James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

Whatever noir "is," the standard histories say that it originated in America, emerging out of a synthesis of hard-boiled fiction and German expressionism. The term is also associated with certain visual and narrative traits, including low-key photography, images of wet city streets, pop-Freudian characterizations, and romantic fascination with femmes fatales. Some commentators localize these traits in the period between 1941 and 1958, whereas others contend that noir began much earlier and never went away. One of the most comprehensive (but far from complete) references, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (revised edition, 1992) begins in 1927 and ends in the present, listing over five hundred motion pictures of various stylistic and generic descriptions. 3

Encyclopedic surveys of the Silver and Ward type are educational and entertaining, but they also have a kinship with Jorge Luis Borges's fictional work of Chinese scholarship, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which contains a whimsical taxonomy of the animal kingdom: those belonging to the Emperor; mermaids; stray dogs; those painted with a fine camel's hair brush; those resembling flies from a distance; others; and so on. Unfortunately, nothing links together all the things described as noirnot the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings. Little wonder that no writer has been able to find the category's necessary and sufficient characteristics and that many generalizations in the critical literature are open to question. If noir is American in origin, why does it have a French name? (The two Frenchmen who supposedly coined the term, writing separate essays in 1946, were referring to an international style.) More intriguingly, if the heyday of noir was 19411958, why did the term not enjoy widespread use until the 1970s? A plausible case could indeed be made that, far from dying out with the old studio system, noir is almost entirely a creation of postmodern culturea belated reading of classic Hollywood that was popularized by cinéastes of the French New Wave, appropriated by reviewers, academics, and filmmakers, and then recycled on television.

At any rate, a term that was born in specialist periodicals and revival theaters has now become a major signifier of sleekly commodified artistic ambition. Almost 20 percent of the titles currently on the National Film Preservation List at the Library of Congress are associated with noir, as are most of the early volumes in the British Film Institute "Film Classics" series of monographs on famous movies. Meanwhile, "neo-noirs" are produced by Hollywood with increasing regularity and prominence. Consider the last three American winners of the Grand Prize at Cannes: Wild at Heart (1991), Barton Fink (1992), and Pulp Fiction (1994). Consider also such big-budget television productions as Twin Peaks, Wild Palms (marketed as ''TV noir"), and Fallen Angels.

Some of these instances might be described as pastiche, but pastiche of what? The classical model is notoriously difficult to pin down, in part because it was named by critics rather than filmmakers, who did not speak of film noir until well after it was established as a feature of academic writing. Nowadays, the term is ubiquitous, appearing in reviews and promotions of many things besides movies. If we want to understand it, or to make sense of genres or art-historical categories in general, we need to recognize that film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema; in other words, it has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discoursea loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies.

It seems odd that film theorists did not arrive at this conclusion long ago. After all, the Name of the Genre (or mood, or generic tendency, or whatever) functions in much the same way as the Name of the Author. In a well-known essay, French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that the "author function" is tied to the "institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses." 4The author, Foucault says, is chiefly a means of textual classification, allowing us to establish relations of "homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by the use of others" (147). At bottom, these relations are "projections," governed by belief in ''a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized around a fundamental and originating contradiction" (151).

Could we not say exactly the same things about the "genre function"? And could we not ask of it many of the same questions that Foucault asks of authorship: "What are the modes of existence of this discourse?" "Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it?" (160) In the case of film noir, one of the most amorphous categories in film history, these questions seem particularly apt. To answer them, this chapter examines the historical context of seminal writings about noir. Throughout, instead of looking for the essential features of a group of films, I try to explain a paradox: film noir is both an important cinematic legacy and an idea we have projected onto the past.

The end of World War II in Paris gave rise to what might be called a noir sensibility; but this sensibility was expressed through many things besides cinema, and if I had to choose a representative artist of the period, it would not be a filmmaker. Instead I would pick the somewhat Rimbaud-like personality Boris Vian, who was a friend of the ex-surrealist Raymond Queneau and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Vian wrote witty avant-garde novels, protoabsurdist plays, satiric columns for Les temps modernes, music criticism for Jazz Hot, and over five hundred Dylanesque protest songs (including "Le déserteur," which remains an an

them of French antiwar movements); meanwhile, he played trumpet and sang in Le Tabou and other Saint-Germain nightspots. During his lifetime, however, he was best known for a roman noir that did not bear his name.

In the summer of 1946, Vian was approached by an editor who wanted to create a list of murder novels that would rival the popular, black-covered Série noire, recently inaugurated at Gallimard. Within two weeks, Vian composed J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I'll spit on your graves), which he published under the name "Vernon Sullivan," an identity he adopted on several occasions, claiming to have translated Sullivan's work "from the American." 5An ultra-violent mixture of situations from William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Richard Wright's Native Son, the novel concerns a black man who passes for white in a southern town and exerts racial vengeance by dominating, raping, and murdering two white women. In a preface, Vian said that the book could never have been printed in the United States because it involved black violence against whites. But there were also problems in France, where J'irai cracher became the first novel to be prosecuted for obscenity since Madame Bovary. The case took a bizarre turn when a middle-aged Parisian salesman strangled his young mistress and committed suicide in a hotel room near the Gare Montparnasse, leaving an open copy of the book next to the murdered woman's body, one of its grisly passages underlined. Vian was briefly jailed and required to pay a fine, and for the rest of his life he suffered from notoriety and ill health. Although he remained active on the literary and cabaret scenes, he sometimes described himself as "ex-écrivain, ex-trompettiste" (ex-writer, ex-trumpet player). Then in the summer of 1959, he entered a Paris movie theater to watch a press screening of French director Michel Gast's adaptation of J'irai cracher, a project he disliked but had been unable to prevent. As he sat alone in the dark auditorium, his heart failed and he died. 6