Lecture Ten:
What Is This Thing Called Noir?
10/25/2005

Unlike other genres, such as the western or the musical, film noir is a notoriously elusive and baggy concept. It has always been easier to recognize a film noir than to define the term. 

Let’s begin with the term itself, which means “dark cinema.” How did a French term wind up being applied to a body of American movies?

Between 1940 and 1945, France was occupied by Nazis, making it enemy territory for the United States and thus a country forbidden to receive Hollywood films. By the war’s end, there was a five-year backlog of American movies for French viewers to see.

During the summer of 1946, from mid July until the end of August, five films followed one another on the cinema screens of Paris. These were Double Indemnity (1944), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Woman in the Window (1945).

French film critics, particularly one named Nino Frank, wrote essays in which they argued that these films were much more cynical, visually interesting, and narratively experimental than most other Hollywood movies. Frank singled out their interest in “criminal psychology” as the aspect that most distinguished these five movies from other, earlier films about crime.

In 1956, two other French film critics, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, wrote the first book on film noir. They identified well over three hundred crime movies that, they argued, should be classified as film noir.

French critics saw these American films as artistic movies, in part, because local conditions predisposed them to view films this way. Postwar France had a notoriously sophisticated film culture, comprised of art houses, journals, and cine-clubs. The discourse on American film noir was thus initiated by two generations of Parisian intellectuals.

Borde and Chaumeton book’s caused quite a stir in France, but got almost no attention in the United States. Soon enough, French film critics turned their attention to other directors and genres and stopped writing about film noir. No one really studied it again until the early 1970s, when American filmmakers like Peter Bogdanovich, Brian DePalma, and Martin Scorsese consciously adapted a noir style and sensibility for their own films.

Paul Schrader, a director and screenwriter, wrote a series of articles in the early 1970s on film noir, famously classifying the time period of classical film noir as 1940, the year of The Maltese Falcon’s release, until 1958, the year that Touch of Evil was released.

By 1975, film noir became associated in American culture with artistic filmmaking and high-brow tastes. Even today, it carries these associations.

Film noir has many characteristics. among these are 1) a complex narrative structure 2) a fascination with urban spaces, especially New York and Los Angeles 3) disturbing portraits of women and feminine sexuality 4) an interest in marginal spaces

Films from which clips were taken:

• Murder, My Sweet (1950)
• Sunset Boulevard (1950)
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
• Touch of Evil (1958)