(unconscious superego?), Durgnat obviously believes that noir has Freudian causes that transcend period, genre, and even politics. He is quite good at showing how noir can be appropriated in Hollywood by both Republican and Democratic directors, and he claims that the narratives associated with the term are as old as Oedipus Rex; they can take fascist, Marxist, or liberal forms, and their attitude toward crime 'is as often nihilistic, cynical, or stoic as it is reformatory' (6). This argument not only collapses distinctions between high art and Hollywood, but also obliterates every other historical or generic boundary. Ultimately, noir drifts like a fog across the whole of western culture, threatening to dissolve any trace of identity and difference.
In contrast, most of the new generation of writers in the United States treated film noir nostalgically, as a phenomenon linked to classic Hollywood in the 1940s. They were strongly influenced by the auteurist phase of Cahiers du cinema, and in the years before videocassette recorders were invented, they gained much of their viewing experience through New York's underground network of 'film buffs. ' In Love and Other Infectious Diseases (1989), Molly Haskell's vivid and moving account of her marriage to Andrew Sarris, we find a useful description of the amateur collectors and archivists of the 1960s, most of whom exhibited movies in offices, apartments, and lecture halls:
These were the sort of people you never see or read about, people the media has passed over because in our high-profile success-oriented world they are invisible, 'losers.' As a group, they were almost entirely maleprobably because voyeurism is essentially a male activity, as is complete surrender to fantasy. . . .
Yet Andrew, though resembling them in some outward aspects, wasn't quite one of them. For one thing, he was more interested in good movies than in obscure ones. Once there was a choice between seeing Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and a rural B picture called The Girl of the Limberlost, and Andrew's was the only hand raised in favor of the former. . . . Andrew was archival in his attempt to see everything, constantly promoting the cause of film preservation, but he was continually refining his tastes, whereas a good many of the buffs collected information quantitatively. 46
Sarris was, of course, the most important American exponent of the French politique des auteurs. Through his classroom lectures, books, and weekly columns in The Village Voice, he challenged prevailing ideas about Hollywood and offered a refreshing alternative to established film criticism. Classical in his tastes but committed to the belief that style is the expression of personality, he seldom wrote directly about genres or collective styles; even so, he helped to establish a canon of great Hollywood directors, several of whom were associated with what was increasingly being described as film noir.
Manny Farber, whose work I discuss in a later chapter, was an equally important writer on Hollywood thrillers and pop auteurs during this period, but Farber's approach was quite different from Sarris's. In Negative Space (1971), a brilliant collection of essays from the 1950s and 1960s, Farber never uses the term film noir, and his reviews from the 1940s are less enthusiastic about such pictures as The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity than one might expect. His influential essay 'Underground Films' is nevertheless a classic example of avant-garde appreciation of lowbrow culture, demonstrating the affinity between the most hip and the least respected domains of art. Here and elsewhere, Farber's attitude toward genre movies is in striking contrast with that of a cold-war liberal like Robert Warshow, and his commentaries on the tough-guy films of Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, John Farrow, and Samuel Fuller did much to encourage a taste for pulp among American cineastes.
Against this intellectual backgroundwhich was strengthened by the box-office success of European art films, by changes in censorship and Hollywood production methods, and by teaching at such institutions as New York University and Columbiaa kind of American new wave began to appear. Self-conscious auteurs such as Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and Brian DePalma were influenced by French criticism of the 1950s, and all of their early, low-budget films were somewhat noirish in tone. The figure who most shaped American ideas about noir, however, was Paul Schrader, a young screenwriter and soon-to-be director whose 'Notes on Film Noir,' written for a Los Angeles museum retrospective and published in 1972 in the New York-based Film Comment (a journal that has always been especially interested in noir), became the best-known statement on the topic in the English language.
Near the beginning of the 'Notes,' Schrader acknowledges his indebtedness to Borde and Chaumeton, and to a great extent the first part of his essay merely outlines their historical argument. Like the authors of the Panorama, he thinks of film noir chiefly as a series or cycle (usually he calls it a 'period'): The Maltese Falcon begins it, Kiss Me Deadly provides its definitive or conclusive masterpiece, and Touch of Evil serves as its 'epitaph.'7 But to this chronological scheme, Schrader adds Raymond Durgnat's idea that noir is also a collection of transhistorical motifs, tones, or moods; as a result, he oscillates between discussion of a dead period and discussion of a specific noir style that might be revived by contemporary filmmakers.
Unlike the writers he cites, Schrader is not particularly surrealist in his preoccupations. Instead, he is strongly attracted to existentialist themes, and he puts great emphasis on German expressionism. Partly for this reason, he writes skillfully and at length about visual style (from the vantage point of 1972, it was much easier to see that thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s had a style). He also adds certain new-critical arguments that were familiar to readers of Sarris. For example, he repeatedly insists that art is more important than sociology, and he shows how cinematic tradition nourishes individual talents; thus he nominates photographer John Alton to a pantheon, and he claims (correctly) that 'film noir was good for practically every director's career' (62).
An even more crucial aspect of 'Notes on Film Noir' derives from something it never mentions: the Vietnam War, which functions as a structuring absence. In his third paragraph, for instance, Schrader calls attention to Easy Rider (1969) and Medium Cool (1969), two films that were popularly associated with the counterculture and the antiwar movement. Both pictures, he argues, are 'naive and romantic' in comparison with noir classics such as Kiss Me Deadly and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. He also predicts that 'as the current political mood hardens, . . . [t]he Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties' (53).
In The Great War and Modern Memory (1977), Paul Fussell has observed that writers always struggle to depict a new war by borrowing motifs from the previous one.
Something akin to this process can be seen in Schrader's essay, although in 1972 the Vietnam conflict had been on television for years, its imagery flowing together with the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the military occupation of college campuses, the shootings at Kent State, the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention, the burning of Watts, and countless other scenes of domestic and international violence. Given such a context, Kiss Me Deadly may not seem 'naive and romantic,' but neither does it seem especially shocking. By the same token, Schrader's essay is less interested in finding motifs adequate to the present than in withdrawing into a mood of despair and bitter disengagement. His major theme is the 'creative funk' that supposedly followed in the wake of victory over economic depression and fascism. He places great emphasis on an atmosphere of Germanic determinism and ironya pervasive gloom that hints at some irredeemable evil and meanwhile exposes 'the underside of the American character' (53). Ultimately, he praises noir less because it constitutes a social protest than because it looks stylish, cynical, and pessimistic; its chief value, he says, lies in the fact that in the period between 1941 and 1958, ''Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupt, themes more fatalistic, and the tone more hopeless' (53). Perhaps nothing is more indicative of his attitude (and that of many Americans in his generation) than his description of what he calls 'the overriding noir theme.' According to Schrader, noir expresses 'a passion for the past and present, but also a fear of the future. Noir heroes dread to look ahead, but instead try to survive by the day, and if unsuccessful at that, they retreat into the past. Thus film noir's techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, and insecurity, then submerge these doubts into mannerism and style' (58).
Not surprisingly, Schrader was to explore these themes and tendencies in his filmsespecially in his script for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), which did as much as any critical essay to make noir seem relevant to the period. Treating Vietnam and presidential assassination as mere epiphenomena, this film concentrates on violence, perversion, and decay as seen through the eyes of a cabdriver in the midnight streets of New York. The film's antihero, Travis Bickle, is a returning Vietnam vet, analogous to all those returning World War II soldiers in Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s. (Schrader would use the same theme again in his script for Rolling Thunder in 1977.) The major irony, however, turns on the fact that Bickle is also a sexually repressed paranoid (in some ways like Hitchcock's Norman Bates) and the only character who possesses a
