By Michael Bayer
For those completely unfamiliar, film noir could be usefully described as, quite simply, crime films from the 1940’s and 1950’s. Those with knowledge of cinema history might assess it as a film genre born at the intersection of German expressionism and American hardboiled fiction. Those fanatics who have devoured every available specimen of these films, however, understand that film noir – French for “dark film” – is a category of art that can’t be precisely described. A convergence of social, philosophical, political, and aesthetic ideas that point to a kind of darkness that was unique to mid-twentieth century America, film noir has puzzled critics, scholars, and fans for 80 years because it’s somehow as inscrutable as it is distinctive.
It makes perfect sense that “dark film” would emerge and peak precisely at the midpoint of the most violent and deadly century in human history, a century comprising humanity’s highest achievements and lowest degradations (even the blood-splattering brutality of the Middle Ages had nothing on the 20th century). Film noir was unquestionably linked to the impact and aftermath of World War II, which had killed 65 million people, more than two percent of the world’s population, in some of the most dehumanizing ways imaginable. Totalitarianism — and its twin forces of fascism and communism – had altered human life to such an extent that even the United States, which had kept a reasonably safe distance from both, was still culturally transformed by it.
American soldiers had returned home disoriented, a kind of moral anarchy having descended on their country, any erstwhile sense of security stretched to its limits by post-traumatic stress, the Cold War, the atomic bomb, and disruption of the social order, particularly regarding the role of women. French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton described it as “a world in complete decomposition.” Unsurprisingly, noir is by definition pessimistic and anti-social.
“How could we tell the world what we’d experienced?” director Samuel Fuller, also a war veteran, wrote later in his autobiography. “How could we live with ourselves?”
For many Americans, this new world produced the feelings of postwar anxiety and alienation that we’ve now come to call the noir ethos. In fact, if noir has a single defining factor, this ethos is it. Everything else – plot, character, visual style – is secondary to the mood of the film. A current of uneasiness, danger, and instability must flow through the noir film because, as philosopher-critic Mark Conard wrote, “All moral absolutes and objective truths have been washed away, and individuals must create meaning for themselves.”
Is film noir a mood then? To an extent, yes.
Borde and Chaumeton called the mood an ever-present “malaise” and wrote that “film noir is a film of death, in all senses of the word,” but even their early treatise on the emerging style aimed to move “toward a definition” rather than concretizing one. English author Graham Greene, whose work originated some of the cycle’s most influential films, offered the phrase “blood melodrama” to accommodate the new emphasis on violence. In terms of genre, Hollywood at the time marketed these films as melodramas, thrillers, mysteries, or detective films. The Hays Code often labeled them “social problem films,” probably to make them more palatable as social critique rather than lascivious entertainment.
In “Notes on Film Noir,” a 1972 essay published in Film Comment to accompany a film retrospective, American director and critic Paul Schrader penned what would become the definitive analysis of the films we know as noir today. Schrader asserted that noir was not defined by conventions of setting and conflict, that it was not a genre, but primarily a mood. He summed up the phenomenon as follows: “Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupt, themes more fatalistic, and the tone more hopeless.”
Years before the ideas of Borde, Chaumeton, Schrader, Muller, or any other noir authorities we know today, an Italian-born, French critic named Nino Frank first discerned this dark mood in American cinema. In an article titled “Un nouveau genre policier: L’aventure criminelle” in the August 1946 issue of L’Ecran Francais, Frank was the first to juxtapose those two monosyllabic words as a distinct category: film noir. For the first and only time, an American cinematic style was named in a foreign language.
As Frank’s “discovery” implies, film noir has always been a critic’s category, not a filmmaker’s category. With some exceptions toward the end of the cycle, writers, directors, and cinematographers had no idea they were working in a new style, let alone in the style we call noir today. Specifically, Frank was looking at a handful of major American films, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and The Woman in the Window (1944), which were only then playing in Paris after distribution delays caused by the war. Viewing these films together, Frank noticed they “no longer have anything in common with the usual type of detective film” and placed greater emphasis on “criminal psychology” and “criminal adventure.”
Frank hailed these movies as “a major class of films” and specifically compared them to Hollywood’s dominant western genre, writing: “There are wry conclusions to be drawn from the displacement of an on-screen dynamic involving chases on horseback and idylls in coaches by the dynamic of violent death and dark mysteries.” The darkness was new to French shores. Even French poetic realism, which had emerged in the 1930’s and is widely recognized as a key influence on noir, offered hope in the form of romantic love or redemption. These early American noirs offered little or none of that.
So, who invented film noir? Maybe we can call it a joint venture: the Americans invented it, but the French discovered it. Hollywood had been a strictly commercial enterprise churning out primarily formulaic entertainment, which the French had always admired and to which they later, during the French New Wave, paid homage. After the war, France’s intellectual environment, including a fascination with surrealism among critics like Frank, conditioned them to see and interpret these American genre films through a more artistic lens. Their distance, both geographically and culturally, allowed them to see what American critics couldn’t.
French appreciation of these new American films was further documented in 1955 with the publication of Borde and Chaumeton’s A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953, the first book-length treatment of the subject. The work is particularly fascinating because the authors penned it while the noir cycle was still unfolding, so their impressions were germinal and their analysis lacked the benefit of historical context. (They lauded 1949’s mediocre Chicago Deadline, for example, and dismissed the universally admired In a Lonely Place, 1950.)
Borde and Chaumeton expounded on Frank’s earlier analysis, agreeing that mood was a dominant noir feature; surely influenced by surrealism and Freudian psychology, both of which were fashionable within Parisian café culture of the 1950’s, the authors named this mood oneirsm, or the abnormal consciousness associated with dreams and hallucinations. “The action is confused, the motives uncertain,” they wrote. “One gets the feeling that all the components of noir style led to the same result: to disorient the spectators who no longer encounter their customary frames of reference.”
This strangeness was one of three noir ingredients identified by Borde and Chaumeton, the others being eroticism and violence. All three contribute to the overall sense of instability we find in the noir experience: traps, temptations, and threats encircle the characters until they find themselves alienated from each other and from all that came before.
In their panorama, Borde and Chaumeton distinguished film noir from five related genres: period crime films, criminal psychology films, gangster films, police documentary films, and the social tendency (social problem) films. Generations later, we now define noir as an umbrella category – in fact, not a genre at all – into which many of these other types of films can neatly sit. Indeed, noir has claimed plenty of films that could also be classified as period crime (The Lodger, 1944), police documentary (The Naked City, 1948), gangster (Key Largo, 1948), and the others.
In identifying a new breed of American film, Nino Frank was also recognizing a new breed of filmmaking talent which had recently landed in Hollywood to escape the dangers of Europe leading up to and during World War II. Arriving primarily from Germany with their expressionism training in hand, these filmmakers – Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer, Anatole Litvak, John Alton, and countless others – brought a European intellectualism that hadn’t been prevalent in America’s commercially-driven studios.
These newcomers were artists, not simply craftsmen, yet many had long admired the genre conventionality of American cinema, an intersection of high and low art perhaps best defended by Raymond Chandler in his 1944 essay in The Atlantic Monthly about the state of detective fiction: “There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.” In this same vein, the enormously popular and critically lauded works of Alfred Hitchcock, both then and now, serve as a kind of “gateway drug” into the noir apothecary.
As noir ramped up, the new style became a pretext for directors to assert their own personal vision; it’s no surprise that film noir emerged alongside the concept of the auteur, the French term for a director with complete creative control over every aspect of his or her film. Like the author of a book. In fact, some claim film noir represents the most creative period in Hollywood history. In his important if opinionated 1968 book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, American critic Andrew Sarris, the man credited with introducing auteur theory to America, ranked many of film noir’s practitioners in the top tiers of directors. These included Lang and Hitchcock (his essay on 1960’s Psycho as high art was a game changer), but also American-born creators like Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, and Sam Fuller.
Today, many aspects of noir, especially the visual aesthetic, are not only influential but endlessly copied: while some critics, Heart of Noir included, don’t recognize neo-noir as anything beyond a marketing label, a standing army of writers, directors, and photographers are reproducing and updating the noir mood and style on a regular basis.
So, what kind of thing is film noir?
It’s not a genre. A genre is timeless. A comedy from 1922 shares a premise and a purpose with a comedy from 2022. Same goes for a western, a musical, a horror, and a documentary. For all the reasons discussed above, and in contrast to thrillers, mysteries, and police procedurals, film noir was a unique creation for a unique period. Critic Andrew Dickos even calls noir an “anti-genre,” which feels just about right.
Then, it must be a style. To be sure, film noir has perhaps the most distinctive aesthetic in cinema history. This “look” peaked in the late 1940’s but remained a dominant visual theme until noir petered out in the early 1960’s. Style, however, can too often convey something superficial. By referring to noir as a style, we risk mischaracterizing this body of deep, strange work as something that exists only on the surface, as nothing more than a fedora next to a streetlamp. Where does style leave off and mood take over? Are they one and the same? Noir’s dominant palette is expressionism, which is the outward reflection of internal thoughts and emotions, so noir could be called a mood, a style, or maybe a moodstyle.
Cutting through the fog of possibilities, many critics have taken a more practical, historical view and labeled film noir a cycle. A cycle of films, expansively periodized from the late 1930’s to the early 1960’s, that shared a mood, a style, and certain plot ingredients, and could only have emerged from a specific coincidence of cultural forces. This is the Heart of Noir view. You will find film noir referred to primarily as a “cycle” throughout this collection with “style” a less common but still acceptable alternative.
To propose the simplest possible definition, Heart of Noir has developed three key criteria for a film noir and listed them below in order of importance. These are imperfect, but we must have criteria and find these useful and reasonable. Every film in the Heart of Noir collection meets at least two of these criteria; the majority meet all three. Since we don’t recognize neo-noir, our noir cycle is bound between 1936, the year Fritz Lang’s first American film was released, and 1964, just as the Production Code was gasping its last breaths (soon to be replaced by the MPAA ratings system) and New Hollywood was just about to change American movies forever. (Meaningfully, 1964 was also the year of noir icon Barbara Stanwyck’s final film and the year we lost Peter Lorre, whose unforgettable face stamped all three films that various critics routinely propose as the first-ever film noir: 1931’s M, 1940’s Stranger on the Third Floor, and 1941’s The Maltese Falcon). The midpoint of the cycle is the midpoint of the century: 1950.
The magic of noir is that our understanding and appreciation of it become richer as time goes by, so perhaps the best way to recognize it is to watch as many films as you can from the classic era and use your own discernment. In fact, the only thing fans love arguing about more than the definition of noir is which films qualify for the label. Some films (Double Indemnity, 1944; Out of the Past, 1947) are unambiguously noir while others (The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946; All About Eve, 1950) are unambiguously not, while still others (Casablanca, 1942; The Lost Weekend, 1945) continue to divide audiences or have been tagged “noir-adjacent,” meaning they don’t meet the generally agreed definition but contain elements that appeal to noir aficionados, nonetheless.
Explore this collection, and then explore some more, and ultimately define film noir for yourself.
© 2024 Heart of Noir
