More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

means, we can discuss an otherwise miscellaneous string of pictures, establishing similarities and differences among them. As I argue throughout this book, every category in criticism or in the film industry works in this fashion, usually in support of the critic's or the culture's particular obsessions. If we abandoned the word noir, we would need to find another, no less problematic, means of organizing what we see.

But I would also argue that even if noir is only a discursive construction, it has remarkable flexibility, range, and mythic force, maintaining our relation to something like an international genre. In America, the musical hardly survives except in animated cartoons, and the last important western was Clint Eastwood's distinctly noirlike Unforgiven in 1992. (Perhaps significantly, the urban-centered romantic comedy remains a popular form and sometimes functions like the flip side of noir.) All the while, the themes of the old thrillersone- way streets and dead ends, mad love and bad love, double crosses and paranoid conspiracies, discontents in the nuclear family and perverse violence in every corner of the societyare as topical as ever and still productive of good films. We may feel a special melancholy when we view the seductive black-and-white films of the 1940s; such films, however, contribute to a recurring pattern of both modernity and postmodernity. The dark past keeps returning. It will do so long after this commentary has ended and the theatrical motion picture has evolved into some other medium.

Notes

Introduction

1. J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3.

Chapter 1

1. Film noir is described as a genre in, among others, Robin Buss, French Film Noir (London: Marion Boyars, 1994); Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968); Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1981); and Jon Tuska, Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984). It is a 'series' in Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, Panorama du film noir american, 194l1953 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955); a 'movement,' 'period,' 'tone,'' and 'mood' in Paul Schrader, 'Notes on Film Noir,' in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 5364; a 'motif' and 'tone' in Raymond Durgnat, 'Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir,' in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 3752; a 'visual style' in Janey Place and Lowell Peterson, 'Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir, ' in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 6576; a set of 'patterns of non-conformity' in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia, 1985), 7477; a 'canon' in J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1989); a 'phenomenon' in Frank Krutnick, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991); and a 'transgeneric phenomenon' in R. Barton Palmer, Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The

American Film Noir (New York: Twayne, 1994). For an argument similar to Palmer's, see John Belton, 'Film Noir's Knights of the Road,' Bright Lights Film Journal 12 (spring 1994): 515.

2. The dates 19411958 seem to have been first proposed by Schrader, who used The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil to mark the beginning and end of the noir period. Schrader's position is accepted by Place and Peterson, 'Some Visual Motifs,' and by a few writers in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI, 1980). Several other books on film noir implicitly endorse this periodization, even when they do not set fixed dates; see, for example, Telotte, Voices in the Dark, and Krutnick, In a Lonely Street. Most recent discussions treat film noir as a transgeneric form that begins somewhere in the late thirties or early forties and continues to the present day; see Palmer, Hollywood's Dark Cinema, and many of the essayists in Joan Copjec, ed., Shades of Noir (London: Verso, 1993). There are, however, skeptical voices. In the Copjec volume, for example, see Marc Vernet, 'Film Noir on the Edge of Doom,' 131, an essay that questions the usual historical and stylistic assumptions.

3. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, eds., Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1992), omit a number of ntles that might be includedbut as Marc Vernet has noted, one of the beauties of the category is that 'there is always an unknown film to be added to the list' ('Film Noir on the Edge,' 1). For a larger filmography, see Spencer Selby, Dark City: The Film Noir (Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, 1984). See also Robin Buss, French Film Noir, who lists 101 examples of French film noir between 1942 and 1993, including A Man Escaped and Weekend. Patrick Brion's handsomely illustrated Le film noir (Paris: Editions de La Martiniere, 1992) discusses several movies that are not usually placed in the categoryamong them, Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

4. Michel Foucault, 'What Is an Author?' in Textual Strategies, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 153. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

5. Vian used the pen name 'Vernon Sullivan' on several occasions, and many of his readers believed that Vernon Sullivan was an African American. The name was inspired by two black jazz musicians from AmericanPaul Vernon and Joe Sullivan.

6. I am grateful to Peter Wollen for calling my attention to Boris Vian and his relevance to the postwar cultural climate in France. See Philippe Boggio, Boris Vian (Paris: Flammarion, 1993); also James Campbell, 'Sullivan, the Invisible Man,' Times Literary Supplement (28 January 1994): 7. In an earlier published essay that formed the basis of this chapter, I claimed that J'irai cracher was the basis for I Spit on Your Grave (1977), a low-budget American horror film directed by Emir Zarchi. I have subsequently discovered that Zarchi's film has no connection with Vian's novel. In 1997, Hawks and Sparrows Films, an independent company, optioned the rights to J'irai cracher. Production was scheduled to begin in 1998.

7. Academic feminism has shown that many of the films called noir are pre-occupied with Freud's famous question, Was will das Weib? Laura Mulvey confirms this point in a recent interview: 'It has been established very plausibly through feminist film theory, particularly around work on film noir, that the woman in Hollywood cinema is not necessarily only the object of the gaze, but also the object of inquiry' (my emphasis). See Juan Suarez and Millicent Manglis, 'Cinema, Gender, and the Topography of Enigmas: A Conversation with Laura Mulvey, Cinefocus 3 (1994):

3. Mulvey herself has emphasized the sadistic component of voyeurism, and her writings have been elaborated and debated in a large literature on psychoanalytic feminism. Among the best known examples are Kaplan, Women in Film Noir, and Mary Anne Doane, 'Gilda: Epistemology as Striptease,' Camera Obscura, no. 11 (1983): 727.

8. In France, today, cinema noir refers to African-American cinema. Higham and Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties, use 'Black Cinema' as the title for their chapter on noir, but they employ the French term when they discuss films. For an interesting paper on films noirs directed by African Americans, see Manthia Diawara, 'Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema,' in Copjec, Shades of Noir, 26178.

9. Jacques Bourgeois, 'La Tragedie policier,' Revue du cinema 2 (1946): 7072.

10. Palmer is almost the only writer on film noir who recognizes that movies have different meanings for different audiences. My survey of French criticism differs from his, but I recommend his discussion of writings on noir in Hollywood's Dark Cinema, 131. See also his anthology, Perspectives on Film Noir (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), which contains useful translations of French writings.