercial film genres (western, romance, comedy, gangster, horror, detective/mystery, swashbuckler, etc.) were established as “Hollywood” became a global system and sought to capture and hold domestic and international markets alike through the use of formulaic practices. If anything, classic film noir represents an attempt to break with those formulaic practices as Borde and Chaumeton and other French cinéastes pointed out so early on. Yet by virtue of its own transgressive nature the noir cycle was doomed. For as the transgressive aspects of film noir became conventionalized, as the beleaguered Production Code finally gave way to the rating system, and as newer production techniques replaced the old, classic film noir disappeared until its rebirth as neo-noir in the late 1960s.⁴ Ironically, for a term that was virtually unknown in America during the classic period even among the filmmakers themselves (Robert Aldrich being the exception), in the postmodern era film noir is the driving force behind what James Naremore has termed the “noir mediascape,”⁵ just as the terms “noir” and “noired” have become popularized.

The problems inherent in trying to pin down film noir as a specific genre or style of filmmaking have been discussed at some length by Alain Silver and other critics over the years, and there is no need here to cover that ground again.⁶ Since film historians of a sociological persuasion have given us the notion of film movements – a class of phenomena typically more restricted to a given social context and temporal period – why should we not investigate film noir along those lines, especially if it is less problematic than other approaches? Film movements, of course, bear some resemblance to the more universalized aesthetic notion of art movements. Film sociologists, however, point out that film movements tend to be more tied to a specific time and culture and so they prefer to conceive of them in terms of Anthony F.C. Wallace’s notion of “revitalization movements” (“a deliberate and self-conscious attempt to provide a more satisfying culture”).⁷ So far four such phenomena have been identified: German expressionism, Soviet “expressive realism,” Italian neo-realism, and the French new wave.⁸ As a film movement, then, film noir can be conceived along the lines of a pervasive effect (rather than a restrictive genre) and located within a specific sociocultural context and temporal scheme, with the ­traditional stages of ascent (1940–1945), peak (1946–1950), and slow decline (1951–1960).

While there are problems inherent in treating film noir as a film movement (not the least of which is that the term itself was a post facto classification), they can, I believe, be overcome, and the advantages of such a conceptual model far outweigh the disadvantages. For one thing it allows us to isolate classic film noir as a distinct body or cluster of films where certain formal standards can be brought to bear (e.g. closed composition, disjunctive editing, etc.), much like genre criticism. At the same time, the notion of a film movement guarantees that those formal changes associated with it be grounded in a real, material context. This grounding in turn opens us up to the subtle interplay between the micro-social level (“Hollywood” as product, praxis, and subculture) and the macro-social context, whose complex interaction with film culture can then be elaborated upon. We can then engage the “world” of film noir in an ongoing dialectic with its historical matrix, explicating every sort of cultural code (e.g. themes, iconography, or even larger patterns of meaning) to explore the complex process of mediation between a film culture and the material world.⁹

If we rethink film noir in terms of a film movement we may also be able to avoid some of the controversies that have haunted critical film theory for the last thirty or so years (e.g. auteurist vs. structuralist). For although most approaches to film noir tend to suppress stylistic differences to demonstrate the manner in which a group of films are similar, those differences which distinguish a Hitchcock-directed film noir from, say, a Lang-directed one can be handled quite nicely as personal idiolect, while those qualities which draw our attention to a rather heterogeneous group of films as noir (mood, disjunctive editing, chiaroscuro visuals, etc.) can then be identified as movement-idiolect, a term typically associated with art movements. Traditionally, art movements come into being when the quite restrictive idiolect of the individual creator (e.g. the language of The Sound and the Fury) is elaborated through the body of works of a given individual (as corpus-idiolect, e.g. all of Faulkner’s fiction) and further elaborated through a specific art movement. We are speaking here of the process through which innovation becomes aesthetic convention, the unconscious becomes coded and individual practice becomes social praxis.¹⁰ But as so many postmodern critics are quick to point out, no author is in complete control of his text since aesthetic texts are built from larger aesthetic “worlds” and from the materials of the real world as well. Fortunately, these larger aesthetic worlds, often identified as intertext or context, have been given a good deal of recent critical attention.¹¹ And in so far as an aesthetic movement becomes distinguished by a specific aesthetic world, idiolect becomes identified with sociolect (the language of a social group, class, or subculture), a key nexus between a restrictive aesthetic world and the more accessible social one. If anything, the proliferation of the film noir world into virtually every media and its internationalization since the late 1990s is indicative of the manner in which a movement-idiolect becomes the sociolect of a distinct subculture.¹² It is also a good example of how the cutting edge of an art movement is quickly blunted as its devices are conventionalized and disseminated, or, as Fredric Jameson would have it, culture becomes commodified.¹³

It would seem that if we are to consider the noir cycle in terms of Wallace’s revitalization movements we run into trouble right away in attempting to demonstrate that it was “deliberate and self-conscious.” Less problematic is the second half of the equation – “the attempt to provide a more satisfying culture.” Virtually every filmmaker I interviewed back in the 1970s (whether writer, director, photographer, or composer) was by degrees chafed by the studio system of the 1930s, at times ­rankled by the ways it repressed personal creativity, and rather consistently anxious to push the boundaries – the Production Code being a particular bête noire among writers and directors.¹⁴ It seems to me that the degree to which these films noir involve audiences of all ages today, or seem more modern than their predecessors, or even play into our notions of postmodernism, is a good measure of the success of their creators. Yet there are critics who still decry the fact that those involved in the production of these films noir lacked a sense of identification with some larger phenomenon – but such lack of identification is often the case with art movements, the early impressionists being a prime example. More telling perhaps are those theorists who subsume film noir into such larger cultural movements as modernism or postmodernism or view it as little more than an American extension of French poetic realism¹⁵ or German expressionism – a confusion, it seems to me, of text with context or intertext.

More problematic is the first half of the equation since “deliberate” and “self-­conscious” are attributes we normally associate with the creators of the neo-noir films of today. But if we are the least bit supple in applying these terms to the filmmakers of the classic period I believe we will find a degree of cohesiveness between the two groups of newcomers to the Hollywood system throughout the 1930s and 1940s whose talents were a prerequisite to the growth of film noir. The first group, the Germanic émigrés, came to Hollywood from Europe during this period. And while there was a degree of rivalry among them, there was also a good deal of camaraderie based on common experiences (most were of Jewish background, many fled to America through France via a virtual “underground railroad” initiated by Robert Siodmak in the 1930s). While not all were members of an American Popular Front, they understandably shared an antipathy towards fascism and likely a sensibility that was quite sensitive to the creation of the dangerous and threatening world of film noir. Unlike their fellow émigrés of the Frankfurt School, they were not hostile towards American popular culture, and most were quite responsive to it. Yet for all of their involvement in American culture and social customs they were still outsiders harboring a sense of detachment matched by that found in the hard-boiled “school” of fiction and the stance of many of its protagonists. Perhaps the Germanic predisposition toward Lorelei figures matches as well the misogynistic bias of much tough guy literature.

In addition to these Europeans there was also a group of incipient filmmakers – mostly writers but directors and actors as well – who migrated from the east coast, whom I have termed the “domestic émigrés,”¹⁶ and who were, for the most part, variously involved in the American Popular Front. The majority came to Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s and most were “lefties” (to use a term popularized by Clifford Odets), veterans of one form or another of the radical theater that flourished on the east coast in the 1930s. There are too many to list here but a representative sampling would indicate their importance to film noir: Jules Dassin, Cy Endfield, John Garfield, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Ben Maddow, Albert Maltz, John Paxston, Abraham Polonsky, Nicholas Ray, Robert Rossen, and Orson Welles. Together with writers such as Daniel Mainwaring, A.I. Bezzerides, and Dalton Trumbo, and emerging talents like Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott, the more politically inclined among them developed an authentic esprit de corps, which of course was shattered with the advent of the Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist.¹⁷ On the micro-social level, the combined effects of the Red Scare, the consent decree (divorcing the studios from their ownership of theaters in 1948), the advent of television, changes in the disposition of film audiences, and, finally, the rise of independent productions changed Hollywood forever. Yet these eastern “mavericks” helped nudge film noir in the direction of the social commentary/exposé with entries such as Crossfire (1947), The Prowler (1951), and Underworld Story ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Conceptualizing Film Noir
• Part II: Hidden, Hybrid, and Transmedia Histories and Influences
• Part III: Social, Industrial, and Commercial Contexts
• Part IV: The Fabric of Film Noir: Style and Performance
• Part V: Identities and Film Noir
• Part VI: Noir in Other Forms
• Part VII: New Geographies of Film Noir
• Index