Isn’t Chinatown film noir in 1974?
“chinatown” is neo-noir. some would say retro-noir.
Personally, while I don’t find much use in the term “film noir” due to its over-broadness and constantly shifting definitional sense, I would say that one would have to seriously consider limiting noirs to the time before the term was coined or shortly thereafter since somewhere after that point noirs were no longer merely a response to conditions of the time, but were self-consciously attempting to become noirs or to reference the earlier films in a way that changes the meaning of those later films.
One example might be Tourneur’s Nightfall. I don’t have any idea whether Tourneur was familiar with the Cahiers articles defining noir and using his own work as an example of it, but shortly after the initial articles were published Tourneur made Nightfall which repudiates the genre on almost a point by point basis. It starts out looking exactly like one would expect a noir film to do, and signals that it will follow those “rules” by adding elements that are referenced repeatedly in discussions of that genre, but then Tourneur changes the relationship of those signifiers into something very near their opposites.
The femme fatale isn’t a fatale at all, but a kind and, eventually loving woman who only aids the protagonist, likewise, the government man isn’t a threat but a boon for the hero, the hero turns out to be well-adjusted and capable of both defeating his pursuers and of living a normal life as we find out in flashbacks, and visually, the film moves from the settings and style of the typical noir, the unforgiving big city cloaked in night and shadow, to where the film ends, in the countryside at daybreak in blinding white snow.
Like I say, I don’t know if Tourneur was aware of the Cahiers article, but he certainly could have been, and if he was, it would make a lot of sense that he would make a film countering some of the ideas of noir that were read into Out of the Past since that films was very atypical of Tourneur’s concerns, as expressed through his other films anyway.
Even if that isn’t the case, I have a hard time with genre based criticism since it tends to compress the range of response to earlier films into a one-size fits all package, making DeMille’s The Plainsman and Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians something near the same under the label of “western”.
Certainly there is a practical use for genre terms in providing an ease of discussion and as a help in finding films one may find interesting, but too much focus on the labels and what fits under them, and too little focus on the specifics of each film can lead to incoherence.
what cahiers article are you referring to? nino frank coined the term film noir and defined what it is, but i dont think he was writing for cahiers then.
criticism by genres should be meant to clarify, not classify. its useful in that sense.
i agree with a lot of what youre saying. i think that the 50s can be seen as a reflexive period of noir. clearly directors then were operating with a knowledge of what “noir” was, and either consciously exaggerating its tendencies or reacting against them.
I can’t find the specific article online anymore, but Cahiers published one in, I believe, ‘56 that talked a great deal about the characteristics of noir and referenced Out of the Past as a key example of the genre. Certainly, that article in itself may not have any relevance to the discussion, but the references to Tourneur’s work drew it to my attention. I haven’t read the Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton book so I don’t know what their reference point are other than in the general sense I’ve managed to gather from reading about it, and of course Frank and Chartier’s coinage is the signal event in the development of the genre such as it is.
In any case, tracking the development is somewhat secondary to my issues with noir or genre discussions in general. I don’t think we really disagree that much at all, I do think there has been a lot of valuable genre based criticism written, my copy the the Film Genre Reader is well thumbed and often perused, but since this thread was about trying to fit Notorious into film noir, I wanted to throw a little bit of caution out there since there can be a loss of understanding of specific films or larger movements in film history as easily as there can be gains in understanding the conversation between films within genres.
For example, it is important to note that Buffalo Bill and the Indians is hearkening back to a previous incarnation of the western as exemplified by films like The Plainsmen and in some way conversing with it or correcting it, so in that sense referring to them both as westerns helps give shape to the changing history of our understanding of the western era, but if the western label is used to loosely or without care, the differences in the mythological status of the west, the difference in filmmaking eras, and the thematic meaning of westerns can get muddled or lost. That I suppose is obvious enough, and easy to see when dealing with films from such divergent time periods that are dealing with similar subjects in radically different ways, but the same point may be brought to bear on films closer together in time and theme.
Take a film like Mildred Pierce for example, it has many of the characteristics of a typical noir film, but it also could be considered within the genre of the “woman’s picture”. Throwing it too lightly into one genre loses some of the other possible relevant information about the film and what it signifies. Melodramas and “woman’s films” also darkened considerably at the time the noir’s were at their peak, in fact, one might wonder which led the other since melodramas could often be darker than other films in the same time periods. This was a different sort of darkness perhaps, less guns, crime and physical threats and more emotionally based, but these films could also be much gloomier when looked at closely for what they suggested about the possibilities for love or the closeness of the family.
Compare The Heiress to Night and the City for example, Night and the City certainly looks darker and more threatening, and the hero ends up in a very bad way, but the possibility for nobility of action and love still exists. The Heiress, on the other hand, totally denies this possibility to its characters, leaving no one physically harmed, but all emotionally without comfort. I suppose someone somewhere has tried to throw The Heiress in with film noir’s for this reason, but that kind of thinking is really just enforcing a preference for one genre and trying to fit as much as one can within it and not looking at other possibilities or historical developments of influence.
In the larger picture, its the failure, by many people, to look at film history that makes the noir genre a little shaky definitionally for me. There has been a good number of writers that do pay attention to this of course, linking noir to the French poetic realism movement of the thirties and German expressionism of the 20s, but this is often ignored by a good many of those that write about noir who act like its rise is somehow unique. Dark cinema occurred, and occurs, regularly throughout film history in different areas and eras. After WWI, after WWII, in the fifties and sixties in Japan, after Vietnam in the US, at different times in India, South America, Korea and elsewhere. To separate out this one time period in one industry and act like it is somehow special can be a mistake that loses some idea of these larger trends in film history and removes it from possible connections beyond the somewhat incestuous inter-referencing of films and directors noted for working within it.
Hell, I don’t know if what I’m getting at is very clear since mostly it is, as I mentioned, just a warning about using a genre label to lightly, and as such is possibly an overblown concern, but I just would like noir lovers to look beyond the label and not get too caught up in what belongs and what doesn’t.
i agree with you about “mildred pierce”. thats why i do not consider noir a genre, because it cuts across genres. its much more helpful, for me, to talk about it as a period, or style, or stylistic period.
“Dark cinema occurred, and occurs, regularly throughout film history in different areas and eras”
excellent point. but yet and still, each dark film era is unique and specific, and deserves clarification, not condensing. true, the connections need to be made and demonstrated.
I completely agree with that last point Bobby. I’m always hoping for more specificity rather than more attempts at generalizing, which is why I appreciate Schrader’s effort to, at least, limit the scope of film noir to a set time period even if, the definitions are otherwise somewhat vague.
You’re also right about the connections, as each new onset of darker or more pessimistic film seems to take something from the previous one, so developing those linkages can help understand how directors and films “talk” to one another.
and yet, I still have to wonder what we’ve gained by the coining of this genre called film noir. Does it provide some better purpose than simply talking about the tendency of crime dramas to be darker in the forties thus keeping the link to earlier films like Public Enemy? I think Schrader goes too far when he makes a point of separating those films and suggests Public Enemy, and its kin, aren’t as artistically rewarding as films in the noir genre.
well, one thing i think we’ve gained is a rescuing of these films from obscurity. giving them a cultural cache. and the attention has shone a light on directors who wouldnt otherwise be studied.
plus, film noir probably helped legitimize film studies in america in general (academically speaking). the early pioneers of american noir criticism were working at a time when film studies was just gaining acceptance as an academic discipline. film noir gave them some meat to grind. an interest in film noir helps to continually certify that film history is important.
i also think film noir lent a counterbalance to the early popularity of the auteur theory. instead of focusing on what separates directors, film noir criticism looked at what they had in common. this helped to diversify film thought/criticism.
finally, i think we’ve gained the creation of a genre. because i do believe neo-noir crystallized into a genre. some great works have been made in this new genre in the area of film, novels, graphic novels, video games, television, etc. no other genre has to justify its existence. so why should film (neo)noir?
I would imagine:
‘cos it’s
-shot in B + W
-has occasional low lighting
I guess?
I find your counterbalance argument intriguing, and as such I’ll have to give it more thought, but it certainly sounds possible.
But the objection I would raise to the other points of your argument, and even possibly to the counterbalance one, is that it sounds like there is an assumption that interest in film noir was a net gain for the quantity of people becoming interested in film or in creating film studies programs that wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for this genre. The films would still be the same regardless if they were called noirs or simply crime dramas, so is it such a certain thing that the interest in those same films wouldn’t have been there otherwise? Or, even more to the point, if there, as I suspect, isn’t much of a quantitative gain in people interested in films on a formal level, then hasn’t film noir scholarship just caused a shift away from some other area of film study? Wouldn’t there, perhaps, be more writings on something other than genre studies, or on different genres?
Perhaps it has added a significant amount of people to the film community, and perhaps these films would have been ignored otherwise and no other films would have been discussed in their stead, but it seems a somewhat iffy proposition to me.
I do think you are right about it having helped save some of the films under the noir umbrella from possible ignoration, and it has been a boon to publishers, so there is something to your argument I admit, but the interest in noir films could be indirectly dooming other films to darkness if your argument isn’t correct and that would be a significant loss too.
Bobby, Greg et al:
Are you familiar with the research of Charles O’Brien (Film Noir In France: Before The Liberation)? He shows that the term film noir was used somewhat extensively in the newspapers and magazines of Paris during the 1930s. The usage was somewhat different, but clearly the coinage was not Frank’s.
No, I hadn’t heard of Charles O’Brien before or his research. Did he use the term, as I would suspect, in reference to some of the darkly pessimistic “poetic realism” films of the thirties like Le jour se lève or La bête humaine or was it in an entirely different context? Do you know if there was any communication between the standard bearers of these two different strands of noir? Or is it simply a coincidental double coinage? Which wouldn’t be surprising given that the term “black” would easily leap to mind when looking at some of these types of films.
Greg,
Let me clarify—-O’Brien is a contemporary scholar did historical research and found a “dozen explicit invocations of film noir” in French newspaper and magazines of the late 1930s. These included Josef von Sternberg’s “Crime and Punishment” (1935), Jean Renoir’s “The Lower Depths” (Les Bas-fonds) (1936), Julien Duvivier’s “Pépé le Moko” (1937), Jeff Musso’s “The Puritan” (1938), Marcel Carné’s “Port of Shadows” (Le Quai des brumes) (1938), Jean Renoir’s “La Bête Humaine” (1938), Marcel Carné’s “Hôtel du Nord” (1938), Marcel Carné’s “Le Jour se lève” (Daybreak) 1939, and Pierre Chenal’s “Le Dernier Tournant” (1939). While some of these films would not fit out current definition on noir, certain elements are consistent. Frank, if I’m not mistaken, was publishing lit crit in French newspapers as early as that late ’20s,and prior to the war, he had been editor-in-chief of Pour vous, a French cinema publication. Later he wrote for the French film magazine l’Écran français, a socialist-leaning magazine that was founded by the Resistance during. So clearly he would have been aware of the prior usuage of the term.
Ah, I see, then Frank likely was just formalizing a term, that had been in use as a sort of adjective in France, for his ideas surrounding US films of the era. Without having any knowledge of the book except for what you mentioned, it sounds to me that this isn’t that extraordinary, in the same way that it wouldn’t be if American critics had formalized a term like “dark films” to describe the genre. That is, it is a somewhat obvious term of description that would be used for films that are very pessimistic. It’s only that the term in French sounds less mundane to many American ears than dark or black films would be.
I think it’s fair to say that Frank’s article “Un nouveau genre ‘policier:’ L’aventure criminelle,” published in L’écran français in August 1946 (pardon me for backfilling the particulars) played a significant role in formalizing what had previously been a somewhat nebulous (and as O’Brien notes, “unambiguously negative”) concept:
Writing in Action française in January 1938, the critic Francois Vinneuil called “Le Puritan” “a classic subject: the film noir, plunging into debauchery and crime.”
An editorial in Petit-journal about Port of Shadows published in 1939 : “It is distressing to see the most official of French film prizes, the Prix du Ministère, awarded to a film — full of artistic qualities, certainly — but of a very special type. A film noir, an immoral and demoralizing film, whose effect on the public could only be harmful.”
A review of Pierre Chenal’s “Le Dernier Tournant” published in Marianne magazine (ironically the same magazine that had serialized James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1936) in 1939:
“Here is another film noir, a film of this sinister series which begins with Les Bas-fonds and [Crime and Punishment], and continues with Pépé le Moko and Quai des Brumes, La Bête Humaine and Hôtel du Nord. [. . .] We begin to be weary of this special atmosphere, of these hopes doomed to failure; of these figures that implacable destiny drives towards decay and death. It is time that the French screen becomes clearer. […] It seems unfortunate that the French school of cinema should be represented by films that express only the inability of men to live a normal life, by films that are only long poems of discouragement. No pity humanizes Pierre Chenal’s film, which was drawn from a novel published in this newspaper.”
To contrast, here’s Frank:
“They are as what one might call ‘true to life.’ The detective is not a mechanism but a protagonist . . . I would not go so far as to say these films are completely successful. The Maltese Falcon is “quite exciting,” Murder My Sweet “very uneven and at times vacuous” . . . "In this manner, these ‘noir’ films no longer have any common ground with run-of-the-mill police dramas. Markedly psychological plots, violent or emotional action, have less impact then facial expressions, gestures, utterances – rendering the truth of the characters, that ‘third dimension’ of which I have already spoken. This is a significant improvement: after films such as these the figures in the usual cop movie seem like mannequins. There is nothing remarkable in the fact that today’s viewers are more responsive to this stamp of verisimilitude, of ‘true to life,’ and, why not, to the kind of gross cruelties which actually exist and the past concealment of which has served no purpose: the struggle to survive is not a new story.” Regarding The Maltese Falcon and Murder My Sweet : "it cannot be by accident that the two films end in the same manner, the cruelest way in the world with the heroines paying full price. These final scenes are harsh and misogynistic, as is most of contemporary American fiction.”
In regard to formalizing the term, we should also credit Jean-Pierre Chartier “Americans Also Make Noir Films” in La Révue du Cinéma in November of 1946, which deals with three films: Murder My Sweet, Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend :
“with a detective as protagonist and a few innocent bystanders in support, human nature’s tendency to do right can still be affirmed. In ‘Double Indemnity,’ as in ‘Murder My Sweet, all of the characters are more or less venal. And while there is a pure young girl in both films, which permits some hope about future generations, the females are particularly monstrous . . . We can see how significant sexual attraction is in the through line of these narratives. It’s a sort of contradiction that, from convention, the film censors, insensitive to the pessimism and despair which radiates from these characters, forbids putting the real emphasis on the sexual drive that dooms them. The result is that the actions of all these figures seems conditioned by an obsessive and fatal attraction to the crime itself. The sexual expropriation that Phyllis Dietrichson exercises over the free will of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), if it were underscored even more, would make his character even more hapless, as he actually is while under her spell, and this would be a sort of relief for the viewer . . . “The narrator of ‘Murder My Sweet,is a private detective . . . [ it is ] no ordinary crime drama where from scene to scene more of the mystery is revealed: the script is not a whodunit designed to draw the viewer into guessing the outcome, it aims not to intrigue but to create an atmosphere of fright. Precisely because we don’t understand them, we sense the menace of unknown dangers. Murder My Sweet genuinely deserves the label of thriller, as the first person narrative is used to make the viewer shudder with the thrill of fear.”
maybe frank was the first to put “noir” in quotation marks. clearly it existed as a descriptive term prior to his writing.
Yes, how similar do you think the term was to something like black comedy as a descriptive term? I’ve seen that term used in the US as both a term of praise, condemnation, and now, mostly, as a generic referent without implicit value attached. Hasn’t black comedy become, at least, an understandable subgenre even without strict formal definition via a somewhat similar path?
i do think black comedy has been accepted as a subgenre. i guess at the end of the day all genres are shortcuts created by us. either for marketing purposes or some other end.
maybe “noir” grew the same way in france. but remember, they had a rich “noir” literary tradition. remember gallimard’s “serie noire”. so noir existed as a marketing concept/genre before even the films came along. when people started talking about “noir” in relation to the films, they had the serie noire books in mind. of course, those books were often reprints of hardboiled american fiction, which is where classic film noir in america was born. so it all comes full circle.
maybe frank was the first to put “noir” in quotation marks—-
Yeah, clearly it is accurate to say he was using it in a way that was somewhat distinct from the earlier uses O’Brien has uncovered, and, with Chartier, he was the first to begin to apply it to some of the films we now consider the definitive films noirs. I also agree with you both that black comedy is a coherent subgenre with people outside of specialists being both familiar with the term and able to identify a given film a such.
filmmakers didn’t know what noir was at the time, they made movies based on the mood and attitude at the time, so some films are bound to have noirish aspects while still not completely being considered a noir. to me, notorious just doesn’t feel like a film noir to me, can’t explain it, it just feels like a hitchcock thriller
Matt Parks
-That may strike some as sad, but there it is.-So, I confess, have I. I agree that it gets sketchy when you try to decide how many elements of noir are necessary to make a film a noir, etc. Writing an essay, of course, it makes sense to have a somewhat over-limiting definition, lest one overshoot the availible publication space trying to be all-inclusive.