Film Ecletics

Film Noir: "Running"

By the end of 2008 can check out the preview of our short film titled: "Running"
Copyright (C) 2008

http://www.running-shortfilm.com

Produced by: COLORTAPE, Perth Western Australia
Executive Producer:Alexandru Schiller
Director: Garrett Van
Assitant Director: Waheed Nadafi

film noir in the screen studies collection: an introduction and checklist.

`The streets are dark with something more than the night.' --Raymond Chandler

• Introduction
• Phases
• Early to Mid-Forties
• The Post-War Years
• The Fifties
• Post-Film Noir
• On the Margin: Off-Genre Films Noir
• Experimental Film Noir
• Films Noir in the Screen Studies Collection
• Film Noir Study Packages
• Bibliography

Note: The collection consists of 16mm film, VHS and Laserdisc titles. Please check the catalogue for the format of specific titles. In some cases, VHS titles may only be available as part of a study package. top
introduction

Film noir is descriptive of a tone, a mood, an ambience rather than a system of conventions comparable to say the western or the musical. The term was coined by French critics who in the immediate post-war years noticed a darkening of mood in the Hollywood crime film; they had been denied access to American films during the war. The subgenre of the hard-boiled detective film is centrally implicated in film noir although the noir tone is also to be found in psychological melodrama. Some westerns and even certain musicals and comedies can also be termed noir.

Various combinations of reasons have been given for the appearance of the film noir: historical and social (the Depression, a long war, and post-war disillusion), technical (faster film stock and more light sensitive lenses), stylistic (the influx of German technicians and directors schooled in Expressionism [1], or the French directors from the school of Poetic Realism) and financial (cost cutting leading to lower budgets, small casts, `B' pictures). Historically it can be placed with other responses to epochs of disillusion and alienation such as Greek tragedy, Jacobean drama or the Romantic Agony, as Raymond Durgnat points out, and the road movies or films set in inner-city neighbourhoods of the late sixties and early seventies. Durgnat also points out that `the black thriller is a hardy perennial, drawing on the unconscious superego's sense of crime and punishment' (1970, p. 49). top

One of film noir's most pervasive motifs is the metaphorical linking of crime with urban alienation, loneliness and paranoia [2]. The popularisation of existential thought reached the USA in the immediate post-war years and has more recently been invoked in commentaries on the hard-boiled school of American writing which carried over into the cinema. Disorientation and meaninglessness in a world without moral absolutes is central to existentialism while notions of freedom, responsibility, authenticity and the leap into faith (or the absurd) constitutes the positive side of existential thought. If films noir seem in the main to be located on the downside, it is also true that the notion of individual freedom and the importance of individual action, central to the American ethos are woven into noir narratives but without the consciously philosophical underpinnings that one finds, for example, in Sartre's and Camus' works of fiction.

The question of whether film noir is a genre persists. But as Cozarinsky points out `genre is a theoretical tool, not a "natural" fact: to consider any groups of works as a genre is to choose some traits as pertinent, others as irrelevant' (1980, p. 58). Like most subgenres (for example fifties science fiction with an alien invader theme), film noir has an ideological base in a specific historical period, c. 1940-60, but it is by no means confined to this period (see the discussion of post-film noir below). The thematic and stylistic trends in film noir cut across genre boundaries in drawing upon the gangster movie, horror films and the private detective film for the characterisation of the anti-hero, a of dread and the atmospheric detachment that pervaded the domain of the detective. However, something of a consensus has emerged that film noir, through its eclectic borrowings, developed into a distinctive genre of social commentary, if of a slightly different order from other genres. In a recent study J.P. Trelotte takes the approach of defining and analysing the noir canon by identifying four narrative strategies - voice-over narration, flashbacks, the subjective camera and what he calls the documentary style - whose deployment he sees as pushing at the boundaries of classical narrative. While it is true that `high' film noir is marked by certain stylistic and narrative practices, as previously suggested, film noir lacks a system of conventions and iconography that one finds in other genres, so that in the final analysis it is the way a film `feels' more than the way it looks that brings it into a noir ambit. The film noir does not generate a set of expectations to the same degree as say the western, the musical or the horror film. Although the majority of films noir share iconographic elements and stylistic traits, it is not the way characters dress, the lighting, the settings or even thematic connections (other than the general linkage to crime) that ultimately place Angel Face, Double Indemnity, They Live By Night and Leave Her to Heaven, to list four stylistically disparate examples, within the noir canon. What these films share is an ambivalent mood, an ambience suggestive of fatality and a claustrophobic intensity in the relationships between the central characters and their milieux. top

Although distinguishable from melodrama by a visual style most often marked by an expressionistic blend of studio and location filming and by the special blend of romanticism and detachment borrowed from a literary antecedent, the hard-boiled school of writing, film noir on its margins crosses over into high melodrama. Such films noir on the margin include Leave Her to Heaven, Beyond the Forest and Moonrise. A key point of difference that is worth testing on individual films, is that film noir frequently presents us with an essentially passive male tempted by an active, sexually aggressive female while the woman's melodrama, in an inversion of the noir pattern, often places the passive (but sexual) female at the centre of the narrative and proceeds to tempt her with an active, aggressively sexual male. The atmospheric doom that so often hangs over both genres stems in part from the sense of making the wrong choice [3].

It is not so much anxiety per se, as the manner of its dispersal that seems to characterise film noir in relation to other genres. Anxiety, for example, is diminished by the submission of the femme fatale to male containment and control. Yet there is an excess of anxiety in many films noirs that cannot simply be dispersed by such a restoration of normality. Thus the redemptive woman, intent on the hero's domestication, can be seen to constitute a threat comparable to that of the femme fatale [4]. This anxiety seems to coalesce around the divided protagonist at the heart of the genre and is the focus for the issue of how a genre of anxiety can also be a genre of wish-fulfilment, an issue also relevant to other 'dark' genres such as horror and melodrama.

Although a division between domestication and adventure, between the pallid father and the masculine adventurer, is pervasive in the American cinema, the war and immediate post-war years crystallised the contradictions in the country's expectations of its men (and women) by imposing sudden and extreme shifts in the norms invoked. This was the moment in which film noir emerged. We are presented with a male protagonist whose point of view is generally privileged, for example by first-person narration, flashbacks, dreams and subjective camera, and whose authority is progressively undermined, for example by labyrinthine plots. The divided protagonist's lack of self-knowledge is projected onto an enigmatic woman or the intricacies of the plot and is thus externalised as a lack of knowledge of the world. This division is actually externalised in a number of ways: between past and present, between loyalty to buddies and attraction to dames, between the femme fatale and the domesticating woman [5].

It is this indirect working through of such contradictions in the culture which may provide a key to film noir's appeal.top
phases

Film noir can be divided into at least four phases: the early to mid-forties or war years, the immediate post-war years, the fifties and apres noir, during the seventies and eighties, a self-conscious reworking of archetypal film noir in, for example, Body Heat or updating of noir themes in, for example, Night Moves and Cop.
early to mid-forties

If Citizen Kane provided the prototype for forties expressionism and The Letter for the femme fatale, the first true films noir are generally accepted as being Stranger on the Third Floor, The Maltese Falcon and I Wake Up Screaming. The first was a `B' picture which utilised expressionist techniques, the second a box-office success which established a style to be followed using the novels of Chandler, Hammett and Cain [6], and the third a police story of murder, corruption and nightclubs of the kind that appeared more frequently in the post-war period.

Following the trend set by The Maltese Falcon, the films noir produced in this period featured alienated lead characters, often recounting their stories in a slangy American vernacular, `romanticism with a protective shell' as Schrader puts it (1972, p. 10). At some point a femme fatale usually entered the narrative, most often concerned with the protagonist's fateful path.

While directors such as Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks and Edgar G. Ulmer used studios to create their atmospheric streets, alleys and docks, a trend towards more use of locations is noticeable by the mid-forties in, for example, the Californian settings of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Films like The Naked City and House On 92nd Street, with extensive use of city locations, marked the real emergence of urban drama in a quasi-documentary mode [7].

Double Indemnity is often seen as the turning point in the growing noir presentation of hard-edged sexuality and violence.top
the post-war years

This is a complex period and one in which the majority of the films noir were produced, many by `B' picture studios. Paul Schrader has described this period as one of manic, neurotic works driven by the mood of post-war adjustment, an uneasiness generated by the plight of returning veterans, the displacement of women from the workforce, the nuclear threat, the Cold War and anti-Communist witch hunts, televised corruption hearings, and the Korean conflict. The lead characters were anti-heroes and the romantic touch of the earlier noirs was replaced by a tough, often contradictory, stance. Many films were interpreted as critiques of their society (Body and Soul; Force of Evil), while others featured violent, difficult to love, males (Where the Sidewalk Ends; In a Lonely Place), criminals on the run (Gun Crazy, They Live by Night), innocents caught in a web (Desperate, Deadline at Dawn) or, in the mid-fifties, criminal gangs (The Phenix City Story, The Big Combo). top
the fifties

With the tailing off of the cycle, perhaps due to the more prosperous economy and the growing youth culture, the style of films noir from this period is often more self-conscious as in the baroque visual style of Kubrick's Killer's Kiss and the manipulation of time in his The Killing. The hallmark is greater diversity of style and allusiveness of theme. The baroque excess of Touch of Evil and the surreal use of locations in Kiss Me Deadly contrasts with the atmospheric understatement of Angel Face.

Directors working in this period such as Fuller, Lang and Hitchcock, continued using noirish themes but the tone was different. Fuller's films, for example, were generally too individualistic in style to be considered `core' films noir. Paul Schrader has noted the use of composition in true noirs such as The Set-Up or They Live By Night. The scene seems to move around the actor with measured pacing and progressive compositions rather than the actor dominating the scene through physical action. This was quite distinct from the `rat-tat-tat and screeching of tyres of Scarface (1932)' or `the violent expressive actions of [Sam Fullers'] Underworld USA (1961)' (1972, p. 11) [8]. Lang's films such as While the City Sleeps or Beyond a Reasonable Doubt were more of a return to the themes of his work of the thirties, but given a distinctly perverse edge, while Hitchcock's style, like Fuller's, is too singular for his films noir - Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man, Vertigo and Marnie --to be centrally placed in the noir canon. top
post-film noir

Since the late fifties the noir conventions have, on occasions, been deliberately used to create a milieu for stories such as The Hustler (1961) or detective films such as Chinatown (1974), its sequel The Two Jakes (1990), Night Moves (1975) and Cop (1987). In Night Moves and the Australian film The Empty Beach (1984), the characters, including the laconic detective, are those of film noir. A dark underside is uncovered in sunlit Florida Keys and Bondi Beach. A similar use of location and mood is evident in films about corruption such as the Australian film Heatwave (1981). The classic femme fatale has been self-consciously revived in stylised pieces such as Body Heat (1981). Most recently the hard-boiled novels of Jim Thompson have become the focus for adaptation, in the post-modern revival of film noir, viz., Miller's Crossing, The Grifters, After Dark My Sweet and The Kill-Off [9].top
on the margin: off-genre films noir

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) [10] is one of a number of thirties films that anticipate the film noir. There was a darkening mood and intensity in some westerns in the late forties and early fifties, for example in Blood on the Moon (1948), Yellow Sky (1949) and The Gunfighter (1950). In Attack! (1956), a combat film, claustrophobia verges on the surreal and the chiaroscuro is distinctly noir. Val Lewton's low-budget horror productions at RKO, notably The Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim and The Leopard Man (both 1943), are pervaded by a sense of impalpable dread in contemporary urban settings which is closer to the ambience of film noir than of gothic horror. The expressionism of the period melodrama Bluebeard (1944) places it in the canon over noirish period psychological melodramas, The Lodger (1944) and House By the River (1949). Social problem films, The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Snake Pit (1948), convey film noir's feeling of entrapment. Shock Corridor (1961), with its questing journalist increasingly enveloped by a nightmare world, is too close to comic-strip surrealism to be a true film noir. The unobtrusive bleakness of The Strangler (1964) has some of the feel if not the look of film noir. Films from different genres and periods - Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and All the President's Men (1976) - share a mood of pervasive paranoia, the former in a small town in which the inhabitants are being taken over by aliens while in the latter urban paranoia is carried over from earlier Pakula films like Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974). Murder By Contract (1958) is a particularly black comedy while in Unfaithfully Yours (1948) Preston Sturges parodies the driven male protagonist central to film noir.

While the focus here is on American film noir, there are also European connections: the French crime films The Second Breath, Breathless and Shoot the Pianist, Antonioni's Cronaca de un amore, the British policier The Blue Lamp and several films made in Britain by a refugee from the blacklist, Joseph Losey, including The Sleeping Tiger and The Concrete Jungle. The Empty Beach and Heatwave provide an Australian connection.top
experimental film noir

Several low-budget experimental narratives in the Collection on 16mm film can be used in deconstructing noir conventions. The Hobbs Case (1979) uses first-person narration as the entry to an unsettling world of real and imagined events. New York filmmaker Manuel De Landa's Raw Nerves (1980) parodies the conventions of the private eye film by employing psychedelic video graphics to transform the narrative into a farcical psycho-drama. In Hollis Frampton's Hapax Legomena Pt. 1, Nostalgia (1971) a photograph becomes the means of evoking a sense of dread in an oblique presentation of an autobiography through a series of systematic displacements between spoken narration and the image and within the image itself. Finishing Touches (1984) is a workshop film by Kathy Meuller and Lesley Stern, on video, which explores the use of voice-over and the role of the femme fatale.

Acknowledgment: I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Simon Cooper in the preparation of this article.top
films noir in the screen studies collection

The figures in brackets indicate the total number of films noirs released in the USA in each year up to 1959 as listed by Spencer Selby (see bibliography).

1940 (5)

• · The Letter

1941 (11)

• Citizen Kane
• Stranger on the Third Floor

1942 (5)

• I Wake Up Screaming top

1943 (5)

• Shadow of a Doubt
• Bluebeard

1944 (18)

• Double Indemnity
• Laura

1945 (22)

• House on 92nd Street
• Leave Her to Heaven
• Mildred Pierce
• Murder My Sweet
• Scarlet Street

1946 (42)

• Detour
• The Locket top

1947 (53)

• Body and Soul
• Crossfire
• Deadline at Dawn
• Dead Reckoning
• Desperate
  
• Out of the Past
• Railroaded
• Woman on the Beach

1948 (43)

• Cry of the City
• Force of Evil
• Ruthless
• They Live By Night

1949 (52)

• Beyond the Forest
• Caught
• D.O.A
• Gun Crazy
• Moonrise
• The Reckless Moment
• The Set-Up
• White Heat
• Woman on Pier 13 top

1950 (57)

• In a Lonely Place
• Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
• Sunset Boulevard
• Where Danger Lives
• Where the Sidewalk Ends

1951 (39)

• The Big Carnival
• The Enforcer
• I was a Communist for the F.B.I.
• On Dangerous Ground
• M

1952 (26)

• Angel Face
• The Narrow Margin

1953 (21)

• The City that Never Sleeps
  
• Pick-Up on South Street top

1954 (26)

1955 (20)

• The Big Combo
  
• House of Bamboo
  
• Killer's Kiss
  
• Kiss Me Deadly
  
• Mr Arkadin
  
• The Phenix City Story

1956 (19)

• Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
  
• The Killing
  
• Slightly Scarlet
  
• The Wrong Man

1957 (12)

1958 (7)

• Touch of Evil
  
• Vertigo top

1959 (7)

1961

• The Hustler

1962

• The Manchurian Candidate

1965

• Brainstorm

1971

• Klute

1974

• Chinatown top

1975

• Night Moves

1987

• Cop

film noir study packages

The following are seven packages comprising two to four features each on VHS with accompanying study notes and suggestions where appropriate for the use of extracts. These are available on seven day loan for classroom use. They are organised thematically although they can be used in a variety of other ways to illustrate trends in the genre. Not all of these packages appear in this issue of Film & Video Acquisitions; some will appear in the next issue.
The Anti-Hero

• Where Danger Lives (1950)
  
• In a Lonely Place (1950)
  
• Touch of Evil (1958)

The Anti-Hero: Studies in Corruption

• Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950)
• Confidential Report (Mr Arkadin) (1955)

The Femme Fatale

• Double Indemnity (1944)
  
• Out of the Past (1947)
  
• Dead Reckoning (1947) top

The Private Eye

• Murder My Sweet (1945)
  
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
  
• Night Moves (1975)
  
• The Empty Beach (Australia, 1984)

The Private Eye: the Fatal Quest

• Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
  
• Night Moves (1975)

Organised Crime

• The Set-Up (1949)
  
• The Killing (1956)
  
• Heatwave (Australia, 1981)

Rough Justice

• The Enforcer (1950)
  
• Cop (1987) top

bibliography

• Cook, Pam, The Cinema Book, B.F.I., London, 1985, pp. 93-98.
  
• Cozarinsky, Edgardo, `American Film Noir', in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, R. Roud (ed.), vol. 1, Viking Press, New York, 1980, pp. 57-64.
  
• Crowther, Bruce, Film Noir: Reflections In a Dark Mirror, Columbus, London, 1988.
  
• Durgnat, Raymond, `The Family Tree of The Film Noir', Cinema (London, England) nos. 6 and 7, August 1970, pp. 48-56.
  
• Ewing, Dale E., Jr., `Film Noir: Style and Content', Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 16, no. 2, Summer 1988, pp. 60-69.
  
• Higham, Charles and Greenberg, Joel, Hollywood in the Forties, A.S. Barnes & Co., New York, 1968.
  
• Hirsch, Foster, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, A.S. Barnes & Co., New York, 1981.
  
• Jensen, Paul, `The Return of Dr Caligari: Paranoia in Hollywood', Film Comment, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 1971-72, pp. 36-45.
  
• Kaplan, E. Ann, ed., Women in Film Noir, BFI, London, 1978.
  
• Kemp, Philip, `From the Nightmare Factory: HUAC and the Politics of Noir', Sight and Sound, vol. 55, no. 41, Autumn 1986, pp. 266-276.
  
• Morrison, Susan, `The (Ideo)logical Consequences of Gender on Genre', CineAction!, no. 13/14, Summer 1988, pp. 40-45.
  
• Porfirio, Robert G., `No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir,' Sight and Sound, vol. 45, no. 4, Autumn 1976, pp. 212-217.
  
• Schatz, Thomas, `The Hard-boiled Detective Film,' in Hollywood Genres, Random House, New York, 1981, pp. 111-149
  
• Schrader, Paul, `Notes on Film Noir', Film Comment, vol. 8, no. 1, Spring 1972, pp. 8-13.
  
• Selby, Spencer, Dark City: The Film Noir, McFarland, Jefferson, 1984.
  
• Silver, Alain and Ward, Elizabeth, eds, Film Noir, Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York, 1979.
  
• Thomas, Deborah, `Film Noir: How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male', CineAction!, no. 13/14, Summer 1988, pp. 18-28.
  
• Trelotte, J.P., Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1989.
  
• Tuska, Jon, Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective, Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1984. top

footnotes

1. Most notably Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, Edgar G. Ulmer, Billy Wilder and Max Ophuls. [Back to text]
2. Virtually every film noir in the Collection (see list above) with the possible exception of the hybrid melodrama Caughthas crime or corruption in some form as a central element of the plot. However, for Jon Tuska a far more important element of the noir narrative structure is that human actions, like those of the protagonists in Macbeth or Crime and Punishmentfor example, are both fated and consciously willed (1984, p. 150). While this generally applies to noir's divided protagonists there is nevertheless a stream of films noir in which the actions of the protagonists are not doubly determined but are either fated as in Detour, Desperate or The Wrong Man in the manner of thirties prototypes in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Lang's You Only Live Once, or are consciously willed as in Dead Reckoning. By way of contrast Lang's other thirties film noir, Fury, is archetypal in the way Spencer Tracy consciously fights against fate. It should be added that Tuska, unlike most commentators, does not regard these as films noir but what he calls films gris. He defines film gris as noir visual style overlaid on narrative structures from other genres such as melodrama. Tuska argues that the essence of film noir is to be found in the blackness of the resolution `which must be ambiguous and threatening, leaving a sense of persisting malaise' (1984, p. 151). To take the way a film ends as a principal criterion for a system of classifying film noir seems too problematic, in the way that Tuska proposes it, to stand up to close scrutiny, especially when we find Sweet Smell of Success, widely regarded as one of the blackest of all films noir, being classified by Tuska as a film gris. [Back to text]
3. Susan Morrison, `The (Ideo)logical Consequences of Gender on Genre', CineAction!, no. 13/14, Summer 1988, pp. 40-45. Examples of woman- centred films noir are listed in note 4 below. [Back to text]
4. For important variants on the notion of the `redemptive woman' see, Mildred Pierce, The Reckless Moment, Caught, Daisy Kenyon, Marnie and Klute where the 'divided protagonist' is a woman. Examples of films in which the redemptive woman role is central are On Dangerous Ground and Moonrise. [Back to text]
5. Deborah Thomas, `Film Noir: How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male', CineAction! no. 13/14, Summer 1988, pp. 18-28. [Back to text]
6. The naturalism practiced by writers like Dreiser and Norris with their aspiration to detachment in their bleak, detailed accounts of the destructive economic effects of the city on their characters, is a distant relation to the hard- boiled crime novel and film noir. See film versions of Norris's McTeague (von Stroheim's Greed) and Dreiser's Carrie (1952). [Back to text]
7. Jon Tuska suggests that the quasi- documentary melodramas like House on 92nd Street and The Naked City, taking the form of police procedural documentaries, are not noir in mood, despite the deployment, in some, of noir visual style. To Tuska (and Higham and Greenberg) the breaking up of the cohesion of the imaginative studio- created world in favour of the construction of a looser reality was the antithesis of film noir (1984, p. 192). To Hirsch 'documentation' in the semi- documentary noirs 'leads to a dramatic dead end' (1981, p. 173). Trelotte, on the other hand, finds in the documentary style a 'technique which opens onto a successful synthesis of reality and artifice which marks later noirs' (1989, p. 26) in, for example, The Phenix City Story and Kiss Me Deadly, The Killing and Touch of Evil. [Back to text]
8. Raymond Durgnat, 'The Family Tree of The Film Noir', Cinema(London, England) nos. 6 and 7, August 1970, pp. 48-56. [Back tot ext]
9. It is interesting to note that the trend towards paranoid horror in the sixties (see 'Focus' article in Film & Video Acquisitions, no. 4, 1990) coincides with the decline of film noir. [Back to text]
10. All films mentioned in this section, with the exception of The Parallax View, are held in the Collection. [Back to text]

Researched by: Alexandru Schiller, Copyright (c) 2008