More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

kinship with Jorge Luis Borges's fictional work of Chinese scholarship, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which contains a whimsical taxonomy of the animal kingdom: those belonging to the Emperor; mermaids; stray dogs; those painted with a fine camel's hair brush; those resembling flies from a distance; others; and so on. Unfortunately, nothing links together all the things described as noirnot the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings. Little wonder that no writer has been able to find the category's necessary and sufficient characteristics and that many generalizations in the critical literature are open to question. If noir is American in origin, why does it have a French name? (The two Frenchmen who supposedly coined the term, writing separate essays in 1946, were referring to an international style.) More intriguingly, if the heyday of noir was 19411958, why did the term not enjoy widespread use until the 1970s? A plausible case could indeed be made that, far from dying out with the old studio system, noir is almost entirely a creation of postmodern culturea belated reading of classic Hollywood that was popularized by cineastes of the French New Wave, appropriated by reviewers, academics, and filmmakers, and then recycled on television.

At any rate, a term that was born in specialist periodicals and revival theaters has now become a major signifier of sleekly commodified artistic ambition. Almost 20 percent of the titles currently on the National Film Preservation List at the Library of Congress are associated with noir, as are most of the early volumes in the British Film Institute 'Film Classics' series of monographs on famous movies. Meanwhile, 'neo-noirs' are produced by Hollywood with increasing regularity and prominence. Consider the last three American winners of the Grand Prize at Cannes: Wild at Heart (1991), Barton Fink (1992), and Pulp Fiction (1994). Consider also such big-budget television productions as Twin Peaks, Wild Palms (marketed as ''TV noir'), and Fallen Angels.

Some of these instances might be described as pastiche, but pastiche of what? The classical model is notoriously difficult to pin down, in part because it was named by critics rather than filmmakers, who did not speak of film noir until well after it was established as a feature of academic writing. Nowadays, the term is ubiquitous, appearing in reviews and promotions of many things besides movies. If we want to understand it, or to make sense of genres or art-historical categories in general, we need to recognize that film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema; in other words, it has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discoursea loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies.

It seems odd that film theorists did not arrive at this conclusion long ago. After all, the Name of the Genre (or mood, or generic tendency, or whatever) functions in much the same way as the Name of the Author. In a well-known essay, French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that the 'author function' is tied to the 'institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses.' ⁴ The author, Foucault says, is chiefly a means of textual classification, allowing us to establish relations of 'homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by the use of others' (147). At bottom, these relations are 'projections,' governed by belief in ''a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized around a fundamental and originating contradiction' (151).

Could we not say exactly the same things about the 'genre function'? And could we not ask of it many of the same questions that Foucault asks of authorship: 'What are the modes of existence of this discourse?' 'Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it?' (160) In the case of film noir, one of the most amorphous categories in film history, these questions seem particularly apt. To answer them, this chapter examines the historical context of seminal writings about noir. Throughout, instead of looking for the essential features of a group of films, I try to explain a paradox: film noir is both an important cinematic legacy and an idea we have projected onto the past.

Noir Is Born: Paris, 1946-1959

The end of World War II in Paris gave rise to what might be called a noir sensibility; but this sensibility was expressed through many things besides cinema, and if I had to choose a representative artist of the period, it would not be a filmmaker. Instead I would pick the somewhat Rimbaud-like personality Boris Vian, who was a friend of the ex-surrealist Raymond Queneau and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Vian wrote witty avant-garde novels, protoabsurdist plays, satiric columns for Les temps modernes, music criticism for Jazz Hot, and over five hundred Dylanesque protest songs (including 'Le deserteur,' which remains an an

them of French antiwar movements); meanwhile, he played trumpet and sang in Le Tabou and other Saint- Germain nightspots. During his lifetime, however, he was best known for a roman noir that did not bear his name.

In the summer of 1946, Vian was approached by an editor who wanted to create a list of murder novels that would rival the popular, black-covered Serie noire, recently inaugurated at Gallimard. Within two weeks, Vian composed J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I'll spit on your graves), which he published under the name 'Vernon Sullivan,' an identity he adopted on several occasions, claiming to have translated Sullivan's work 'from the American.' ⁵ An ultra-violent mixture of situations from William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Richard Wright's Native Son, the novel concerns a black man who passes for white in a southern town and exerts racial vengeance by dominating, raping, and murdering two white women. In a preface, Vian said that the book could never have been printed in the United States because it involved black violence against whites. But there were also problems in France, where J'irai cracher became the first novel to be prosecuted for obscenity since Madame Bovary. The case took a bizarre turn when a middle-aged Parisian salesman strangled his young mistress and committed suicide in a hotel room near the Gare Montparnasse, leaving an open copy of the book next to the murdered woman's body, one of its grisly passages underlined. Vian was briefly jailed and required to pay a fine, and for the rest of his life he suffered from notoriety and ill health. Although he remained active on the literary and cabaret scenes, he sometimes described himself as 'ex-ecrivain, ex- trompettiste' (ex-writer, ex-trumpet player). Then in the summer of 1959, he entered a Paris movie theater to watch a press screening of French director Michel Gast's adaptation of J'irai cracher, a project he disliked but had been unable to prevent. As he sat alone in the dark auditorium, his heart failed and he died.⁶

The themes and motifs of Vian's life and workindigo moods, smoky jazz clubs, American fiction, and romantic isolationresemble those in movies of his day, and his scandalous novel foregrounds two issues that seem relevant to film noir: sexual violence and racial blackness or otherness. Psychoanalytic feminism tells us something about the first issue (much feminist theory grows out of the study of American films noirs), although the discussion needs to be historicized and linked to changing patterns of censorship. In regard to the second issue, we need to examine the metaphor of darkness. The discourse on noir grew out of a European male fascination with the instinctive (a fascination that was evident in most forms of high modernism), and many of the films admired by the French involve white characters who cross borders to visit Latin America, Chinatown, or the ' 'wrong' parts of the city. When the idea of noir was imported to America, this implication was somewhat obscured; the term sounded more artistic in French, so it was seldom translated as 'black cinema.' ⁸

I say more about such matters in subsequent chapters; for now, however, the publication and eventual adaptation of J'irai cracher interest me for historical reasons, because they coincide with what I shall call the first (or historical) age of American film noir: the period between the postwar arrival of Hollywood movies in Paris and the beginnings of the French New Wave. We can never know when the first film noir was made (examples have been claimed as far back as D. W. Griffith's Muscateers of Pig Alley [1912] and Louis Feuillade's Fantomas [1913]), but everyone agrees that the first writings on Hollywood noir appeared in French film journals in August 1946at exactly the moment when 'Vernon Sullivan' was composing his novel. The term was used by analogy with the Serie noire, and it surfaced in discussions of five features made before, during, and after the war, all of which had just been exhibited in succession on Paris movie screens: The Maltese