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Wednesday, September 26
FILM NOIR: THE HISTORY (AND FUTURE) OF A TERM
by
Lloydville
on Wed 26 Sep 2007 08:46 AM PDT
The term film noir
was coined in 1946 by French film critic Nino Frank. The occasion
was a particular week in which five films made earlier in Hollywood but
unavailable to French audiences during the war opened in Paris.
All of them had dark themes and reminded Frank of American pulp fiction
from the 30s.
Much of this fiction had been published in France
under the Série Noire ("Black Series") imprint and so Frank,
logically enough, labeled the five films films noirs. Three of the films, Murder, My Sweet (above, at the top of the post), Double Indemnity and The Phantom Lady were in fact based on the work of pulp fiction writers -- Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The Woman In the Window, below, was more in the line of a Hitchcockian psychological thriller, a form Hitchcock had mastered before the war. Laura was a fairly standard murder mystery, a form that also predated WWII, though very elegantly executed.
In short, there was nothing terribly new about the five films in
question, though all were perhaps a little darker and edgier in tone
than similar Hollywood films from before the war had been.
Because the French had not been able to see the gradual development of
this tone during the war years, it came as something of a revelation.
But after 1946 a new film tradition emerged which diverged from the
hardboiled detective fiction of the 30s -- and from the rancid domestic
dramas of Cain and from the
Hitchcockian suspense thriller and
from
the classic murder mystery. It was a body of work which
specifically addressed post-war, atomic age anxieties. In this
body of work, the underworld of pulp fiction seemed to have become the
only world. Its protagonists were not wisecracking knights errant
who ventured onto
the wild side of things to solve a crime, nor were they everymen forced
to brave an ordeal to become stronger and wiser, nor were they
committed
criminals, following transgressive urges to an inevitable and
cautionary doom, a doom which
restored society's moral norms. They
were men in a state
of existential despair, unsure of how the world worked anymore, at the
mercy of strong women, morally bewildered. The doom they
often met with solved nothing, restored nothing. It was, in a
sense, an expression of the post-traumatic stress disorder of the
generation which had fought WWII and could never again see "normal"
life in the same way again -- especially not in the enduring shadow of
nuclear
annihilation.
This new tradition naturally enough assumed the label film noir,
even though it was quite distinct from the kinds of films that inspired
the label, the kinds of films out of which the new tradition emerged.
The imprecision of the term film noir was built into its history, so to speak. Most of the films we now think of as classic films noirs
were made after the term was invented. They eventually came to
constitute a distinct cycle, which flourished for more than a decade
before it played itself out toward the end of the 50s.
I think the time has come to consider this cycle apart from the kinds of films that were first called films noirs -- and I think the only sensible way to do this is to violate the history of the term film noir
and to apply it only to the distinct cycle that emerged, for the most
part, after the term's invention. In fact, I would argue that
none of the five films that inspired Frank's phrase really belong to the
tradition of the classic film noir.
In the interest of clarity and a sharper kind of analysis, we need to distinguish film noir
from the various traditions out of which it developed. Pulp
fiction, or hardboiled detective fiction, are terms that serve perfectly well to label the sort of films
made from the works of writers like Chandler, Woolrich and Cain.
Hitchcockian is a term that serves perfectly well to label the sorts of
thrillers he specialized in. Murder mystery is a term that serves perfectly well to describe a film like Laura. The cycle of films that emerged
after WWII, what might be called the atomic-age crime thriller, was
something else again and it needs its own label . . . film noir.
Tuesday, September 11
POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER AND FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 11 Sep 2007 02:26 AM PDT
World
War Two was a "good war". America and its allies pulled together
and destroyed the Axis powers. On balance, and in retrospect, it
has to be considered one of the great achievements of
humane civilization. But human beings don't live on balance or in
retrospect, particularly where war is concerned. They live inside
the horror of it and it takes a toll on individuals and on societies
which can never be fully measured.
The upbeat spirit of American propaganda during the war, and the
genuine satisfactions of victory, veiled the true experience of the war
for millions -- not just for those who fought it on the battlefields of the
world, but for those at home who lived in terror that their loved ones at
the front might never return . . . and of course, most especially, for those at home whose loved ones
didn't return. On a broader level, anyone who simply witnessed
the
spectacle of total war on a global scale, from whatever distance, had
to have experienced a soul-shaking anxiety about the fragility of all
social structures and cultural norms.
After WWII, the whole planet experienced post-traumatic stress disorder
-- localized in this case by the fact of the atomic bomb, which ended
the war but left the world with a paradox that wouldn't go away.
It took an act of colossal horror to finally "win" this good
war. And the prospect of this horror being again visited on the
world was far from unimaginable.
We now know a lot more than we used to about post-traumatic stress
disorder and the ways it can be treated. In the immediate post-war era, the
phenomenon was more elusive, and often unrecognized. We made
meaningful social restitutions to the veterans of the war, with measures like
the G. I. Bill -- we reconstructed the devastated nations we
conquered. But that just scratched the surface.
It was in art that the true psychic cost of the war was exposed and explored -- nowhere more pointedly than in film noir.
The sort of trauma that engenders PTSD is identifiable by several
characteristics -- a sense of being out of control and confused, a
sense of terror, a sense of being outside the normal realm of human
experience. Is there a better description of the usual
predicament of the protagonist in a classic film noir?
PTSD on a broad cultural and societal level is what best explains the phenomenon of film noir,
which on its surface is so mysterious. Why should a triumphant
nation, after a great collective victory in a good war, have been
gripped by that mood of existential dread which informs so many Hollywood films of the post-war era?
Why should the most spectacular achievement of American arms have led
to a crisis of manhood, a sense of impotence, a fear of powerful women
incarnated in the morbid fantasy of the femme fatale?
Film noir was a dream
landscape where the buried costs of WWII could be recognized, reckoned
and mourned, as
a prelude to psychic recovery, or at least psychic survival.
Veterans of combat often report the difficulty of dealing with people
who have not shared their experience of it -- people who can never
really know what it's like. Film noir,
far more than the WWII combat film, was one of the few arenas of
American life where the true legacies of war, its lingering moral and
psychological dislocations, could be engaged without apology or shame.
Monday, September 3
THE NARROW MARGIN
by
Lloydville
on Mon 03 Sep 2007 08:07 AM PDT
An excellent brief review (with plot spoilers) of The Narrow Margin on the ever-useful films noir web site. I personally classify this film as a police procedural, not a genuine film noir -- which I think helps explain why the treatment of the apparent femme fatale, played by Marie Windsor, is so unsatisfying. Femmes fatales
serve no real dramatic purpose in a police procedural -- they're just,
if anything, red herrings . . . and who wants to see Marie Windsor
treated as a red herring?
Meanwhile Joe D'Augustine from Film Forno sends this comment on Odds Against Tomorrow:
"This
is a great movie! One of Jean Pierre Melville's favorites. Ryan and
Belafonte are amazing. Bravo to HB for financing it, that took guts and
no wonder it dealt with the frustrations of a black American male so
honestly. It was also one of the first films edited by DeDe Allen, her
next was The Hustler. The old cop who got screwed out of his pension is
excellent as well. Ed Begley, Is he corrupt or was he turned corrupt by
a corrupt system? I guess he is on a friendly basis with the
bookie/gangster. And he is the mastermind of the big steal. Great
locations, it is one of Wise's best! He really made all kinds of films
and made them well."
Saturday, September 1
NOIRISH: DOMESTIC NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 01 Sep 2007 04:46 AM PDT
The dark view of the world reflected in traditional film noir
found expression in other kinds of Hollywood movies, ones which didn't
necessarily reflect a preoccupation with specifically male anxieties or
use the night-time urban underworld as an image. A strong tradition emerged
which centered on the home and domestic relationships and the ways
these seemed to be threatened by the colossal derangement of war on a
global scale and later by the specter of nuclear annihilation. Here are some of the films I see as representative
of this tradition:
Shadow Of A Doubt
Double Indemnity
Clash By Night
Blonde Ice
Leave Her To Heaven
Sunset Boulevard
The Night Of the Hunter
Scarlet Street
Daisy Kenyon
The Bad and the Beautiful
American homes weren't physically threatened by the violence
of WWII, at least not directly, but millions of sons and husbands and fathers from those homes
were sent out into harm's way -- and the whole scale of the war seemed
to be a threat to the very idea of social order, to the very idea of
home and family as the bonding agents of civilization.
Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt was the first great expression of this sense of domestic insecurity. Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity
offered a vision of how comfortable middle-class life might be infected
by the violence and cynicism of a world that had seemingly gone
mad. In the post-war era, in the shadow of nuclear annihilation,
other films, like Leave Her To Heaven and Clash By Night, reflected a deep suspicion of the old domestic verities -- a sense that they might no longer be viable.
I would place Wilder's Sunset Boulevard in the category of domestic noir.
For one thing its action is mostly centered inside one house -- but
the whole film is basically Wilder's deconstruction of his "home", Hollywood, for which he felt both affection and
disgust. (Wilder's cynicism was very personal and eccentric, so
its dangerous to connect it too directly with broader social currents
-- but it's clear that these broader social currents made his dark
visions commercially viable, and he must certainly have had at
least an intuitive appreciation of this fact.)
The Night Of the Hunter is, in my opinion, way too poetic, metaphorical and explicitly religious to be called a film noir, but it's certainly a dark film, and it deals with the issues of collapsed manhood that also informed the classic films noirs. If anything it's domestic noir.
It deals with the destruction of one home by a failed father, a long,
perilous journey in search of a new home, and the threat to that new
home by a demonic shadow father. Its expressionistic visual style
harks back to the silent era, to the UFA style, and has little in
common with the harsh, jagged, tabloid-style photography of classic noir.
It's interesting to note that The Night Of the Hunter was a box-office flop on its initial release, while the general run of classic films noirs
were consistently (if modestly) profitable almost to the end of the
Fifties. This suggests that Americans weren't prepared to
confront their post-war anxieties about manhood and the home too
directly. The film noir
form allowed for a kind of indirect expression of these anxieties
within the context of a nominally conventional crime thriller.
When exposed outside this context, as in The Night Of the Hunter,
they turned audiences off -- the medicine was just too strong, the
scalpel too close to the bone. (Note that in the poster above, Sunset Boulevard
identifies itself as "a Hollywood story" whose pathology of the
collapsed male could, presumably, be imagined as confined to Tinsel
Town.)
All the films listed above involve murder or the threat of murder, which is why they are often thought of as films noirs, but they differ from the classic film noir in that they offer a strong female perspective and locate the origins of their existential catastrophes inside a home or homes.
The anxieties addressed by these domestic noirs
would be addressed more subtly and ultimately more accessibly in other kinds of
films in the 50s, most notably in the work of Douglas Sirk and in the
cycle of films concentrating on teen angst. When
filmmakers were able to deal with dark visions of American domestic
life outside the conventions of a crime thriller, the domestic noir lost much of its usefulness as a form.
[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . . Clash By Night is included in the Warner DVD noir series . . . noir expert Eddie Muller considers Sunset Boulevard one of the greatest of all noirs . . . Leave Her To Heaven, Shadow Of A Doubt and Double Indemnity are included in Nicholas Christopher's noir filmography in his book Somewhere In the Night and appear on many other lists of films noirs . . . the Wikipedia entry on the subject identifies The Night Of the Hunter as a classic-era film noir . . . the Internet Movie Database, as well as the VCI DVD, call Blonde Ice a film noir . . . Scarlet Street is included in Kino's second box set of films noirs . . . Daisy Kenyon is part of Fox's DVD noir series.]
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