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

19. Notice also that Out of the Past contains several brief but eloquent camera movementsas in the scene in which the camera pans slowly from Jeff Bailey, who is seated at a bar, to Kathie Moffat, who enters the room. Midway through the pan, the image dissolves, signifying the passage of time. This photographic lyricism, which is evident in both low-key and high-key scenes, can also be found in Tourneur's other great film noir, Nightfall (1957), photographed by Burnett Guffey.

20. Whether we are speaking of black and white or color, it is much more difficult for a photographer to make films look interesting in daylight than in darkness. On sunny days, it helps a great deal to have the spectacular mountain scenery and expansive sky of westerns, as in Out of the Past. The most difficult scenes in daytime are the ones shot on city streets. "If you have a totally dark room and you have a night scene," photographer Michael Chapman observes, "you do it all. . . . But if you have a day exterior, there's just plain less you can do on it. . . . I think a lot of [the problem] is simply the enormous recalcitrance of daytime. It's simply unavoidable" (Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato, Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 106).

21. Most of the statistics in this paragraph are derived from Kinden, "Hollywood's Conversion to Color." An extensive discussion of color technology and its ideological implications may be found in Neale, Cinema and Technology.

22. François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 13132. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

23. A similar lighting style was used in The Dark Corner (1946), an impressive black-and-white thriller on which Henry Hathaway and Joe MacDonald also collaborated.

24. To get a sense of how foreign pictures were perceived in America at the time, see J. Lee Thompson's comedy, What a Way to Go! (1964), which parodies a wide range of contemporary styles, including a Ross Hunter melodrama in wide screen, and a European art movie in black and white.

25. Raging Bull also mixes color with black and white, but it reserves the color for a brief montage of grainy home movies. Martin Scorsese used the release of the film as an occasion to argue publicly for the preservation of old Technicolor prints and to call attention to the inferiority of contemporary color stocks. It should also be noted that most of the filmmakers I have mentioned were quick to protest television mogul Ted Turner's attempt to computer-colorize the classic black-and-white movies.

26. There are practical as well as cultural reasons for New York cinema's affinity with darkness. Hollywood cameraman Bill Butler, who began his career in Chicago and who later photographed such noirlike pictures as The Conversation (1974), remarks that "the people who shoot the best at night come out of New York. They've shot on the streets of New York so much, they don't use anything hardly in the way of light. But they've got street lights and store windows to do it there" (Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, 86).

27. Gordon Willis says that the technique of amber light "broke out like a plague" after he completed The Godfather. "And today, people still apply it. It's applied indiscriminately, I might add. Because doing that does not automatically make it a period movie" (Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, 288). Another fashionnow happily passing awaywas the use of fog machines to give a smoky Stimmung to interiors. Along similar lines, the better photographers of the period began to shoot outdoor scenes at the "magic hour" of duska technique that gave the actors a natural rimlight, and the world around them a kind of glow. This style was used effectively by Jordan Cronenweter in one of the most unusual and neglected films noirs of recent decades: Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way (1981).

28. Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, 111.

29. Throughout this discussion, I omit camera movements, but it should be noted that most of the best-known "neo-noirs" contain spectacular tracking shots made possible by Steadicams or other new technologies. Portable cameras and "optical tracking" movements made possible by zoom lenses are in fact the chief markers of post-1970s cinematography. Scorsese's work, not only in Taxi Driver, but also in Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino, is particularly dependent on these shots. Brian DePalma and other directors often use 360-degree tracking movements in place of shot-reverse shot combinations. The opening sequence of Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995) is a subjective POV shot that covers a violent robbery from beginning to end, starting in the back seat of an automobile and running up and down several floors of a building.

30. Peter Wollen, "MTV, and Postmodernism, Too," in Futures for English, ed. Colin MacCabe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 168.

31. Frederic Jameson argues that parody is always critical and mocking and is typical of a society that has a normative conception of language. He therefore sharply distinguishes parody from pastiche, which he defines as a "neutral" or "blank" imitation of dead stylesa mimicry "without a satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic" ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society,'' in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster [Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983], 114).

My own use of the term is closer to the one in Linda Hutcheon's useful book, A Theory of Parody. Hutcheon argues that parody need not be comic; its general purpose is to establish a "difference and distance from the original text or set of conventions," and it has a variety of uses in contemporary art. Its modern forms usually presuppose "both a law and its transgression, or both repetition and difference." As a result, depending on its specific context, parody can be "both conservative and transformative, both 'mystificatory' . . . and critical'' (Theory of Parody [New York: Methuen, 1985], 101).

32. Raymond Chandler's eye for fashion is discussed by Dana Thomas in "Pulp Fashion," The New York Times Magazine (4 December 1994): 1045.

33. At the height of the craze for lames M. Cain in the late 1930s, there was a popular song entitled "The Postman Always Rings Twice, the Iceman Walks Right In." There were also countless parodies of Cain, including James Thurber's "Hell Only Breaks Loose Once." Where movie musicals are concerned, see George Cukor's Les Girls (1957), which contains an elaborate parody of Brando in The Wild One (1954), performed by Gene Kelly.

34. "I am constantly tempted to burlesque the whole thing," Chandler remarked after completing The Big Sleep. "I find myself kidding myself. . . . Why is it that Americansof all people the quickest to reverse their moodsdo not see the strong element of burlesque in my writing?" (quoted in Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976], 93). He also claimed that two of his early stories, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" and "Smart-Aleck Kill," were "pure pastiche" (Frank MacShane, ed., Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler [New York: Columbia University Press, 1981], 187). In the 1940s, S. J. Perelman wrote a parody of Chandler for The New Yorker ("Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer"). Chandler loved it, and he and Perelman became good friends.

35. Even though the Germans had a crucially important influence on historical film noir, Wim Wenders claimed that he was unable to make "any connections between the films Fritz Lang made in America and the ones he made in Germany." For him, noir was a Hollywood invention, associated with the flood of American pop culture that spread throughout Germany at the end of the war. Because of his ambivalence about this culture, Wenders paid oblique, ironic tribute to American sources of the 1940s and 1950s, casting pop icon Dennis Hopper as an American crook who wants to "bring the Beatles back to Hamburg," Samuel Fuller as a Mafia dealer in international pornography, and Nicholas Ray aK an artist who lives by forgery.