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

Rohmer and several of his colleagues at Cahiers du cinéma belonged to a generation that imbibed its existentialism and phenomenology from André Bazin, who was a more conservative and in some ways more consistent writer than Sartre. 36In Qu'est-ce que la littérature? Sartre struggled to reconcile modernist narration with political engagement; Bazin could avoid the problem, because his essays, posthumously collected in Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (19581962), were couched in terms of moral dilemmas or the problem of death. Like most of the French, Bazin was interested in modern American fiction, and he often used a Sartrean vocabulary ("freedom," "fate," "authenticity," and so on). In fact, many of the basic tenets of his theoretical writing resemble Sartre's arguments about literature, minus any traces of Marxism. On the grounds of "realism,'' for example, Sartre wanted to do away with both omniscient narration and temporal ellipsis; modern narratives, he argued, should resemble Ulysses, employing multiple perspectives and detailed renditions of a day, an hour, or even a minute (158). For his part, Bazin argued that cinema should provide relatively passive observation rather than intrusive commentary and should make greater use of long takes or temps morts, such as the coffee-making sequence in De Sica's Umberto D. In place of Sartre's neutral or ambiguous literary narrators, however, Bazin valorized the camera, which he regarded as a phenomenology machine that could preserve ambiguous reality without the tendentious intervention of a human hand. 37

Bazin's style of existentialism is everywhere apparent in his 1957 eulogy for Humphrey Bogart, written only two years before Bazin's own death. According to Bazin, Bogart was important because "the raison d'être of his existence was in some sense to survive," and because the alcoholic lines visible on his face revealed "the corpse on reprieve within each of us" (Hillier, 98). Jean Gabin, the star of prewar French films noirs, seemed romantic by comparison; Bogart was a man "defined by fate," and because he was associated with "the noir crime film whose ambiguous hero he was to epitomize," he became the quintessential "actor/myth of the postwar period" (Hillier, 99). Bazin argued that Bogart's portrayal of Sam Spade was equivalent to the almost simultaneous release of Citizen Kane: "It must be the case," he wrote, "that there is some secret harmony in the coincidence of these events: the end of the prewar period, the arrival of a certain novelistic style of cinematographic écriture, and, through Bogart, the triumph of interiorization and ambiguity" (Hillier, 100).

The "ambiguity" of which Bazin speaks is quite different from the disorientation or inversion of norms valued by the surrealists. It has more to do with ethical complexity and with the cinema's ability to capture what Bazin elsewhere calls the "structure of reality" in all its phenomenological uncertainty. Likewise, Bazin's "interiorization" has little to do with the Freudian subconscious. It suggests instead a radical isolation or individuality that forces the subject to create identity out of existential choice. Bazin apparently believed that the "secret harmony" linking Bogart and Orson Welles was a cultural by-product of what French literary critic Claude-Edmonde Magny (in a book heavily influenced by Sartre) called "the age of the American novel." On a more general level, however, the themes of isolation, uncertainty, and ambiguity must have exerted a strong appeal to anyone who was wary of collective politics and inclined to treat social issues in terms of personal ethics.

During this period, younger critics at Cahiers du cinéma began to project Bazin's ideas onto Hollywood, sometimes treating the film noir as if it were an existential allegory of the white male condition. The favored existential hero, however, was not Bogart but Nicholas Ray, who had directed They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place, and On Dangerous Ground. François Truffaut wrote that the essential theme of Ray's films was "moral solitude," and Jacques Rivette argued that Ray was concerned with "the interior demon of violence, which seems linked to man and his solitude." At this juncture, the terms film noir and auteur began to work in tandem, expressing the same values from different angles. (It is no accident that the two terms would enter the English language at the same moment.) Film noir was a collective style operating within and against the Hollywood system; and the auteur was an individual stylist who achieved freedom over the studio through existential choice. But the auteur was more important than the genre. Unlike Borde and Chaumeton, who used the names of directors only as a convention of French scholarship, the Cahiers group always subordinated general forms to personal visions. In other words, France was not far from the nouvelle vague.

To see what the future had in store, we need only consider Claude Chabrol's 1955 Cahiers essay "The Evolution of the Thriller," which pays special attention to Kiss Me Deadly.

Like Borde and Chaumeton, Chabrol regarded this picture as a watershed, although he believed its significance had less to do with the end of a genre than with the creation of a cinema of authors. By the mid 1950s, Chabrol argued, the literary sources of film noir had ' 'dried up," and the plots and mise-en-scènes were clichéd. There was no question of renewing the form, but it had become a "wonderful pretext'': "[Kiss Me Deadly] has chosen to create itself out of the worst material to be found, the most deplorable, the most nauseous product of a genre in a state of putrefaction: a Mickey Spillane story. Robert Aldrich and A. I. Bezzerides have taken this threadbare and lackluster fabric and woven it into rich patterns of the most enigmatic arabesques." 40

Clearly, an art cinema based on transformation of "the worst material" was about to appear. In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless was released, and Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player soon followed. Both films were fusions of Bazinian neorealism and surrealist disjunctions; both were littered with references to Bogart, Gun Crazy, On Dangerous Ground, and so on; and both made film noir available as a "pretext" for directors who wanted to assert their personalities. Also in 1959, Boris Vian died in a Paris movie theater. The first age of film noir had ended.

The discourse on American film noir was initiated by two generations of Parisian intellectuals, most of whom declared the form extinct soon after they invented it. Many of the films they discussed had been directed by European émigrés (mainly Germans), who used tough, Hemingwayesque dialogue and American production values to bestow a kind of glamour upon the dark emotional moods favored by Continental artists of the postwar decade. For the French especially, an American star like Bogart epitomized these moods. Bogart's persona was tough, introspective, emotionally repressed, and fond of whiskey and cigarettes; within certain limits, he suggested a liberal intellectual, and he was sometimes cast in the role of a writer or director. Hence the Bogart thriller became a mirror in which European cinéastes could see their own faces.

Significantly, the French began to lose interest in noir at about the time their own art cinema became internationally successful. But the vogue for realistic, atmospheric novels and films about criminal violence had never been confined to France, and it never disappeared. In Argentina, for example, a craze for hard-boiled fiction lasted from 1946 until 1960, and a large critical literature grew up around Spanish-language translations of Hammett, Chandler, and David Goodis. Many authors in Western Europe and Latin America worked in the tough-guy vein (Argentina's Rodolfo, J. Walsh began writing noir political fiction in the 1960s), and filmmakers in several countries made pictures that resembled dark Hollywood thrillers. Meanwhile, crime in the city, which is one of America's favorite themes, continued to be exploited by politicians, journalists, and artists of every kind. Thus when French critical terminology crossed to Britain and America, it exerted considerable influence and acquired new interpreters. Eventually, as old movies became increasingly available on television or in retrospectives, a European image of America was internalized by the Americans themselves. By the 1990s, noir had acquired the aura of art and had evolved into what Dennis Hopper describes as "every director's favorite genre." 41