More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

streets for what Chartier had called 'accents of rebellion' against the 'fatality of evil.' Some of the reasons behind this potentially contradictory response were evident during a round-table discussion at Cahiers du cinema in 1957, when Andre Bazin remarked in passing that in the French prewar cinema, 'even if there wasn't exactly a genre there was a style, the realist film noir.' Bazin was nostalgic for a lost national identity, but he also recognized that noir had philosophical or ideological significance: French films of the type, he argued, were indebted to surrealism and might have been developed along the lines of literary existentialism.¹⁹

As Bazin's remarks suggest, French discussion of American film noir was conditioned by the prevailing and sometimes conflicting trends in Left Bank intellectual culture. The importance of existentialism to the period has long been recognized; what needs to be emphasized is that existentialism was intertwined with a residual surrealism, and surrealism was crucial for the reception of any art described as 'noir.' Gallimard's Serie noire was conceived and edited by Marcel Duhamel, who assisted in the development of the 'Exquisite Corpse' game in 1925, and who participated in the surrealist researches into sexuality during the early 1930s; the Popular Front film noir, especially in such instances as Quai des brumes, was strongly associated with the surrealism of Jacques Prevert; the Anthologie d'humour noir (1940) was edited by Andre Breton himself; and critical discussion of American films noirs in the 1950s was conducted chiefly in surrealist journals. Indeed, Nino Frank's seminal essay, which emphasizes 'criminal adventure' and the 'dynamism of violent death,' is replete with surrealist values.

From their beginnings in the years after World War I, the surrealists used cinema as an instrument for the destruction of bourgeois art and the desublimation of everyday life. Breton and his associates would pop briefly in and out of movie theaters and write lyrical essays about their experiences, developing what Louis Aragon called a 'synthetic' or tangential criticism, which was designed to extract latent, chiefly libidinal meanings from single images or short sequences. This project was facilitated by movies with improbable, confusing, or incoherent narratives: the bad film, the crazy comedy, the horror film, andespecially in the post-World War II erathe Chandleresque detective film, which often lost control of its plot and became a series of hallucinatory adventures in the criminal underworld. ²¹

The surrealists were 'dreaming' cathected details from the cinematic mise-en-scene, but not just any detail caught their eye. They were profoundly attracted to the cinema of the 'social fantastic,' to stories of doomed erotic love, and to thrillers with Sadeian titles. Among their particular favorites were movies about gangsterism and murder, in part because such pictures depicted violent, antisocial behavior, and in part because they bestowed an aura of the marvelous upon urban decor. As Aragon wrote in 1918, American crime films ''speak of daily life and manage to raise to a dramatic level a banknote on which our attention is riveted, a table with a revolver on it, a bottle that on occasion becomes a weapon, a handkerchief that reveals a crime, a typewriter that's the horizon of a desk.'²²

Aragon might well have been describing thrillers of the 1940s, which were perversely erotic, confined largely to interiors, photographed in a deep-focus style that seemed to reveal the secret life of things, and often derived from the literature of alcohola substance especially conducive of desire, enervation, euphoria, confusion, and nightmare. Not surprisingly, such films were admired and discussed in L'Age du cinema, a surrealist publication of 1951, and in Positif, an influential journal that maintained strong connections with surrealism throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s. They were also given important study in a book that was profoundly surrealist in its ideological aims: Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir americain (1955), which has been described as a 'benchmark' for all later work on the topic.

Raymond Borde was a frequent contributor to Positif and the director of Pierre Molinier (1964), a surrealist film with offscreen commentary by Andre Breton. But we do not need to consult his or Chaumeton's vitae, since their intellectual heritage is apparent from the outset: the Panorama is introduced by Marcel Duhamel, who fondly recalls the years 19231926, when he and other members of the surrealist group, including Breton, Raymond Queneau, Benjamin Peret, Jacques Prevert, and Yves Tanguy, watched American gangster films that were 'curious, nonconformist, and as noir as one could desire.' As if this were not enough, Borde and Chaumeton choose a phrase from Lautreamont, the surrealist's favorite poet, as an epigraph: 'The bloody channels through which one pushes logic to the breaking point.'

Despite their obvious ideological purpose, Borde and Chaumeton often seem unclear or inconsistent. They initially describe film noir as a series, but at later points they also discuss it as a genre, a mood, and a Zeitgeist. In the introduction, Duhamel claims that noir is as old as cinema and has never been healthier, whereas in the text, Borde and Chaumeton say that the American series began in 1941 and ended in the early 1950s. (A postscript to the 1988 paperback edition moves the end of noir forward to 1955 and then notes its 'fascinating renaissance' in Point Blank, Dirty Harry, and Badlands.)²⁵ Throughout, an 'objective' tone serves as a mask for the indulgence of a desire. Borde and Chaumeton have surprisingly little to say about visual style (the French were generally unimpressed by what Bazin later called 'plastics,'' or expressionist imagery); in fact, they emphasize that the dark atmosphere of Hollywood crime movies is 'nothing in itself ' and ought not to be adopted for its own sake (180). Instead, they place great emphasis on the theme of death, and on 'essential' affective qualities, which at one point they list in the form of five adjectives typical of surrealism: 'oneiric, bizarre, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel' (3).²⁶ Sometimes one of these qualities is said to dominate: The Shanghai Gesture (which had prompted one of the surrealist experiments in 'irrational expansion') is supposedly 'oneiric,' whereas Gilda is 'erotic' (3). Sometimes, too, the traits are unevenly distributed, with the 'noir aspect' manifesting itself in a tangential form that resembles Aragon's synthetic criticism: 'The Set Up is a good documentary about boxing: it becomes film noir in the sequence where accounts are settled by a savage beating in a blind alley. Rope is a psychological film that can be linked to the noir series only because of its spellbinding sadism' (3).

But according to Borde and Chaumeton, there are also noir narratives and characters; and at this level film noir becomes a full-fledged outlaw genre, systematically reversing Hollywood's foundational myths. True films of the type, Borde and Chaumeton insist, not only take place inside the criminal milieu,' but also represent 'the point of view of criminals' (7). Such films are 'moral' in an approximately surrealist sense: instead of incorruptible legal agents, they give us shady private eyes, crooked police, murderous plainclothes detectives, or lying district attorneys. Often they depict the gentry as corrupt, and whenever they deal with gangsters, they replace the 'grand primitives' of earlier gangster movies like Scarface with angelic killers or neurotics (7).

It follows that the ideal noir hero is the opposite of John Wayne. Psychologically, he is passive, masochistic, morbidly curious; physically, he is 'often mature, almost old, not very handsome. Humphrey Bogart is the type' (10). By the same logic, the noir heroine is no Doris Day. Borde and Chaumeton never allude to the Marquis de Sade's Julliette, one of the most famous sexual terrorists in French literature, but the character they describe resembles her in every respect save the fact that she is 'fatal even to herself¹' (10). Beautiful, adept with firearms, and 'probably frigid,' this new woman contributes to a distinctive noir eroticism, 'which is usually no more than the eroticization of violence'' (10). Her best representative on the screen, Borde and Chaumeton argue, is Gloria Grahame, who, even though she was seldom cast as a femme fatale, always suggested 'cold calculation and sensuality' (125).

Above all, Borde and Chaumeton are intrigued by the way film noir has 'renovated the theme of violence' (10). One of the major accomplishments of the series, they observe, is to replace the melodramatic combat of arms between hero and villain (the swordplay at the climax of a swashbuckler, the gun duel at the end of a western, and so on) with a richly elaborated 'ceremony of killing.' Death in such films usually takes the form of a professional execution (a locus classicus is The Killers, a 1946 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway) or a sadistic ritual: in The High Wall, a publisher of religious books murders an elevator repairman by hooking an umbrella under the stool on which the man is standing, sending him plummeting down an empty shaft; in Kiss of Death, a demented gangster laughs as he shoves a little old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs; in Brute Force, a fascistic prison guard tortures inmates with an elaborate, stylized brutality; and in Border Incident, an undercover policeman is slowly run over by a tractor and a field plow while his helpless confederate stands by and watches.