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

The only film genres in which color was not merely acceptable but also de rigueur were cartoons, travelogues, and musical comedies; in other words, color was associated with what Tom Gunning describes as the "cinema of attraction," or with carnivalistic films involving fantasy and utopian spectacle. 7

Throughout the period, color was also relatively expensive and commercially unproven. Despite the success of Selznick's Star Is Born (1937) and Gone with the Wind (1939), the industry as a whole did not believe that the Technicolor process had important effects on box-office receipts. According to some filmmakers, it could actually harm the more serious pictures by undermining the values of classical narrative; thus British cameraman Guy Green argued that "photography for dramatic subjects . . . must not be a glorious spectacle all on its own. . . . It must be suppressed and made to lend itself to the subject." 9In part for such reasons, the movies in general were less concerned with the contrast of vibrant hues than with the play of light and shadow. Even projects such as Yellow Sky (1948), a spectacular western filmed in Arizona, and The Prince of Foxes (1949), an elaborate historical pageant filmed in Italy, were shot in black and white. 10Notice, moreover, that in certain quarters, black and white had long been regarded as a stylized mediuma sign not merely of realism but also of abstraction, bohemia, aestheticism, and avant-garde taste. As we have seen in chapter 2, darkness was central to modernist art of every kind. European poets such as Charles Baudelaire reveled in black moods; James McNeill Whistler entitled his famous painting of his mother "Arrangement in Grey and Black"; and the International Futurist Exhibition of 1915 featured a "black square against a white background" composed by Casmir Malevitch. In our own day, black has been described by the painter Louise Nevelson as "the most aristocratic of colors." 11Another contemporary artist, Ad Reinhardt, seems to agree, although he thinks of black as a noncolor. "It's aesthetic,'' he saysunlike red or yellow, which have to do with "vulgarity or folk art or something like that" (quoted in Wodek, 193).

The aesthetic use of black and white is evident in most forms of art photography, which in turn influenced the American abstract expressionist painters of the late 1940s and early 1950sa group that includes Arshile Gorky, Willem deKooning, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. At the peak of their influence (which coincides with the so-called film noir), this group produced images that looked rather like 1930s art photos reduced to a purely graphic, nonrepresentational level. Hence the art critic David Anfam speaks of Franz Kline's "photographic sensibility" and compares him to Walker Evans and Edward Weston. 2Anfam also notes that Kline's interest in black and white can be related to the ethos of the New York School of street photographersincluding Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, and Ted Cronerwho flourished in the same period, and whose work was similarly evocative of the "chill, steely glare of a Manhattan vista" (24).

In Refraining Abstract Expressionism (1993), Michael Leja goes further, arguing that Hollywood film noir belongs on the same broad cultural terrain as well-known abstract paintings by Kline, Pollock, and other members of the New York group. The "claim to significance" in both noir and the new painters, he observes, was "grounded in the presumption of a complicated subjectivity under stress, suffused in (primitive) terror and tragedy." Both forms "posited the complex white male individual and his cosmic situation as the proper focus for analysis," and both were relatively existential or "outside history." 13This argument may seem excessively philosophical where Hollywood is concerned, but there can be little doubt that a modernist ideology involving male subjectivity and urban darkness or primitivism helped to condition a great deal of art in the postwar decades. 14Notice also that during the same period, the center of international modernism shifted from Paris to New York. 15Black-and-white cityscapes of the Manhattan skyline became virtually synonymous with the artistic sensibility, and they began to appear with increasing regularity throughout the visual culturein the younger generation of street photographers; in films such as The Naked City, The Window, and Detective Story; and in the graphic, monochromatic effects of nonrepresentational paintings. "As a native New Yorker," Richard Kostelanetz remarked, "two colors are worthy of artblack and white; all other colors are appropriate for illustrations" (quoted in Wodek, 24).

The black-and-white photographic style that we associate with film noir was therefore given legitimacy by virtue of the fact that it suggested both gritty realism and the highest aesthetic refinement. (Even today, black-and-white photography implies stylishness and sophisticationas in a recent American television commercial that shows an Infinity automobile on a wet city street at night, parked outside a jazz club.) There was considerable irony in this situation, because hard-boiled fiction, which had been a source for many postwar films, was associated with the lurid color illustrations on the covers of pulp magazines. During and after the 1940s, the movies divested such fiction of its potential vulgarity, giving it slightly more upmarket or serious connotationsin part by the simple act of converting it into a more abstract visual medium.

As we might expect, the contradictory implications of black-and-white photographyits claims to both realism and artistic stylishnessare evident in prototypical noir cameraman John Alton's "textbook" for non-professionals, Painting with Light (1949, reprinted 1995). Throughout this book (which in its original edition contained several color illustrations), Alton insists that audiences "are getting tired of the chocolate-coated photography of yesterday" and that "mystery'' movies should "go realistic." 16He claims that World War II has made audiences reject "sweet unreal photography," accustoming them to black-and-white scenes in which there are "no boosters, no sun reflectors, no butterflies, and no diffusers" (13435). Since 1947, he says, movies have become "starkly real," and pictures such as Boomerang and T-Men, which were filmed on location, have proven that "realistic photography is popular" (135). Elsewhere, however, Alton spends a good deal of his time explaining how to light close-ups of glamorous women and how to make "beautiful" outdoor compositions with the aid of diffusers, filters, and reflectors. Even when he argues that the illumination of sets "should be as realistic and true to life as possible" (67), his real purpose is to create a heightened dramatic atmosphere, especially in films that involve "mystery lighting." He loves "slums, bars, gambling joints, where the filament of a lamp is the only bright spot" and where "a few photoflood bulbs strategically placed" will provide sufficient illumination (49). He emphasizes the importance of "Jimmy Valentine lighting," or the positioning of a key light directly below the faces of villains, so that they take on a grotesque look. He also provides helpful hints for creating moody images of rain or fog in urban environments. "When shooting neon or other electric lights," he notes, "wet the pavement to get reflections of the light sources in the picture" (49). The particular fascination of these shots, he observes, is the result of "light- playreflections on the shiny, wet surfaces of the street. They are music" (59).

Despite the title of his book, Alton is different from most painters, who tend to associate black and white with the technology of printing. Like all cinematographers, he instinctively thinks of the photographic image as a theatrical or stagelike space, filled with dramatic highlights and cast shadows. The technique of "mystery lighting," he suggests, derives from a long-standing tradition of gothic stage plays and magic shows that illuminate sinister figures from below. He is quite good at showing how this tradition might enable Hollywood to photograph sudden flares of light amid surrounding darkness; at one point, he even composes a sort of extended haiku or imagist poem on the topic: