There are many posts on this blog that refer to the concept of film noir. Different writers on the blog might hold slightly different opinions about what is and isn’t film noir. This is problematic because we know that audiences love noirs, whether they are from the classical period of the 1940s/50s or from more recent times and labelled as ‘neo-noir’ or other similar terms. One of the most important tags on this site is ‘film noir‘ with over fifty posts tagged in this way.
I don’t want to rehearse all the arguments about film noir here but just to make clear some of the main tenets of my personal approach to the concept.
- The first usage of the term was argued to be in France in 1955 in a book by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, Panorama du Film Noir Americain, Paris: Les Editions de Muit. This followed discussions by French critics and cinephiles after viewing the large numbers of Hollywood films released after the war, having been denied a release under the German Occupation. Early attempts by scholars such as Raymond Durgnat (1970) and Paul Schrader (1972) attempted to explain why such films had been made in Hollywood. Subsequently there have been many attempts to develop the discussion in a variety of journals and books.
- My own take on film noir was first developed through attendance at the British Film Institute’s Summer School at Stirling in 1975 which prompted several later publications such as Women in film noir (1978) edited by E. Ann Kaplan (London: bfi). It’s from this early exposure to what would become a considerable body of film scholarship that I developed my own ideas.
- I prefer not to think of film noir as a genre but instead as a ‘mode’, an approach to a film aesthetic that could be applied to any broad genre such as the crime film, different forms of melodrama, the Western etc.
- Film noir as a mode is found in films from many national film industries – and from transnational productions. There are examples of films noirs on this blog from Britain, France, China, Japan and other places as well as the US.
- There are many historical developments that have been argued to have aided the development of film noir during the 1940s. These include the influence of German Expressionism and French Poetic Realism in the 1920s and 1930s, the American gangster film of the 1930s, the influence of German émigrés in Hollywood, the changes in film technologies in the early 1940s such as improved filmstock, lighting, lenses etc. and the influence of news photography, newsreels and the introduction of neo-realism in Italy (drawing on previous developments in France). Some other suggestions are the emergence of the ‘hard-boiled’ style of pulp fiction in the US and the emergence of the Serie Noir imprint of books in France in 1945 which published American hard-boiled fiction. There have been claims that the term ‘film noir‘ was coined by the French critic Nino Frank as early as 1946 to describe such American crime fiction.
- Much of the early work on film noir explored the concept of a ‘disturbed’ mise en scène following the seminal work of Janey Place and Lowell Peterson (1974) ‘Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir’ in Film Comment, January. This focus on visual style seems to have got a little lost in the public discourse in recent years.
- In thematic terms noir has been seen as a response to the ‘disruption’ of wartime experiences for both men and women – either from the trauma of warfare itself or the changes in employment or forced movement/migration. The development of the Cold War and the anti-Communist witch hunts in the US are other possible factors.
- Changes in the film industry itself such as lower budgets, the challenge of TV, issues of censorship etc. might also lead to changes in the kinds of films produced. The late 1940s in the US, UK, France, Japan and many other filmmaking territories was a time of great changes.
I’m sure there are many other points that could be made about the mix of factors which have helped to produce films noirs. Comments and suggestions are very welcome. More blog entries on film noir are on their way over the next few weeks.
itp Global Film 
I incline to film noir as a genre; whilst the dark expressionist style is more a mode or an approach. One aspect of noir that is important is the type of narrative involved. The best discussion of this seems to me to be in ‘The Movie Book of Film Noir’ and the introductory essay.
As for the use of the term the comments can be found applied to extremely different types of movies. There seems to be a tendency, certainly in English usage, for words that become widely used to lose a defined meaning; auteur would be another prime example.
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Yes, Michael Walker’s ‘Introduction’ in The Movie Book of Film Noir is very good, but he does have thirty pages to in which to lay it out! He covers all the main points of the noir discourse very well indeed and he’s certainly seen more of the films than I have. I think I only disagree with him on a couple of issues and I’ll try eventually to map them out. Michael was often arguing his case strongly at BFI Summer Schools in the 1970s.
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When I think of film noir I think of an attitude or perhaps a realisation that is best expressed in Dashiell Hammett’s parable of ‘Flitcraft’, as related by protagonist Sam Spade to Brigid O’Shaughnessy in ‘The Maltese Falcon’. This parable seems to step outside the plot of the novel in that it doesn’t seem to advance anything but helps to explain the detective’s response to the situation he finds himself in.
Flitcraft was a past case of Spade’s (and maybe Hammett’s). He was a man who left his office one day and vanished, leaving behind a wife and kids and a healthy bank account with no apparent reason for it. When he eventually turned up years later in Spokane, he had a new wife and kids and essentially the same situation he had left behind. What had happened was he had a near death experience when a falling beam from a construction site had hit the sidewalk next to him.
‘He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.’
This realisation of how random life really was cut him adrift for awhile and he just took off, but then when he encountered no more falling beams he gradually drifted back into the same cosy situation he had left, just somewhere else.
A noir is like Flitcraft’s falling beam, something that reveals things about the world that probably we already know but mostly choose to overlook. It can be unsettling for a bit, but after it is over our life goes back to how it was.
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This is very interesting John. Noir as ‘attitude’ is as good a definition/explanation as many others.
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Hi Roy, I just published my own article on this subject and WordPress Reader tagged your post on to the end of mine as being suggested reading in the same vein. Your title intrigued me, so I thought I would check your post out.
I agree with you that the problem of ‘noir’ is certainly knotty and not worth quibbling about, though I suspect a lot of the confusion has to do with the deadly tendency to mistake narrative ‘content’ as somehow being preponderant over visual ‘form’. Film noir is the one case I know of in narrative cinema where it’s the formal elements that dictate the kind of narrative content that can emerge from them.
But I thought I would just chime in with a point which I thought might amplify your own. Aas I show in the article I’ve just published, it’s definitely Nino Frank and another critic called Jean-Pierre Chartier, writing in the summer and autumn of 1946 respectively, who coin the term ‘film noir’. I provide a translation of Frank’s coinage of the term in my post, but Chartier goes provocatively further than Frank in his November 1946 article, the title of which is “Les Américains aussi font des films noirs” (“Americans also made dark films”).
That ‘also’ in the title seems to me significant because it implies the concept of a ‘film noir’, a qualitatively ‘black’ or ‘dark’ movie, that is pre-existent in the French cultural consciousness, or at least in the cultural discourse of the day. As I state in my own article, the French talk about the years of the German Occupation during which these American films had been suppressed as ‘les années noires’, so they are preternaturally sensitive to a concept of ‘noirness’ and they seem to be perceiving an analogy between these American crime dramas of compromised morality and the existential compromises that ordinary French people had to make during the war.
Thanks for your engaging post, Roy.
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Many thanks for this. I’ve read your piece a couple of times and it is very rich in suggestions. I agree with you about the importance of Patricia Highsmith in terms of literary noir. I find her work intriguing and disturbing. As I understand it none of Raymond Chandler’s work on the script for Strangers on a Train survived into production and aspects of Highsmith’s narrative were altered/added to by Czenzi Ormonde and the other collaborators. Personally, I’ve generally enjoyed Highsmith adaptations from European filmmakers (i.e. French or German) more than the American ones. Strangers is very good though. I must go back and read re-read Paul Schrader so thanks for that prompt. I’m also grateful for the Frank translation.
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That’s right: the Chandler script was entirely unusable, according to Hitchcock. It’s one of those missed opportunities for a truly fruitful collaboration between two great artists of the popular thriller, and the fault seems to have been entirely on Raymond Chandler’s side. I agree with you about the superior quality of European adaptations of Patricia Highsmith: in her ‘Jamesian’ mode, her feeling, as an American, for the European spirit of life, I think the Europeans, in return, have properly understood the subtleties of Patricia Highsmith in a way the Americans have been late to grasp.
Thanks for the generative dialogue, Roy. It was a pleasure to encounter your piece.
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