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

Jean-Pierre Chartier also treated the American films as a group, but he disliked their "pessimism and disgust toward humanity" and suggested that the puritanical Breen Office had deflected the characters' sexual motives into an "obsessive criminal fatality." In some respects, his remarks were reminiscent of the conservative reactions to French noir during the avant guerre, except that the Americans seemed to him far more decadent than the French Popular Front had been. Although he admired the first-person narration in Murder, My Sweet (which reminded him of "the old avant-garde"), Chartier was troubled by the moral effect of the Hollywood series as a whole:

One may speak of a French school of film noir, but Le Quai des brumes or Hôtel du Nord have at least accents of rebellion, a fleeting image of love that gives hope for a better world, . . . and if the characters are desperate, they rouse our pity or sympathy. Nothing of that here: these are monsters, criminals whose evils nothing can excuse, whose actions imply that the only source for the fatality of evil is in themselves. (70)

In the United States, most of these films had been nominated for Academy Awards and had attracted a good deal of public and critical attention. Reviewers had seen a vague connection between them, but no one tried to invent a new term. 18 The New Yorker described Double Indemnity as a "murder melodrama" (16 September 1944), and The Los Angeles Times called it an "intellectual exercise in crime" (10 October 1944). (Times critic Philip K. Scheuer, who admired the Wilder film, added a qualification: "I am sick of flash-back narration and I can't forgive it here.") Newsweek said that Murder, My Sweet was a ''brass-knuckled thriller" (26 February 1945), and The Hollywood Reporter noted that Paramount was investing heavily in the ' 'hard-boiled, kick-em-in-the-teeth murder cycle" (28 January 1946). The Americans also grouped the films in ways that now seem unusual: The Los Angeles Times compared Double Indemnity with the MGM adaptation of William Saroyan's Human Comedy (6 August 1944), and Manny Farber, writing in The New Republic, compared it with Preston Sturges's Miracle of Morgan's Creek (24 August 1944).

French writers, in contrast, were fascinated with the noir metaphor, and in subsequent discussions they elaborated the tensions between the two essays by Frank and Chartier. Over the next decade, as the category expanded and became the subject of retrospectives and catalogues raisonnés, French critics often followed Frank's line, praising noir for its dynamism, its cruelty, and its irrationality; but they also searched the dark Hollywood streets for what Chartier had called "accents of rebellion" against the "fatality of evil." Some of the reasons behind this potentially contradictory response were evident during a round-table discussion at Cahiers du cinéma in 1957, when André Bazin remarked in passing that in the French prewar cinema, "even if there wasn't exactly a genre there was a style, the realist film noir ." Bazin was nostalgic for a lost national identity, but he also recognized that noir had philosophical or ideological significance: French films of the type, he argued, were indebted to surrealism and might have been developed along the lines of literary existentialism. 19

As Bazin's remarks suggest, French discussion of American film noir was conditioned by the prevailing and sometimes conflicting trends in Left Bank intellectual culture. The importance of existentialism to the period has long been recognized; what needs to be emphasized is that existentialism was intertwined with a residual surrealism, and surrealism was crucial for the reception of any art described as "noir." Gallimard's Série noire was conceived and edited by Marcel Duhamel, who assisted in the development of the "Exquisite Corpse" game in 1925, and who participated in the surrealist researches into sexuality during the early 1930s; the Popular Front film noir, especially in such instances as Quai des brumes, was strongly associated with the surrealism of Jacques Prévert; the Anthologie d'humour noir (1940) was edited by André Breton himself; and critical discussion of American films noirs in the 1950s was conducted chiefly in surrealist journals. Indeed, Nino Frank's seminal essay, which emphasizes "criminal adventure" and the "dynamism of violent death," is replete with surrealist values.

From their beginnings in the years after World War I, the surrealists used cinema as an instrument for the destruction of bourgeois art and the desublimation of everyday life. Breton and his associates would pop briefly in and out of movie theaters and write lyrical essays about their experiences, developing what Louis Aragon called a "synthetic" or tangential criticism, which was designed to extract latent, chiefly libidinal meanings from single images or short sequences. This project was facilitated by movies with improbable, confusing, or incoherent narratives: the bad film, the crazy comedy, the horror film, andespecially in the post-World War II erathe Chandleresque detective film, which often lost control of its plot and became a series of hallucinatory adventures in the criminal underworld. 21

The surrealists were "dreaming" cathected details from the cinematic mise-en-scène, but not just any detail caught their eye. They were profoundly attracted to the cinema of the "social fantastic," to stories of doomed erotic love, and to thrillers with Sadeian titles. Among their particular favorites were movies about gangsterism and murder, in part because such pictures depicted violent, antisocial behavior, and in part because they bestowed an aura of the marvelous upon urban decor. As Aragon wrote in 1918, American crime films ''speak of daily life and manage to raise to a dramatic level a banknote on which our attention is riveted, a table with a revolver on it, a bottle that on occasion becomes a weapon, a handkerchief that reveals a crime, a typewriter that's the horizon of a desk." 22

Aragon might well have been describing thrillers of the 1940s, which were perversely erotic, confined largely to interiors, photographed in a deep-focus style that seemed to reveal the secret life of things, and often derived from the literature of alcohola substance especially conducive of desire, enervation, euphoria, confusion, and nightmare. Not surprisingly, such films were admired and discussed in L'Age du cinéma, a surrealist publication of 1951, and in Positif, an influential journal that maintained strong connections with surrealism throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s. They were also given important study in a book that was profoundly surrealist in its ideological aims: Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir américain (1955), which has been described as a "benchmark" for all later work on the topic.

Raymond Borde was a frequent contributor to Positif and the director of Pierre Molinier (1964), a surrealist film with offscreen commentary by André Breton. But we do not need to consult his or Chaumeton's vitae, since their intellectual heritage is apparent from the outset: the Panorama is introduced by Marcel Duhamel, who fondly recalls the years 19231926, when he and other members of the surrealist group, including Breton, Raymond Queneau, Benjamin Peret, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy, watched American gangster films that were "curious, nonconformist, and as noir as one could desire." As if this were not enough, Borde and Chaumeton choose a phrase from Lautréamont, the surrealist's favorite poet, as an epigraph: "The bloody channels through which one pushes logic to the breaking point."