32. Jean-Paul Sartre, 'The Situation of the Writer in 1947,' in What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 156. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
33. Sartre quoted by Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 19401950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 252.
34. For a discussion of this tendency, see Robert Denoon Cummings's introduction to The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: The Modern Library, 1966), 347.
35. Like all other French critics, Eric Rohmer believed that film noir had reached a dead end by the mid 1950s. He remarked that, for his generation, 'the charm of these works lies in the delirious romanticism of their heroes and the modernism of their technique. Hollywood, shy of them for so long, suddenly noticed their existence, and a breath of the avant-garde made the studios tremble. What came of it? There is now enough distance for us to judge: the answer is very little, if anything.' Rohmer, 'Rediscovering America,' in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema, 91.
36. The political context in Paris is sometimes obscure, but in general the existentialist-inspired readings of film noir tend to be less activist or overtly left wing than the surrealist readings. Bazin himself was a liberal Catholic who appears to have been influenced by Emmanuel Mournier's 'personalism.' For a discussion of the politics of French intellectuals during the period, see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 19441956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). On the avant-garde end of the political spectrum, a vaguely surrealist interest in film noir persisted throughout most of the 1950s, especially in the journal Positif. In 1957, activist Guy Debord, who was the leader of the French Internationale situationiste, published The Naked City, a collage map of Paris that took its title from the 1948 movie. For a discussion of Debord's appropriation of noir, see Thomas F. McDonough, 'Situationist Space,' October (winter 1994): 5977. See also Jill Forbes, 'The Serie Noir,' in France and the Mass Media, ed. Brian Rigby and Nicholas Hewett (London: Macmillan, 1993).
37. At about this time, France's leading academic phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, proclaimed in a lecture to the College de France that henceforth the work of cinema and the work of philosophy would be parallel. See Dudley Andrew, ''Breathless: Old as New,' in Breathless, ed. Dudley Andrew (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 8.
38. Claude-Edmonde Magny, The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction between the Two Wars, trans. Eleanor Hochman (New York: Ungar, 1972). This book, published in France in the 1950s, helped to transmit Sartre's ideas about the novel into French film theory.
39. Francois Truffaut, 'A Wonderful Certainty,' in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema, 107; and Jacques Rivette, 'On Imagination,' in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema, 105.
40. Claude Chabrol, 'The Evolution of the Thriller,' in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema, 160, 163.
41. Dennis Hopper quoted by Leighton Grist, 'Moving Targets and Black Widows: Film Noir in Modern Hollywood,' in Cameron, Book of Film Noir, 267.
42. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 41. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
43. The Harvard students were, of course, especially fond of Casablanca, which has never been called a film noir, even though it contains practically everything we associate with the form: a smoky nightclub, a fog-laden airport, a feeling of containment or huis-clos, Arthur Edeson's gothic photography, Bogart in a trenchcoat, Lorre and Greenstreet in supporting roles, and so on. Borde and Chaumeton excluded Casablanca from Panorama du film noir americain, arguing that it is nothing more than a wartime propaganda film with a romantic ending; and yet they describe Paramount's This Gun for Hire, which is equally propagandistic and in some ways quite saccharine, as a definitive film noir. Perhaps the real reason for the absence of Casablanca from histories of noir has more to do with the specific content of its propaganda. The French may have been cool toward the film because of the way it depicts their role in the war.
44. Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (New York: Praeger, 1973), 123.
45. Durgnat, 'Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir,' Film Comment (6 November 1974): 6. Hereafter, all quotations are from this version of Durgnat's essay (condensed from an earlier, somewhat less playful article in the British journal Cinema).
46. Molly Haskell, Love and Other Infectious Diseases (New York: Morrow, 1990), 1012.
47. Schrader, 'Notes on Film Noir,' in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 5361. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
48. Schrader has a sophisticated literary education, and Martin Scorsese's early films are filled with fairly explicit allusions to James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. According to Schrader's own account, he wrote the script of Taxi Driver when he was undergoing a spiritual and psychological crisis similar to the one T. S. Eliot describes in The Waste Land. I discuss the more general influence of literary modernism on Hollywood in chapter 2.
49. In much of the subsequent critical literature, noir is defined in such a way as to frustrate political or didactic reading. In Silver and Ward's Film Noir, for example, see Carl Macek's account of Cyril Endfield's left-wing, social-realist Try and Get Me (1950), which supposedly 'functions better as a film noir than it does as a quasidocumentary exposing environment as the true producer of crime' (296). See also Dennis White's comments on The Mask of Dimitrios (1944): 'It is possible that [Eric] Ambler's characters are not cynical enough for American noir or that his point of view is more radical than existential' (187).
50. An influential essay written at this time on contemporary Hollywood was Richard T. Jameson, 'Son of Noir,' Film Comment 10 (1974): 3033. For evidence of how the term became popular within the industry, see Todd Erickson, 'Kill Me Again: Movement Becomes Genre,' in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 30729.
51. For an interesting commentary on this phenomenon, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Allusion Profusion,' Chicago Reader (21 October 1994): 12, 2526.
52. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural logic of late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). See also Marcia Landy and Lucy Fischer, 'Dead Again or A-Live Again: Postmodern or Postmortem?' Cinema Journal 33, no. 4 (summer 1994): 322.
Chapter 2 1. George Orwell, 'Raffles and Miss Blandish,' in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 154.
2. For the discourse on Americanism in Germany, see Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On Baudelaire and modernity see Antoine Compagnon, Five Paradoxes of Modernity, trans. Franklin Phillip (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
3. Some modernist philosophers and artists were more critical of modernity than others. On the one hand were those who completely rejected Enlightenment rationalism and nineteenth-century liberalism: Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and so on. On the other hand were those who criticized nineteenth-century ideas of progress and liberalism but who remained within a rationalist or humanist camp: Edmund Husserl, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Andre Gide, and others.
4. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness prefigures this theme, but I am of course alluding to Jim Thompson's Killer inside Me (1952), which is symptomatic of modernist themes in 'cheap' fiction after World War II. Notice also the postwar novels of Cornell Woolrich, Fredric Brown, andabove allCharles Willeford. Willeford's High Priest of California (1956) is the story of a sociopathic used-car salesman who enjoys reading Eliot, Joyce, and Franz Kafka in his spare time. For commentary on several hard-boiled novelists who worked in this vein, see Terry Curtis Fox, 'City Nights,' Film
