Category: Articles

“As it has come down to us through the decades, it is an object of beauty, one of the last remaining to us in this domain, situated as it is between neo-realism and the New Wave, after which rounded objects like these will no longer be made… because there is always an unknown film to be added to the list, because the stories it tells are both shocking and sentimental… film noir is like a Harley-Davidson: you know right away what it is. The object being only the synecdoche of a continent, a history and a civilization…”

– Vernet, Marc (1993). “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom”, in Copjec, Joan, ed. (1993). Shades of Noir. London and New York: Verso. ISBN 0-86091-625-1, pp. 1–31.

This edited quote is from the opening paragraph of  the cited article by French film academic Marc Vernet. The full paragraph is set out below.

Vernet here is cheekily setting up the reader.  We nod yes, and yes, as we read through this metaphysical paean to film noir, but Vernet’s purpose is to demolish this mythic edifice.  Vernet sees the conception of film noir as a deluded idée fixe conceived by the French film writers of the immediate post-WW2 from a corpus of films released in a flood of American movies screened in liberated Paris in 1946.

In essence Vernet considers film noir an invalid construct.  For Vernet, what noir aficiniados see as films noir are simply crime movies; chiaroscuro filming was evident in  Hollywood movies since 1910; and German expressionism is hardly an influence.  I can buy this up to a point.  I have always thought that Expression has only a tenuous connection with film noir, and Vernet argues the chiaroscuro angle strongly by reference to a number of pre-code Hollywood films – talkies and silents.  But his justification of the view that film noir is an idée fixe is scoped so narrowly as to negate his own argument.  He insists that the noir canon comprises only crime stories featuring a private detective and a femme-fatale, and he has nothing to say about French poetic realism.

I do though like Vernet’s explanation of why post-war French film scholars and the enfants terribles of the New Wave so loved film noir.  I don’t fully agree with how get’s there though.  He sees film noir – as he narrowly defines it –  as ‘conservative’: the hard-boiled hero is a defender of traditional values against the conglomerate; as the individual against the collective – a sort of proto-superman – like Gary Cooper’s architect in King Vidor’s expressionist bizarro noir of Ayn Rand’s unreadable novel ‘The Fountainhead’.   For me the idea that film noir is not subversive does not stand up to any fair analysis.  I have dealt with this issue at length in many articles posted at filmsnoir.net, and will leave it to the reader to explore those arguments more fully in those posts.

Getting back to why Vernet thinks the French noiristas of the 40s and 50s loved noir.  Those leftist intellectuals – the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Claire, and Rivette, according to Vernet had to sublimate their hatred of American imperialism to their love of Hollywood movies, particularly films noir and b-movies, by seeing in those pictures a critique of capitalism and its alienating institutions.  To my mind he reaches a pretty fascinating conclusion albeit for the wrong reasons.  Classic film noir is subversive and many of the classic noirs were critiques of traditional values, and were made by committed leftists and others not comfortable with the ethos of American capitalism.

Office memorandum, Walter Neff to Barton Keyes, Claims Manager. Los Angeles, July 16th, 1938. Dear Keyes: I suppose you’ll call this a confession when you hear it. I don’t like the word confession…  When it came to picking the killer, you picked the wrong guy, if you know what I mean. Want to know who killed Dietrichson? Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Keyes. I killed Dietrichson. Me, Walter Neff, insurance agent, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars – until a little while ago, that is. Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money – and a woman – and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?

I am currently reading a book on French cinema by American academic T. Jefferson Kline titled Unravelling French Cinema (John Wiley & Sons 2010).  As the title indicates, Kline by examining French films from the early 1930s to the present day explores the nature of French cinema.  His guiding thesis is that French films are more concerned with the nature of cinema than with narrative for its own sake.  It is a complex analysis and the author’s scholarly approach makes the book daunting reading.

Kline initiates an intriguing discussion of cinema as a process of mourning, which goes not only to the examination of certain films but to the very nature of cinema.   He focuses on art-house films and strangely mentions French poetic realism only as an aside.  The great poetic realist films of the 1930s are not discussed, nor the French noirs of the 1940s and 1950s.  The fatalism of these films to me seems germane to any discussion of cinema as mourning, and to an understanding of film noir.

Let us take these word’s from Kline’s book:  “We can think of many films that move us precisely because the main character must die, and so we mourn… we must realize that cinema in its most essential form is an image of something that is no longer there.  Like a cherished photograph, we can look at it over and over again, but we can never make its subjects return to the physical form they enjoyed when the film was made.” (p. 334)

This is the very nature of the fatalism inherent in poetic realism and in film noir: a doomed protagonist battling the fates.   The very use of flashback in many noirs reinforces this fatalism – the fate of the protagonist is known from the outset.  Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) are the definitive flashback noirs.

Something to think about.

The gods, like most other practical jokers, have a habit of repeating themselves too often. Man has, so to speak, learned to expect the pail of water on his head. He may try to sidestep, but when, as always, he gets wet, he is more concerned about his new hat than the ironies of fate. He has lost the faculty of wonder.

The tortured shriek of high tragedy has degenerated into a petulant grunt. But there is still one minor booby-trap in the repertoire which, I suspect, never fails to provoke a belly-laugh on Olympus. I, at any rate, succumb to it with regularity. The kernel of the jest is an illusion; the illusion that the simple emotional sterility, the partial mental paralysis that comes with the light of the morning, is really sanity.

– Eric Ambler, ‘Cause For Alarm’, London, 1938. Ambler, an English writer, wrote the source novels for the films noir Journey Into Fear (1943) and The Mask of  Dimitrios (1944).