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

3. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, eds., Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1992), omit a number of ntles that might be includedbut as Marc Vernet has noted, one of the beauties of the category is that "there is always an unknown film to be added to the list" ("Film Noir on the Edge ," 1). For a larger filmography, see Spencer Selby, Dark City: The Film Noir (Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, 1984). See also Robin Buss, French Film Noir, who lists 101 examples of French film noir between 1942 and 1993, including A Man Escaped and Weekend. Patrick Brion's handsomely illustrated Le film noir (Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 1992) discusses several movies that are not usually placed in the categoryamong them, Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

4. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 153. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

5. Vian used the pen name "Vernon Sullivan" on several occasions, and many of his readers believed that Vernon Sullivan was an African American. The name was inspired by two black jazz musicians from AmericanPaul Vernon and Joe Sullivan.

6. I am grateful to Peter Wollen for calling my attention to Boris Vian and his relevance to the postwar cultural climate in France. See Philippe Boggio, Boris Vian (Paris: Flammarion, 1993); also James Campbell, "Sullivan, the Invisible Man," Times Literary Supplement (28 January 1994): 7. In an earlier published essay that formed the basis of this chapter, I claimed that J'irai cracher was the basis for I Spit on Your Grave (1977), a low-budget American horror film directed by Emir Zarchi. I have subsequently discovered that Zarchi's film has no connection with Vian's novel. In 1997, Hawks and Sparrows Films, an independent company, optioned the rights to J'irai cracher. Production was scheduled to begin in 1998.

7. Academic feminism has shown that many of the films called noir are pre-occupied with Freud's famous question, Was will das Weib? Laura Mulvey confirms this point in a recent interview: "It has been established very plausibly through feminist film theory, particularly around work on film noir, that the woman in Hollywood cinema is not necessarily only the object of the gaze, but also the object of inquiry" (my emphasis). See Juan Suarez and Millicent Manglis, "Cinema, Gender, and the Topography of Enigmas: A Conversation with Laura Mulvey, Cinefocus 3 (1994):

3. Mulvey herself has emphasized the sadistic component of voyeurism, and her writings have been elaborated and debated in a large literature on psychoanalytic feminism. Among the best known examples are Kaplan, Women in Film Noir, and Mary Anne Doane, "Gilda: Epistemology as Striptease," Camera Obscura, no. 11 (1983): 727.

8. In France, today, cinéma noir refers to African-American cinema. Higham and Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties, use "Black Cinema" as the title for their chapter on noir, but they employ the French term when they discuss films. For an interesting paper on films noirs directed by African Americans, see Manthia Diawara, "Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema," in Copjec, Shades of Noir, 26178.

9. Jacques Bourgeois, "La Tragédie policier," Revue du cinéma 2 (1946): 7072.

10. Palmer is almost the only writer on film noir who recognizes that movies have different meanings for different audiences. My survey of French criticism differs from his, but I recommend his discussion of writings on noir in Hollywood's Dark Cinema, 131. See also his anthology, Perspectives on Film Noir (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), which contains useful translations of French writings.

11. For a discussion of the Americanization of French culture in general during this period, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Decolonization, and the Reordering of French Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).

12. For recent books on these films in English, see Edward Byron Turk, Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). For an amusing discussion of "noir-like" aspects of French movies in the 1930s, see Manohla Dargis, "Cool Chats," The Village Voice, 6 July 1993: 50. The importance of noir in France both before and after the war has also been suggested in two essays by Ginette Vincendeau: "France 19451965 and Hollywood: The Policier as Inter-national Text," Screen 33, no. 1 (spring 1992): 5080; and ''Noir Is Also a French Word: The French Antecedents of Film Noir," in The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1993), 4958.

13. Charles O'Brien, "Film Noir in France: Before the Liberation," Iris 21 (spring 1996): 720. Of course the term noir has an even older history; it describes the roman noir, or gothic novel, and in French literary criticism it suggests the decadent tendencies of late romanticism.

14. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that The Maltese Falcon was "worthy to stand with the English-made mysteries of Al fred Hitchcock" (25 October 1941), and The New York Times described John Huston as "a coming American match for Alfred Hitchcock" (12 October 1941). Time magazine compared Falcon with films by Hitchcock and Carol Reed (20 October 1941). Wilder's statement is quoted from The Los Angeles Times (6 August 1944).

15. The omission of Germany is not surprising, given the historical circumstances.

The French "rediscovery" of German cinema began in the 1950s and was stimulated by the French publication of Lotte Eisner's work on expressionism. See Thomas Elsaesser, "A German Ancestry to Film Noir? Film History and Its lmaginary," Iris 21 (spring 1996): 12943. In the mid 1940s, the French also failed to mention that the vogue for James M. Cain had started outside America: The Postman Always Rings Twice was adapted by the French themselves in 1939, and by the Italians in 1943. Among the British films that could have been discussed alongside the new Hollywood thrillers was Hotel Reserve (1944), which was based on an Eric Ambler novel. Directed by Lance Comfort, with James Mason and Herbert Lom in featured roles, this picture looks quite noirish in retrospect.

16. Nino Frank, "Un nouveau genre 'policier': L'aventure criminelle," L'écran français 61 (28 August 1946): 14; my translation. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text. Frank mentions Hitchcock's Suspicion but only to note that he finds it an "absolute failure," unworthy of comparison with Double Indemnity.

17. Jean-Pierre Chattier, "Les Américains aussi font des films noirs," Revue du cinéma 2 (1946): 67; my translation. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

18. One exception was Sigfried Kracauer, "Hollywood's Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?" Commentary (August 1946): 13236. Kracauer had recently completed From Caligari to Hitler, and he used the same arguments to discuss American "terror films," including Shadow of a Doubt, The Stranger, The Dark Corner, The Spiral Staircase, and The Lost Weekend. His essay is discussed in Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 45, and in Edward Dimendberg. "Film Noir and Urban Space,'' Ph.D. diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 1992, 11663.