More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

After an art-historical category has been named and its key members identified, critics usually try to explain its causes or genealogy. This is the task undertaken in the second chapter of Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir americain, in which the authors discuss six major 'sources' of American film noir. Three of the sources are sociological: a new realism about violence in the wake of World War II, a rise in the American crime rate, and a widespread institutionalization and popularization of psychoanalysis. The rest are artistic: the hardboiled crime novel, the European cinema, and certain Hollywood genres of the 1930sespecially horror films at Universal, gangster movies at Warner, and classic detective pictures at Fox.

Somewhat surprisingly, Borde and Chaumeton argue that European cinema was a 'feeble' influence and that American noir should be understood chiefly within the 'Hollywood professional context.' Even so, the genres they mention (such as the 1930s horror picture) were sometimes indebted to European emigres, and the artistic ideology they describe clearly belongs to an older, cosmopolitan tradition. At one point, they argue that noir made gangsters more psychologically complex and sympathetic, horror more quotidian, and detective fiction less rational. Leaving aside the references to popular formulas, these are more or less the values of modernist literature since the beginning of the century.

Here we need to keep in mind that virtually all of the initial cycle of American films noirs were adapted from critically admired novels. We also need to remember that the Parisian critics who invented the idea of American film noir in the late 1940s were writing at a time when their city was attempting a return or a repetition of its cultural role in the 1920s and 1930s. Existentialism was replacing surrealism as the dominant philosophy, but Paris was once again a staging ground for revolutionary artistic movements, a capital of jazz, and a cheap haven for foreign writers. The initial discourse on Hollywood's dark cinema therefore coincides with one of the last important moments in the history of international modernism. Sometimes the connection between the Parisian cinephiles and the older generation of high modernists was quite specific. For example, Nino Frank, who is usually credited with the first application of the term film noir to American thrillers, was a close friend of James Joyce during the 1930s and helped Joyce translate 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' into Italian; according to Joyce's biographer, Richard Ellmann, Frank often took Joyce to the movies.

This does not mean that the French imagined everything they saw at the cinema. If Paris was a center of modernism, so, in a more qualified sense, was Los Angeles, which provided a temporary home for central European exiles from the war and for major American writers such as William Faulkner. A great many films of the 1940s were clearly indebted to modernist art, and sometimes the indebtedness went beyond mere technique. During the period in question, however, it makes just as much sense to argue that certain directors, writers, and photographers were trying to invest melodramatic formulas with a degree of artistic significance. By 1945, modernism had assumed an overriding importance, supplementing the older canon, shaping most artistic practices, and determining critical interpretation of the past and the present. It was quite simply the most respected art among the educated classesthe kind that was regarded as more authentic, more important as a commentary on modern experience, and more relevant to the intellectual concerns of the day. It was also becoming institutionalized and fully absorbed into what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called 'the culture industry.' Thus in a 1944 commentary on James Hadley Chase's best-selling noir novel, No Orchards for Miss Blandish, George Orwell grumbled, 'Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs.' ¹

If modernism did not directly cause the film noir, it at least determined the way certain movies were conceived and appreciated. There was, in fact, something inherently noirlike in the established tradition of modern art. To make this point clear, let me offer a few commonplace generalizations about high modernismbearing in mind that, like film noir, modernism is an idea constructed ex post facto by critics, and that it refers to a great many artists of different styles, sexes, nationalities, religious persuasions, and political inclinations. (One of the first appearances of the term in English is in a 1927 poetry anthology by Robert Graves and Laura Riding, but it did not gain widespread use until the 1960s.) I shall draw most of my examples from English and American literature, in part because noir has always had strong literary associations, and in part because I am leading up to a discussion of several English-language writers who worked for the movies.

First of all, modernism was an older, more wide-reaching manifestation of the same dialectic between Europe and America (or between vanguard art and mass culture) that produced the discourse on film noir itself. A metropolitan development largely associated with white male artists, it was fully established in New York, Chicago, and the major European capitals by 1914, slightly before World War I shattered the confidence of the previous century's established institutions. Because it was generated during the second industrial revolution, it was frequently about things such as metro stations, rail travel, cinemas, jazz, and the spaces of urban modernity. But modernism had a complex, ambivalent relation to the dominant economy. After World War I, as economic power shifted westward, and as Hollywood began to dominate the world's imagination, the leading modern writers grew increasingly conflicted in their attitude toward the United States, which seemed both a dynamic force of change and a threat to civilized Europe.

This ambivalence was especially apparent in Weimar Germany, where a complex discourse on Americanism persisted throughout the 1920s; its larger history, however, can be traced back to nineteenth-century artists such as Charles Baudelaire, whose paradoxical aestheticism was developed in direct response to bourgeois capitalism and the rise of urban mass culture. ²

In some of its most elite manifestations (such as the writings of T. S. Eliot), modernism was critical not merely of America but of modernity altogetherincluding Enlightenment rationalism, industrial technology, and liberal or social democracy.³ In formal terms, it was often detached, aestheticized, and self-reflexive, and at its extremes it led to what Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset called a 'dehumanization.' The most radical modernist painting emphasized the surface of the canvas rather than the thing depicted; and the most radical modernist writing, beginning with Stephane Mallarme, subverted what Roland Barthes would later term 'readerly' values. The modernist devaluation of content, however, was usually more advertised than practiced. One of the obvious aims of the new art was to create scandal and thereby challenge dominant values at the levels of both the signifier and the signified. Vanguard art in the 1920s was not merely a matter of paintings that problematized vision or novels in which nothing seemed to happen; it was also an assault on bourgeois Europe's ideals of sexuality, family, and religion, and on provincial America's fundamentalism and Babbittry.

Even before the censorship scandals over Madame Bovary, Ulysses, and The Rainbow, European literature was preoccupied with individual subjectivitya topic that led naturally to explorations of sex and the 'Primitive' unconscious. Prior to World War I, in the work of British and American authors such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Maddox Ford (all of whom were indebted to Gustave Flaubert), impressionistic narration and the control of point of view became the hallmarks of modern literary art. Additional support for 'deep' narrative techniques, involving stream of consciousness and nonlinear plot, was ultimately found in Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri-Louis Bergson, and Sigmund Freud. Sometimes these techniques were used to reveal savagery or death instincta killer inside us, living below the surface of rational life. ⁴ Furthermore, the new novel mounted an implicit critique of industrial modernity's sense of progressive or nonrepeatable time. As David Lodge puts it, one of the chief characteristics of modernist fiction is that it 'eschews the straight chronological ordering of its material, and the use of a reliable, omniscient and intrusive narrator. It employs, instead, either a single, limited point of view or multiple viewpoints, all more or less limited and fallible; and it tends toward a complex or fluid handling of time, involving much cross-reference back and forward across the temporal span of the action.'⁵

The modernist concern with subjectivity and depth psychology was given a further impetus by social modernity and the emancipation of women, which brought new subjectivities into being. However, the relationship between modernism and the new woman was troubled, particularly in the case of the male moderns, who offered a liberating honesty about sex while at the same time mounting a gendered opposition to establishment culture. A locus classicus is the climactic scene of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (often described as the urtext of British modernism), in which Marlow finds it impossible to tell the truth to Kurtz's sheltered fiancee, 'the Intended.' At about this time in London, T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound were attempting to replace the flowery rhetoric of late-Victorian poetry with 'hard' and 'clear' imagery. Attacks on the supposedly genteel, ladylike taste of the middle class were intensified in the years after World War I, when all forms of writing, from verse to journalism, became more plainspoken and 'masculine.' For those writers who had experienced combat, beautiful images and poetic diction seemed almost obscene: a horse should be called a horse, not a 'steed' or a 'charger,' and a good novelist or newspaper editor should approach language in much the same way as Pound approached poetry,