More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

liberal intellectual, and he was sometimes cast in the role of a writer or director. Hence the Bogart thriller became a mirror in which European cineastes could see their own faces.

Significantly, the French began to lose interest in noir at about the time their own art cinema became internationally successful. But the vogue for realistic, atmospheric novels and films about criminal violence had never been confined to France, and it never disappeared. In Argentina, for example, a craze for hard-boiled fiction lasted from 1946 until 1960, and a large critical literature grew up around Spanish-language translations of Hammett, Chandler, and David Goodis. Many authors in Western Europe and Latin America worked in the tough-guy vein (Argentina's Rodolfo, J. Walsh began writing noir political fiction in the 1960s), and filmmakers in several countries made pictures that resembled dark Hollywood thrillers. Meanwhile, crime in the city, which is one of America's favorite themes, continued to be exploited by politicians, journalists, and artists of every kind. Thus when French critical terminology crossed to Britain and America, it exerted considerable influence and acquired new interpreters. Eventually, as old movies became increasingly available on television or in retrospectives, a European image of America was internalized by the Americans themselves. By the 1990s, noir had acquired the aura of art and had evolved into what Dennis Hopper describes as 'every director's favorite genre.' ⁴¹

In the Anglo-Saxon world, the idea of noir was nourished at first by the growth of film cults and college film societies. (I myself saw many of the classic 1940s films for the first time at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s.) As. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum have shown, informal institutions similar to the French cine- clubs began to proliferate in New York during the late 1950sespecially in the East Village, where revival theaters featuring noir classics rubbed shoulders with storefront exhibitions of the newly emerging American underground cinema. At the Charles Theater on Avenue B 'Edgar G. Ulmer (director of cheap B movies like The Naked Dawn and Murder Is My Beat) was celebrated along with the Marx Brothers; and Orson Welles's Touch of Evil was touted as a masterpiece superior to Citizen Kane.'⁴² In 1964, Time magazine drew national attention to the annual Humphrey Bogart Festival at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not unlike Belmondo in Breathless, a generation of Harvard undergraduates were imitating Bogey, quoting lines from his major films and shouting 'More! More! More!' in time with the slugs he pumped into Edward G. Robinson at the climax of Key Largo. Such behavior, Hoberman and Rosenbaum wryly observe, was perhaps reinforced by those students 'who had spent their junior year abroad' (2830)⁴³

The interest in noir was also stimulated by alternative critics and journalists. In Britain, one of the most influential writers of this kind was Raymond Durgnat, who played a key role in adapting surrealist taste to the youth-oriented, pop-art environment of the 1960s. Durgnat's many publications of a surrealist bent include books or monographs on Josef von Sternberg, Luis Bunuel, and Hitchcock; on the crazy comics; and on the history of eroticism in the cinema. He is also the author of 'Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir' (1970), published originally in London (the title alludes to a Rolling Stones song of the period) and reprinted in a shorter version in New York four years later. During the 1960s and early 1970s, much of Durgnat's writing appeared in Films and Filming, a fairly large-circulation review filled with grainy, black-and-white stills of half-clothed movie stars in vaguely lurid, often sadomasochistic poses. (These stills have something in common with the illustrations in Borde and Chaumeton's Panorama, but they also feature cheesecake and beefcake material from a more hedonistic, sexually liberated era.) At the same time, Durgnat coedited and contributed extensively to Motion, an important film journal that published special issues on the French New Wave and on 'Violence and Sadism in the Cinema.'

Motion's issue number 6 (autumn 1963) provides a good indication of the relatively avantgarde politics of the journal as a whole. Among Durgnat's contributions is 'Standing Up for Jesus,' a satiric invective against the Arnoldian, Leavisite, and 'Hoggartite' attitudes of Sight and Sound, the nation's most prestigious film magazine. According to Durgnat, the typical university-educated Englishman never speaks 'a good word for Jerry Lewis, Bugs Bunny, 'Mad,' 'Galaxy,' Humph, Thelonious Monk, Bootsie and Snudge, singers like Eartha Kitt, Edith Piaf, Cleo Lane, songs like 'September in the Rain' or 'Tell Laura I Love Her'' (26). In an attempt to rectify this situation, Motion offers a 'symposium' on B-movie epics and Italian peplum, featuring Richard Whitehall on Flash Gordon and Durgnat himself on Hercules; an eight-page 'cinemateque imaginaire' entitled 'The Gentle Art of Titillation,' composed entirely of campy, black-and-white pinups suggesting various forms of Hollywood fetishism, transvestitism, and sadism; a brief gloss on the pinups, entitled 'La femme est magique!' (a line spoken by Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player); an essay by Ian Johnson on Night of the Hunter, describing the film as a 'childhood dream'; and a free-associative 'ramble' by Barrie Pattison, intended to illustrate 'the irrationality of films and memories of films.' On page 59 are several letters to the editor responding to an earlier special number oil sex and violence. Among the letters is this communication:

Dear Sirs,

Congratulations on your violence issue, the best, most comprehensive treatment of the theme I, for one, have seen. . . . A special bravo for Ian [Johnson's] article on the fascinating Peeping Tom . . . and to both of you for having the guts to reprint in English Joubert's piece on the Japanese cathartic cinema.

In the Dassin piece, which seems to me to overrate that gentleman's recent production, I was amazed to see no mention of Night and the City, which besides being his most accomplished film, is the one in which violence is the most successfully integrated into the fabric of the film through an extraordinary animal symbolism. . . .

Then, too, I was surprised to find so little attention paid to the two American directors who seem to me to display the most consistent preoccupation with the erotic implication of violence. I refer to Sam Fuller and Kubrick. The latter, in fact, who is obviously more self-conscious than the former, strikes me as the most kinky director around, with the possible exception of Bunuel. I am thinking especially of the scene in Killer’s Kiss in which the monstrous dance-hall proprietor tries to get his girl hot by making her watch the handsome boxer-hero get his brains bashed out on tv.

NOEL BURCH

75 Blvd Montparnasse, Paris 6

At the time, Noel Burch was an avant-garde filmmaker living in Paris. (One of his early pictures was Noviciat, an overtly masochistic fantasy that casts Annette Michelson in the role of a dominatrix.) Within a decade, he would become known as the author of Theory of Film Practice (1973, originally published in Cahiers du cinema in 1969), one of the most widely discussed books in the history of academic film studies. On the surface, Burch's book is an exercise in structural or 'serial' formalism; notice, however, that it contains a chapter entitled 'Structures of Aggression,' in which he comments on the 'dialectic of prohibition and transgression explored by Georges Bataille' and on the 'poetic' uses of a ''tension that arises when taboos are violated. ' Although Burch never uses the term film noir, his work provides evidence that a surrealist or noirlike attitude toward 'cathartic' violence persisted in vanguard film theory well into the 1970s.

Where film noir in particular is concerned, Durgnat was the writer who most forcefully transmitted surrealist values into an English-language context. The American version of his well-known essay on noir's 'family tree' is accompanied by a chart that amounts to a sort of irrational expansion of the noir metaphor, exploring its various 'branches.' The chart is faux-scientific, filled with arbitrary subcategories and wordplay (such as 'Dept. of Post- Korean Paranoia,' 'Gay Blades and Straight Razors,' 'Le Film Blanc,' ''Gumshoedammerung'); it lists individual films under more than one rubric; and, alongside the usual noir classics, it includes such titles as Jezebel, Monsieur Verdoux, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Portrait of Jennie, Cronaca di une Amore, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ('John Huston's Great Film Noir'), The Blue Angel, King Kong, Shadows, The Man with a Golden Arm, and 2001.

Like Borde and Chaumeton, Durgnat identifies noir with gangsters, cops, criminal adventure, love on the run, bourgeois murder, fatal passion, sexual pathology, and so on. But unlike most of the French, he insists that noir has no historical limits; its essential 'motif[s] and tone[s],' he argues, are 'perennial, drawing on the unconscious superego's sense of crime and punishment.' ⁴⁵ Despite the confusions of this terminology