In one of the greatest feats of artistic expression ever performed, the makers of American film noir—working at a time when freedom of expression in American film was at an all-time low—managed to project onto American movie screens some of the darkest visions of American life ever conceived. Throughout the run of the original cycle of noir films, Hollywood filmmakers were constrained by the limitations imposed by the Motion Picture Production Code that had gone into effect in 1934. Meanwhile, film noir itself arose at a time when the need to support the American effort in World War II made it very difficult to criticize the American way of life without seeming unpatriotic. And most films of the original noir cycle were made during a time when the paranoid political atmosphere of the early Cold War years made it difficult to conduct such critiques without being suspected of communist sympathies. Yet noir filmmakers somehow managed to explore the dark side of the American dream with characters, plots, and visuals that pushed the limits of all these constraints, while nevertheless winning the hearts of American filmgoers.
Film noir was a key element of American film in the 1940s and 1950s. However, noir has shown a surprising staying power, and films building on the basic characteristics of film noir have continued to appear until this day. First, a wave of what has come to be called “neo-noir” films appeared in roughly the last three and a half decades of the twentieth century, driven largely by the collapse of the Motion Picture Production Code, which had greatly restricted how thoroughly the original noir films could explore the dark territory they consistently inhabited. Neo-noir films have continued to appear in the twenty-first century as well, but filmmakers of the new century have found innovative ways to explore noir territory. For one thing, noir has now become a genuinely international phenomenon (in addition to the contributions of European directors to American noir film throughout its history). Noir-inflected films from Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong have become a major element of twenty-first-century Asian cinema[1], while the films and television mini-series associated with the Scandinavian cultural phenomenon sometimes referred to as “Nordic noir” have been one of the century’s most successful modes of European cultural production[2]. The American film industry has also continued to produce new noir-inflected films (though often with international actors or directors), making noir one of the richest veins in twenty-first-century cinema as a whole.
This course is partly intended to serve as a general introduction to film noir for those who are interested in the topic but have relatively little knowledge of it. But it also seeks, for both beginners and experienced viewers, to outline a new historical model for the historical evolution of noir film from its roots in the 1940s and 1950s to the production of a number of revisionary noir films in the twenty-first century (with the phenomenon of neo-noir falling roughly in between—in the period, say, from the 1960s through the 1990s). This introduction will seek to establish the basic characteristics that define “film noir,” characteristics that neo-noir film uses and changes in only minor ways, but that revisionary noir film changes in more radical ways. For example, a neo-noir film such as Chinatown (1974) carefully draws upon film noir for its style and content, updating noir conventions primarily in ways that are related to the use of color and the collapse of the Code. In contrast, a revisionary noir film such as Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s graphic novel adaptation Sin City (2005) is clearly a revisionary noir that pushes the envelope of noir violence in exaggerated and even abject ways. Sin City thus calls attention to the sanitized and muted representation of violence in the original noir films, possibly suggesting that these films might have thus inadvertently made violence seem more palatable. Sin City is also technically innovative, producing digitized visuals that mimic the appearance of the comic series on which it is based, which is in itself essentially an exaggeration of the aesthetics of film noir. Presented mostly in extremely stark black-and-white visuals, this film also uses splashes of color for emphasis at key moments, such as red for blood, though it also effectively uses bright white and even yellow for blood in key scenes, a strategy that makes the black-and-white visuals seem even more striking. It also features a number of characters who might be described as noir lost men, though some go so far past the norm that they would make even the most extreme film noir characters seem tame. Thus, as Bould puts it, in both its visuals and its characters, this film reduces film noir “to its image(s) and the desire not to make a film noir but to somehow put the very idea, the megatext, of film noir on the screen” (114). This sort of representation clearly invites re-evaluation of the characters, content, and aesthetics of noir, making Sin City a quintessential example of revisionary noir.
WHAT IS NOIR FILM?
In this course, I will use the term “noir film” as a blanket designation for all types of films that prominently employ noir motifs in any way. This term thus encompasses all of the films discussed in this course, whatever their differences might otherwise be. (Though it will not be a primary focus in this course, one might also use the term “proto-noir film” to indicate films that were made prior to the emergence of full-blown film noir but that had already begun to show many noir characteristics and that thus exerted an influence over the evolution of film noir.) I will use the term “film noir” in the same sense that it is typically used by both fans and scholars of the phenomenon—as a broad designation for the extensive cycle of films with noir characteristics that were produced roughly from John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon in 1941 through Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958. That is, “film noir” describes the prevailing paradigm in noir films from roughly 1941 to 1958. These are the films that establish what we think of as “noir.” I will also sometimes refer to them as “original noir” films or “classic noir” films.
James Naremore, writing in a book first published in 1998, notes the significant amount of critical attention that has been paid to film noir, typically defined as a series of “thrillers or crime pictures of the 1940s and 1950s,” characterized by their “cynical treatment of the American Dream, their complicated play with gender and sexuality, and their foregrounding of cinematic style.” He then goes on to state that “film noir has become one of the dominant intellectual categories of the late twentieth century, operating across the entire cultural arena of art, popular memory, and criticism” (More 2). Naremore then does a great deal to characterize film noir, though noting that the concept has less to do with the films themselves than with a “discourse—a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies” (11).
The history of noir supports Naremore’s claim, especially as the concept of “film noir” did not exist when the first wave of noir films was being made. Indeed, few observers in America realized, during World War II, that something genuinely new was happening in the relatively low-budget, dimly-lit crime dramas that were appearing with increasing frequency during the war years. Meanwhile, American films were largely banned in France during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945, so that, once the war was over, French viewers suddenly gained access to a five-year backlog of American films all at once. Astute French critics, seeing these films together as a group, immediately recognized that much of what they were now seeing was distinctively different from the Hollywood films to which they had become accustomed before the war. Viewing films such as John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945), Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), and Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944) for the first time, the French critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier declared these films to belong to a family of related works that represented a new breakthrough in American film realism—though many aspects of these films must have seemed familiar to French viewers in the sense that many French films of the 1930s anticipated film noir in a number of ways. Responding both to the thematic darkness of the films and to the literal darkness of the images they saw on the screen, Frank and Chartier dubbed this new kind of American film “film noir” (black, or dark film), a name apparently inspired by the “Série noire” series of dark crime novels that had recently begun appearing in postwar France. It was thus that one of the most American of all film phenomena acquired its French name. Other French critics soon followed suit, remaining in the vanguard of critical appreciations of film noir for some time. For example, the first (and now classic) book-length study of the genre—only much later (2002) published in English—was A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, published in France in 1955.
Basic Characteristics of Film Noir
Film noir is notoriously hard to categorize in a succinct way, largely because noir is defined more by mood and atmosphere than by specific settings or iconography. Still, the phenomenon of film noir is typically associated with a number of distinctive characteristics, even though no one film noir can possibly contain all of these characteristics. In fact, some of the best-known characteristics of film noir are actually absent from most noir films. For example, partly due to the association of the works of writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler with the phenomenon, film noir is often thought of as typically featuring hardboiled private detectives. However, while detective films are certainly among the most important noir films, most noir films do not feature either private detectives or police detectives as their main characters. Similarly, because their depiction stood out in such stark contrast to the representation of women in most Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, a focus on the figure of the femme fatale is often thought of as a key attribute of film noir. Again, however, most noir films do not contain a classic femme fatale, even though they do often contain a number of female characters who in one way or another stand apart from the Hollywood mainstream.
In their initial characterization of film noir, Borde and Chaumeton identified five basic characteristics of the series of films they were discussing. These films, they declared, were “oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel,” though different films focus on different elements in this list (2). And, if this list of qualities seems a bit vague and general, many critics since that time have attempted to come up with a concise list of basic properties of film noir as a phenomenon. In a much-cited article (first published in 1972), director and screenwriter Paul Schrader has helpfully listed four basic “catalytic elements” from which he sees the original noir cycle as drawing its basic energies. These elements are 1) war and postwar disillusionment; 2) a general turn to greater realism in postwar film as a whole; 3) the influence of German expatriates; and 4) the hardboiled tradition. He then discusses some basic stylistic and thematic tendencies in film noir, as influenced by these”elements.”[3]
Deborah Thomas concentrates more directly on the properties of the films themselves. Taking an approach that is anchored in gender studies, she suggests the following list of basic characteristics of noir films:
- These films tend to feature a “central male protagonist whose point of view is privileged through such devices as first-person narration … and subjective framing devices like flashbacks or dreams” (67).
- They tend to undermine this point of view “through labyrinthine plots which seem to elude the protagonist’s attempts to give them coherence through his narration” or through “breaks in the protagonist’s consciousness” (68).
- Film noir tends to feature protagonists with a divided or split consciousness, often figured in his simultaneous attraction to a “good” (i.e. domesticated) woman and a “bad” (i.e. strong and independent) femme fatale (68).
- Such films tend to feature a “mood of pervasive anxiety” for their male protagonists, often resolved through the death of the femme fatale or a suggestion of normalcy and domesticity looming in the near future (68).
Any number of other lists might be (and have been) proposed. As a good starting point, I would suggest the following basic characteristics of film noir:
- The noir “look.” Almost always shot in black-and-white, the original noir films typically feature low-key lighting and striking shadow effects, often with odd camera angles or in a mode influenced by the style of German Expressionist cinema.
- The noir protagonist, typically male, is an unconventional hero, even an anti-hero. Sometimes he is seriously flawed, even evil or psychotic. He might be unusually violent or misogynistic. Sometimes he is simply an ordinary person who is thrust into extraordinary circumstances with which he is ill equipped to deal. Often, he is weak or ineffectual, confused and lost, particularly at the mercy of women. When he is strong and effective, he tends to be so on his own terms, often following his own moral code that differs substantially from the societal norm.
- Women in film noir are often represented in stereotypical ways: the conniving bad girl and the virtuous good girl are the most common types, often placed in the same film in opposition to one another, perhaps competing for the affections of the same man. In many cases, though, noir women are actually far more complex than the classic Hollywood norm; they can be quite strong and capable (often more so than the male protagonist), but they sometimes have a tendency to use these characteristics to the detriment of the male protagonist, in which case they are usually given the label “femme fatale” (“fatal, or deadly, woman”). In a number of noir films, though, a woman character is the protagonist, and in this case she tends to be more virtuous than the typical femme fatale, though social pressures often force her into ruthless or unscrupulous actions.
- Film noir tends to be informed by an air of moral crisis and uncertainty; characters are tempted by opportunities they know they should rightly decline or otherwise find themselves at a moral crossroads, knowing that the path they take will have crucial long-term consequences. Often the characters are morally ambiguous: they are neither fully good nor fully bad, nor are their actions. Borde and Chaumeton repeatedly emphasize the “ambiguity” of film noir and of the way in which noir films tend to break down easy distinctions, especially between good and evil, creating an effect of confusion that disorients viewers: “the moral ambivalence, criminal violence, and contradictory complexity of the situations and motives all combine to give the public a shared feeling of the anguish or insecurity, which is the identifying sign of film noir at this time” (Panorama 13).
- Film noir tends to be skeptical of high-minded pronouncements and pessimistic about the future. The films tend to suggest that life has no inherent meaning, though sometimes (in the mode of philosophical existentialism) characters are able to make their own meanings in life.
- Film noir tends to be heavily stylized. The lighting, music, and camera placements are often intrusive, used to excess as a means of creating an atmosphere of tension, mystery, or uncertainty. Characters and plot events are not necessarily realistic in any conventional sense.
The Emergence of Film Noir
To understand film noir, it is helpful to understand the historical conditions under which it developed. One of these conditions was, of course, the Production Code, but broader historical conditions the United States were crucial to the rise of film noir, as well. In fact, even conditions in Germany were important to the development of certain noir characteristics. In particular, the German defeat in World War I led to a period of intense crisis in Germany that eventually led to the tragic rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. But the air of crisis in Germany after World War I proved a stimulus to some forms of artistic creativity, especially film, as the German film industry became for a time, arguably, the most sophisticated in the world. The most direct line of influence between the German postwar crisis and German film was in the rise of Expressionism, an artistic style that was perfectly suited to express a sense of crisis—and that ultimately exercised a strong influence on the visual texture of film noir. German silent film classics such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) did a great deal to establish the Expressionist style This style then continued to be a force in the German film industry into the sound era, and Expressionist sound films such as Lang’s M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) are both clear forerunners of film noir both visually and thematically.
Things were about to change in Germany, however, and Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship in 1933 soon led to a tidal wave of oppressive policies that drove many top talents out of Germany. One of the first actions of the new regime, in fact, was to exert control over the German film industry, quickly leading to the banning of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse in Germany. Lang, a practicing Catholic whose mother had been born Jewish, fled to France before moving on to Hollywood to make his first American film, the proto-noir crime drama Fury, in 1936. He then worked in the Hollywood film industry for the next twenty years, becoming an important noir director and a key example of the influence of filmmakers who had formerly worked in the German film industry.
American filmmakers with roots in the German film industry (most of whom came to America in flight from the Nazis) included such noir masters as Wilder, Michael Curtiz, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Their influence was no doubt one reason for the prominence of German Expressionist techniques in Hollywood by the 1940s. In the case of film noir, though, this prominence was greatly enhanced by the fact that the Expressionist style was so well suited to the thematic texture of film noir. This style, which emphasized low-key lighting and the inventive use of light and shadows to create atmospheric effects, was also well suited to low-budget filmmaking, another plus for noir film.
In short, the dark turn in German history between the world wars proved a boon to the American film industry, helping the period from the 1930s through the 1950s to become known as a sort of Golden Age in American film. During this time, an emergent Hollywood film industry developed a highly sophisticated system for making and distributing classic films that made Hollywood the world capital of cinema. Talent flowed into California from all over the country and even all over the world, enriching the Hollywood milieu even further and making the Los Angeles neighborhood a shining paradigm of America itself as a land of opportunity where anyone with the ability and willingness to work hard could have ample chance to succeed. Moguls such as Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Carl Laemmle, Harry Cohn, and David O. Selznick became the kings of the industry. All of these were immigrants or the sons of immigrants; all were Jewish, and all came from working-class backgrounds. The building of this film industry was an impressive achievement, a highly visual demonstration of what American skill, ingenuity and industriousness could accomplish. It was the American Dream in action. Meanwhile, Hollywood films became advertisements for America; distributed more and more widely across the globe, they became emblems of prestige, markers of quality that encouraged audiences around the globe to associate America with wealth, sophistication, and fine craftsmanship.
That, of course, is only one side of the story. The Hollywood film industry grew so impressively in the 1930s largely in order to provide a momentary diversion from the harsh realities of American poverty during the Great Depression. In the first half of the 1940s, Hollywood films provided brief moments of respite from the trauma and anxiety of World War II. Meanwhile, victory in that war brought anything but universal prosperity and contentment. Hollywood films continued to provide escapist entertainments in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, even as the industry itself became a central target of the anti-communist hysteria that swept across America like a plague. Thus, if the heyday of Expressionism occurred during a troubled period in German history, then the Golden Age of Hollywood corresponded closely with some of the darkest decades in American history, from Depression in the 1930s, to war in the 1940s, to repressive anticommunist hysteria and terror of nuclear holocaust in the 1950s.
Hollywood film from the 1930s through the 1950s might have often provided escapist entertainment, but it also reflected the dark side of American history more directly. At the very beginning of the sound era, for example, films such as the Universal monster movies and the Warner Bros. gangster movies of the early 1930s grew out of the difficulties of their era. Such films were among the forerunners of film noir—and they were exactly the sort of films that the Production Code was designed to curb, leading to the rise of film noir to take their place. The connection between gangster films and noir films is fairly obvious, but it should also be clear that monsters such as King Kong and Frankenstein’s Creature are virtual prototypes of the noir protagonist: alienated, misunderstood, and basically innocent, but driven to crime and eventually destroyed by forces beyond their control.
Many films before the U.S. entry into World War II anticipated film noir even more directly. In 1940, for example, Stranger on the Third Floor showed numerous characteristics that would later come to be associated with noir films. It also features performances by Elisha Cook, Jr. (who would later become a key noir character actor) and Peter Lorre—who had starred in Lang’s M (1931) back in Germany and who would play important roles in a number of American noir films, including The Maltese Falcon, which also features Cook. Stranger on the Third Floor includes a psychotic killer (played by Lorre), an innocent man (played by Cook) wrongly convicted of murder, and a protagonist (played by John McGuire) who is driven to near madness by the events of the film. The film ultimately deviates from most noir in its successful resolution, but it nevertheless has very much the look and feel of a noir film—especially in the strange dream sequence at the center of the film, which is an almost perfect example of German Expressionist visuals. The film also features the cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca, who would become a leading noir cinematographer.
The Motion Picture Production Code
No discussion of the basic characteristics of film noir would be complete without a consideration of the impact of the Motion Picture Production Code on these films, which in many ways were designed to do exactly what the Production Code was trying to prevent. The Production Code was a series of restrictions on the content of Hollywood film adopted by the film industry as a form of self-censorship, designed both to counter the public perception of film as a morally suspect form and to prevent the imposition of censorship from outside the industry. Adopted in 1930 and fully implemented in 1934, the Code was drafted by former United States Postmaster Will B. Hays, who resigned his cabinet post in 1922 to become the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), charged with creating a better public image of the film industry. The Code (often referred to as the Hays Code), established three general principles. First, no film should be produced that would tend to lower the moral standards of its audience. Second, films should present “correct standards of life.” Finally, no film should ridicule the law (natural or human) or show sympathy with the violators of the law. It then spelled out a number of specific restrictions, most of which were oriented toward limiting the representation of sexuality, violence, or criminality on the screen. The Code had a major impact on Hollywood film from 1934 until the 1960s, when it began to appear more and more anachronistic. The Code was periodically updated to try to stay relevant but was abandoned in 1968. It was replaced by a film rating system, still in use today in modified form, instituted by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), to which the MPPDA had changed its name in 1945.
Of course, virtually every film noir was in some way problematic according to this Code, and it is clear that many characteristics of film noir developed largely as an attempt to represent sexuality, violence, and criminality in ways that could pass Code review. Thus, noir filmmakers developed an elaborate language to suggest a variety of forbidden topics without actually showing or mentioning them directly, thus skirting the restrictions of the Code. Many film historians, in fact, feel that film noir was enriched by the limits placed on them by the Code, which forced the filmmakers to be more clever and creative than they might otherwise have been. Meanwhile, one reason for the emergence of neo-noir films at the end of the 1960s was that filmmakers wanted to re-visit the possibilities of film noir in an era without Code restrictions. Indeed, the two major, obvious distinctions between noir and neo-noir films are the absence of Code restrictions on the latter and the tendency of the latter to be produced in color.
What Is Neo-Noir?
Though the original film noir cycle had seemingly run its course by the end of the 1950s, the changing nature of American society in the 1960s considerably disrupted the film industry—most obviously in the collapse of the Production Code, which opened the way for the resurrection of noir energies in the new and less restricted form that came to be known as “neo-noir.” With the emergence of films such as John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1973), Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1974), and Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), it soon became clear that the atmosphere, style, characters, and narratives of film noir were being self-consciously deployed in a new family of films, now unrestricted by the Production Code and mostly (but not always) made in color. By the 1980s, distinctive films such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) and Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple (1984) helped to propel an explosion in the production of neo-noir films, and explosion that (predictably) included remakes of a number of noir classics. However, stretching the conventions of anything opens a much wider variety of possibilities than had following those conventions, so these films (the production of which continued apace in the 1990s) were much more diverse than the original noir cycle had been—as the example of Ridley Scott’s science fiction noir classic Blade Runner (1982) amply illustrates. Even Tim Burton’s original Batman (1989) clearly qualifies as a neo-noir film. Moreover, other influences (such as the French New Wave) also contributed to the greater diversity of neo-noir film.
It should also be noted that the rise of neo-noir was closely aligned with what has come to be known as the “New Hollywood,” in which a new generation of young directors exercised unprecedented control over their films, thanks partly to the collapse of the studio system and partly to the fact that the rise of blockbuster films made helped to make directors a marketable “brand.” Many of the key neo-noir films were also New Hollywood films, though it is also the case that some directors who were working within the bounds of what could rightly considered neo-noir established such a distinctive brand that their films came to be associated more with their directors than with neo-noir. Thus, neo-noir directors from John Cassavetes (A Woman Under the Influence in 1974, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in 1976, Opening Night in 1977) and Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets in 1973, Taxi Driver in 1976, Raging Bull in 1980), to David Lynch (Blue Velvet in 1986, Wild at Heart in 1990, Lost Highway in 1996) and Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs in 1992, Pulp Fiction 1994, Jackie Brown in 1997), have more often been discussed as individual “auteurs”than within the genre context of neo-noir. Moreover, some of these directors—Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) is probably the best example, though all of his films contain strong revisionary energies—push the conventions of noir far enough that they might be considered revisionary noir directors.
The wide variety of neo-noir films—and the fact that some of the films are more clearly and self-consciously “noir” than others—makes neo-noir difficult to define. However, book-length studies, such as Richard Martin’s Mean Streets and Raging Bulls (1997) and Foster Hirsch’s Detours and Lost Highways (1999) have begun to map out a definition, while broader studies of noir, such as that by Bould, have paid significant attention to neo-noir as well. Meanwhile, if the beginnings of neo-noir are reasonably easy to locate in specific developments in the 1960s, there are no such developments to which one can tie the end of neo-noir. In fact, it is my argument in this course that neo-noir films continue to be produced to this day, alongside revisionary noir films—and indeed that the distinction between neo-noir and revisionary noir is not an absolute one but a matter of degree, so that the revisionary noir films of the twenty-first century can be placed along a continuum from, say, the ultimate neo-noir of the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), to the clearly revisionary noir of films such as Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me (2010) or Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems (2019). Meanwhile, other films of the twenty-first century remain mostly in the neo-noir camp, including such examples as otherwise different as Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale (2002) and The Black Dahlia (2006), Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017).
What Is Revisionary Noir?
Neo-noir films self-consciously draw upon the conventions of film noir but in ways that do not encourage a re-evaluation of those conventions or of the original noir films. Revisionary noir films use noir conventions but challenge them and go beyond them in ways that do encourage this sort of re-evaluation. Again, though, the line between neo-noir and revisionary noir is not absolute: any given film that employs noir conventions might potentially inspire someone to rethink noir, just as any film that goes beyond noir conventions, no matter how radically, might find some viewers who are not inspire to rethink noir. I am speaking of matters of degree more than kind.
The historical line between neo-noir and revisionary noir is also particularly vague. Just as neo-noir films continue to be made today, so too were noir films with strong revisionary energies made well before the twentieth century. However, it should also be noted that the distinction between revisionary noir films and neo-noir films is not necessarily a value judgment: revisionary noir films are not necessarily “better” or more interesting films than neo-noir films. They simply push more firmly against the boundaries of what is conventionally regarded as “noir.” The Man Who Wasn’t There can be taken as a sort of limit case that pushes neo-noir as far as it can go without posing a critical challenge to our conventional understanding of “noir.”[4] Itthus opened the way for an increase in the prevalence of what I will call “revisionary noir,” in reference to noir films that clearly and self-consciously draw upon noir tropes in both style and content but differ from the original film noir cycle in ways so substantial that they tend to encourage a re-evaluation of those original films and of the meaning of “noir” as an umbrella concept. Such films do not merely use noir tropes but can lead to a substantial revision in those tropes. I will argue that this mode of noir film becomes particularly prominent after the first years of the new century and remains so today in 2024.
The Periodization of Noir Film
Cultural historians refers to the kind of historical model I am proposing here as a model of “periodization,” in which history proceeds in stages, with a given “paradigm” being the dominant one in any given period. Some famous examples of this kind of periodication include the model of literary history proposed by the Russian formalists in the early twentieth century and the model of scientific history proposed by Thomas Kuhn in the middle of the twentieth century, but such models are commonly used in all sorts of situations, including the history of film. I should emphasize, though, that the periodization of noir film that I am proposing here (film noir, neo-noir, and revisionary noir) depends both upon developments within the films themselves and on external social and political forces that contribute to the shaping of film history. I should also emphasize that the transitions from one period to the next are not sudden and absolute. For example, if I designate Point Blank as the “first” neo-noir film, that does not imply that this film represented a dramatic break in which noir history sharply veers off in a new direction. Indeed, one could just as easily suggest Jack Smight’s Harper (1966) as the first neo-noir film without any meaningful change to the historical model. The boundaries between the three main periods I described above are fluid and porous. In addition, during each shift of paradigm, there will appear a number of transitional films that belong comfortably within neither the old nor the new paradigm. Thus, if one regards Touch of Evil as the “final” film noir, it might also be regarded as the first film in the transition to neo-noir. Similarly, if one regards Point Blank as the first neo-noir film, then it might also be considered the final film in the transition from noir to neo-noir. Moreover, in between Touch of Evil and Point Blank, there are a number of transitional noir films—such as Harper or Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964)—that begin to push the boundaries of noir film beyond the original noir paradigm. Of course, the emergence of neo-noir represents a sharper turn than the emergence of revisionary noir, largely because of forces that were external to the films themselves. The most obvious of these was the Production Code, which gradually collapsed over the course of the 1960s, due both to economic factors related to the rise of television and to changing cultural values amid the emergent countercultural movements of that decade. No such clearly defined external forces impacted the transition from neo-noir to revisionary noir, which is probably why that transition is less sharply defined (and is, in fact, being posited here for the first time)[5]. Meanwhile, if neo-noir films have continued to be produced in the twenty-first century, it is also the case that, as the examples of films such as Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992)and Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) show, films that clearly fit in the revisionary noir category were already being produced well before 2001.
It is helpful here to draw upon the work of the prominent British cultural theorist Raymond Williams to describe the transitions between periods. Williams argued (in much the same mode as the Russian Formalists, but with more awareness of external social factors), that cultural production in any period is indeed largely shaped by a specific dominant paradigm. However, Williams notes, any period will also continue to see the “residual” influence of the preceding dominant paradigm, as well as to begin to see the “emergent” influence of what will become the dominant paradigm in the succeeding period (Williams 121–23). Thus, for example, the films of the neo-noir period not only draw upon the noir characteristics that were established in the original film noir cycle but also begin to anticipate the more radical deviations from those original characteristics that would emerge in the revisionary noir period.
Film Noir and Modernism
The specific vision of noir history put forth here is very closely related to larger models of cultural history during the same period—and especially to the theorization of postmodernism developed by the prominent cultural theorist Fredric Jameson through the 1980s and summarized in his 1991 book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Before discussing the relevance of Jameson’s work on postmodernism to noir history, however, it is first useful to note that both film noir and the related phenomenon of hardboiled detective fiction have been described as distinctively American forms of modernism[6]. Modernism is most commonly associated with high-profile work of the early twentieth century, such as the fiction of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, the poetry of T. S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams, or the paintings of Pablo Picasso. But modernism, though it never became a literary dominant (in the sense meant by the Russian Formalists), reflected a quite widespread sense that the radical changes underway in virtually every aspect of modern life had rendered older forms of art largely irrelevant. Modernist artists were thus willing to attempt radical experiments in an attempt to produce new forms of art that could respond to the new texture of life in the fast-paced modern world.
Film itself as an art form arose at about the same time as modernism—and was one of the many innovations that were changing Western societies at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the 1930s, though, a distinctive non-modernist Hollywood style had become dominant in American film. This style was essentially realist in that it was designed not to call attention to itself, allowing audiences to concentrate on the story within the film, suspending their disbelief and treating the events on the screen as if they were really happening. There were few exceptions to this tendency in American film of the time, which is one reason why the most important exception—Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941)—seemed so strikingly innovative. Citizen Kane, a major modernist work of art,was not a commercial success (for various reasons), and so it did not inspire a wave of direct imitators in Hollywood. It was, however, an important influence on the development of film noir, which was just beginning to appear when Kane was officially released in September of 1941, roughly a month before The Maltese Falcon. Often considered the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane was certainly one of the most innovative, especially in its use of unusual camera angles and movements, play with lighting, unbalanced compositions, and flashback narrative structure. All of these elements would subsequently become prominent in film noir, even though Kane is not typically thought of as a film noir, mostly because its central character is a larger-than-life figure, as opposed to the Everymen, outcasts, and losers who typically populate film noir. Of course, even the powerful Kane is driven by childhood trauma, has his life disrupted by a sexual obsession, and ends up a broken man, dying alone. Still, Kane is probably better considered a proto-noir film than a noir film proper, reminding us that The Maltese Falcon did not simply emerge from nowhere. Borde and Chaumeton mention Kane multiple times in their discussion of film noir, though they also regard Kane as an “unclassifiable” film that doesn’t really fit in any category (2). It is also worth mentioning here that Welles himself would go on to become one of the greatest noir directors, directing such crucial noir films as The Stranger (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947). And, if Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) is to be considered the end of the noir cycle, then that cycle can then be said to be bookended by Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, making the films of Welles crucially important in the evolution of noir.
Noir Film and Postmodernism
Most cultural historians agree that, in the years after World War II, a new form of art that both drew upon and challenged the insights of the modernists began to emerge, becoming fully formed around the end of the 1960s. There has, as yet, been no complete consensus about the exact relationship of this new movement to modernism, but modernism seems so important as a predecessor in one way or another that this new movement has come almost universally to be known as “postmodernism.” Original critical assessments of postmodernism (and especially of postmodern literature) were heavily influenced by the countercultural spirit of the 1960s, seeing postmodernism as an emancipatory movement that challenged the literary establishment via subversive carnivalesque strategies that refused to respect the authority of existing cultural norms. A number of critics in the 1960s and 1970s—Egyptian American literary scholar Ihab Hassan and French poststructuralist theorist Jean-François Lyotard were probably the most influential on American literary and cultural studies—saw postmodernism in this way, at the same time generally seeing modernism as an elitist movement that was largely aligned with the ruling forces in Western society.
Of course, these early theorists of postmodernism were working, not only in the midst of the 1960s/1970s counterculture, but also at a time when the modernist art and literature of the first decades of the twentieth century had been adopted as key parts of the official Western “canon,” largely because the complex and sophisticated works of modernist artists were arguably aesthetically superior to the works of Soviet socialist realism, so that the canonization of modernism allowed it to be conscripted as a key element of Western Cold War rhetoric[7]. It was thus easy, after the 1950s, to envision modernism as supportive of official authority, even though the major modernist writers had mostly been marginalized outsiders when they were actually living and working. For example, Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), perhaps the greatest single work of modernist literature, was powerfully critical of both the Catholic authorities in Ireland and the British colonial authorities that had by then ruled Ireland for centuries. Moreover, his book was considered shocking and even pornographic by many. It was, for example, banned in the United States upon its initial publication, a ban that stayed in place until 1934.
Beginning his major work on postmodernism in the 1980s, Jameson was working at a time in which the 1960s and 1970s counterculture was largely a thing of the past—and had largely failed to achieve its supposedly radical goal of fundamentally changing the world. Jameson was thus able to see that the counterculture might not have been quite as radically transformative as it had been widely perceived to be at the time, primarily because it failed to imagine a genuine alternative to the capitalist system that was the most important factor determining the nature and organization of Western societies of the time. Accordingly, Jameson was immediately suspicious of claims of the emancipatory power of postmodernism, given that these claims were so clearly related to the energies of the counterculture. At the same time, he also sought to recover the initial subversive tendencies of modernism, which he saw as a (failed) last-ditch effort to resist the complete takeover of Western societies by capitalism.
In contrast, postmodernism, for Jameson, arose as a sign of the defeat of modernism by capitalism. Postmodernism, indeed, is for Jameson essentially the culture that arises when all of the major enemies of capitalism have been defeated, leaving the power of capitalism essentially unchallenged. Postmodernism, for Jameson, is the culture that arises when the process of capitalist modernization is virtually complete, leaving nothing that has not already been colonized by the capitalist system. Drawing upon the work of Ernest Mandel, Jameson refers to this new stage of capitalism as “late” capitalism, a global form of consumer-oriented capitalism when virtually everything (including culture) has been conscripted by the capitalist system and incorporated into the capitalist system of commodity production. Thoroughly aligned ideologically with late capitalism, postmodernism is thus the “cultural logic” of late capitalism[8].
As it so happens, Jameson uses neo-noir film as one of his key examples of postmodern art. In particular, he refers to neo-noir films such as Chinatown and Body Heat as “nostalgia films,” arguing that the imaginations of postmodern filmmakers (and other postmodern artists) are typically held so firmly in the grip of late capitalist ideology that the artists are unable to develop distinctive styles of their own and must turn to the past for inspiration. On the other hand, for Jameson, this turn to the past is emotionally inert, bereft of the kind of genuine longing for something that has been lost that we typically associate with the emotion of nostalgia. This emotion, for Jameson, is unavailable to postmodern films because of a general postmodern loss of historical sense that makes filmmakers unable fully to understand the past as historically linked to the present. In particular, the nostalgia film thus becomes a special form of the “pastiche” that Jameson consistently regards as the crucial stylistic technique of postmodern art: unable to generate a genuinely personal style of their own, postmodern artists, for Jameson, simply borrow from the styles of the past, as if choosing them from a cafeteria menu.
For Jameson, such nostalgia films speak to the fact that we had (in the 1980s) become so estranged from our present, demonstrating the “enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience” (21). Meanwhile, in the more than thirty years since Postmodernism was published, Jameson’s book has remained the most influential theorization of postmodernism. Indeed, as the late capitalism he was describing has developed into a new, more virulent neoliberal form, his analysis would seem to have become even more accurate. But if postmodernism is a cultural dominant, and if it is thoroughly aligned with late capitalism, how will anything ever change in the future? Jameson doesn’t know the answer to that, nor does anyone else. Yet, based on historical precedent, Jameson insists that the current prevailing system, no matter how total, will change—and will change in ways that we cannot possibly anticipate:
The postmodern may well in that sense be little more than a transitional period between two stages of capitalism, in which the earlier forms of the economic are in the process of being restructured on a global scale, including the older forms of labor and its traditional organizational institutions and concepts. That a new international proletariat (taking forms we cannot yet imagine) will reemerge from this convulsive upheaval it needs no prophet to predict: we ourselves are still in the trough, however, and no one can say how long we still stay there. (Postmodernism 417).
In addition, Jameson believes that postmodernism itself might evolve in ways that ultimately give it the ability to contribute to future change. One reason why late capitalism has such a grip on our imaginations, he argues, is that it is so complex and widespread that it is impossible for us to understand how it works, where it came from, or where we ourselves fit within the larger system. Late capitalism has, in short, crippled our ability to perform what Jameson calls “cognitive mapping,” after the work of urban geographer Kevin Lynch on how individuals get their bearings within the complex setting of modern cities. Jameson envisions a day, though, when postmodern art can help us to regain the ability to perform this sort of cognitive mapping. Thus, he concludes, “the political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale” (Postmodernism 54).
I would argue that, if neo-noir film is a quintessential example of postmodern pastiche culture that fails to contribute to this project of cognitive mapping, the emergence of revisionary noir films is possibly a sign that postmodern culture is finally beginning to enter the political phase that Jameson speculated about when he was writing over thirty years ago. Revisionary noir films acknowledge both film noir and neo-noir as their predecessors but set themselves apart from these predecessors in ways that help us to see those earlier periods as a past that is connected with the present through a process of historical change. By extension, if the past can change into the present, then the present can change into a different future, possibly a better one.
ORGANIZATION OF THIS COURSE
This course will trace the historical evolution of noir film by looking at three important subsets of noir film, including those focusing on detectives, those centering on the existential crisis of a “lost man,” and those that are dominated by women characters, including characters who belong to the classic noir category of the femme fatale. There are, of course, other subsets of noir film (such as “heist” films or other crime films that do not necessarily feature detectives or investigations), but these three should be sufficient to characterize noir film in general. Each of the three segments of this course begins with an introductory historical overview of that subset of noir film. Each segment then proceeds with a detailed discussion of three films from the original noir cycle in order clearly to establish the characteristics of the films in that cycle. Each segment will then discuss one neo-noir film and one revisionary noir film from the requisite subset in order to explore the ways these categories differ from each other and from the original film noir cycle.
Works Cited
Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. Verso, 1998.
Booker, M. Keith. The Coen Brothers’ America. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
Booker, M. Keith. Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism: Reading Joyce After the Cold War. Greenwood Press, 2000.
Borde, Raymond, and Étienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953. 1955. Translated by Paul Hammond. City Lights Books, 2002.
Bould, Mark. Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City. Wallflower, 2005.
Creeber, Glen. “Killing Us Softly: Investigating the Aesthetics, Philosophy and Influence of Nordic Noir Television.” The Journal of Popular Television, vol. 3, no. 1, April 2015, pp. 21–35.
Durgnat, Raymond. “Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. Limelight Editions, 1996. 37–51.
Forshaw, Barry. Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film & TV. Oldcastle Books, 2013.
Hassan, Ihab. “POSTmodernISM.” New Literary History, no. 3, 1971, pp. 5-30.
Hirsch, Foster. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir. Limelight, 1999.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 4th edition, University of Chicago Press, 2012. Originally published in 1962.
Lee, Hyangjin. “The Shadow of Outlaws in Asian Noir: Hiroshima, Hong Kong and Seoul.” Neo-Noir. Edited by MarkBould, Kathrina Glitre, Kathrina, and Greg Tuck, Wallflower Press, 2009, pp. 118-135.
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT Press, 1960.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. 2nd revised edition, Verso, 1999.
Martin, Richard. Mean Streets and Raging Bulls: The Legacy of Film Noir in Contemporary American Cinema. Scarecrow Press, 1997.
Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir and Its Contexts. University of California Press, 1998.
Nestingen, Andrew. “The Nordic Noir Brand.” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, vol. 11, no. 1, 2021, pp. 103–112.
Place, Janey, and Lowell Peterson. “Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. Limelight Editions, 1996. 65–76.
Rabinowitz, Paula. Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. Columbia University Press, 2002.
Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. Limelight Editions, 1996. 53–64.
Thomas, Deborah. “How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male.” The Book of Film Noir. Ed. Ian Cameron. Continuum, 1993. 59–70.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977.
Notes
[1] On Asian noir, see Lee.
[2] For some general information on Nordic noir, see Creeber, Forshaw, and Nestingen.
[3] In another classic article (first published in 1970), Raymond Durgnat traces the historical roots of film noir, while the article by Place and Peterson is a good brief introduction to film noir visual style.
[4] The films of the Coen Brothers in general are perhaps the ones who have most pushed the boundaries of noir most extensively, while remaining largely within the bounds of neo-noir. See my book The Coen Brothers’ America for a survey of their films.
[5] This is not to say that no specific external events impacted the rise of revisionary noir. For example, both the 9/11 bombings and the 2008 financial crisis contributed to a rise in anxieties in American society as compared with the relatively sanguine 1990s. Social anxieties tend to fuel noir films.
[6] See, for example, the book by Paula Rabinowitz.
[7] On this phenomenon, see the concluding chapter to my book Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism (169–87).
[8] Following Jameson’s work, Perry Anderson has argued that the first wave of theorists of postmodernism were actually driven by Cold War anti-Marxist impulses, rather than anti-capitalist impulses (45–46).