For the Love of Film III: Epilogue

Farran Smith Nehme, aka the Self-Styled Siren and one of the co-sponsors of the annual For the Love of Film film-preservation blogathon, in which this blog participates (most recently last May),  announced today that we can now all enjoy the object of this year's fundraising effort.  The surviving three reels of the six-reel silent The White Shadow (1924) will be streaming online for free for the next two months. The film, directed by Graham Cutts, is especially significant as it is the first surviving film on which Alfred Hitchcock is credited (he worked as assistant director, art director, editor, and writer on the movie).

Thanks to our readers who donated to this effort during this blog's participation in For the Love of Film III last May. And thanks, too, to those among my fellow bloggers who took part.  It's a fun event and it's great to see such a concrete outcome!

Some more information on the film itself and the preservation project from the National Film Preservation Foundation's Annette Melville (via the Self-Styled Siren) can be found below the fold:

The opening three reels of the six-reel feature were uncovered in 2011 during research by the NFPF to identify American silent-era titles held by the New Zealand Film Archive...The film was preserved at Park Road Post Production in New Zealand under the supervision of the NZFA and the Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

    The White Shadow will be presented for free streaming, with the following extras:     · Program notes about the film by David Sterritt     · Newly recorded musical score created by Michael M. Mortilla who, with Nicole Garcia, reprises the performance from the gala premiere at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2011     · A short bio of the New Zealand projectionist, Jack Murtagh, who salvaged the film     · Slide shows about the film’s discovery, the New Zealand Film Archive, and the Academy Film Archive

    The 43-minute presentation, which will run two months, is made possible by contributors from around the world. “Not everyone has the ability to attend the special screenings of The White Shadow in Los Angeles, Washington, or New York,” said Jonathan Marlow, co-founder of Fandor, the curated on-demand movie service that is donating webhosting for the event. “We’re thrilled to play our part in making this fascinating discovery available everywhere.” Fandor’s gift matches cash donations raised through the Internet fundraising drive organized by the 2012 “For the Love of Film” Blogathon, spearheaded by Marilyn Ferdinand, Roderick Heath, and Farran Smith Nehme. The campaign mobilized support from more than 100 film fans across five continent

    Almost everybody loves Hitchcock movies. We went one better. We helped get one back in front of thousands of viewers for the first time in decades. No modesty here: This film is online because we worked our tails off to help get it there.

Once again, I'm so glad that the USIH Blog could play a small part in getting this to happen!

And enjoy The White Shadow!

The Horror! Hitchcock through Zizek

[This is the second post in the USIH Blog's participation in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III. See Ben's fantastic first contribution here. This year's blogathon, which runs through Friday, May 18, focuses on Alfred Hitchcock. Money is being raised for the National Film Preservation Foundation's The White Shadow Project, which will record Michael Mortilla's score to this 1924 silent that Hitchcock wrote and on which he worked as an Assistant Director, and will make the movie available for free streaming online. Those interested in donating can click this link or the thumbnail announcing the blogathon over in the right margin.  For the Love of Film III is being cohosted by Farran Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Rod Heath of This Island Rod.]

What do horror films do? What makes them persistently popular? I came of age in the 80s with Freddy Krueger, the undead, knives-as-finger-nails antagonist in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. These films pivoted from the tried-and-true horror flick formula. Teenagers who behaved badly, those who imbibed in drugs and sex, died the first horrific deaths at the "hands" of Freddy, who worked as a sort of demonic guarantor of a traditional symbolic order--an order that was dying an equally horrific death. But even more, Freddy was the return of the repressed for the parents, who had long ago violated Biblical commandments in their futile efforts to protect the old order. So Freddy is a ghoulish representation of the corruption of both old and new orders. There's no going back to the old, which was sustained by an undercurrent of repression. But the new, the libertine, the transgressive, the antinomian, is nothing to celebrate. Freddy as such is the quintessential postmodern specter.


But even if A Nightmare on Elm Street and other horror films of the 80s nicely illustrate the conundrum of post-sixties culture, they cannot compare to the understated brilliance of the Hitchcock horror film. I also, in a way, came of age with Hitchcock. My father loved Hitchcock and introduced me to all of his films on VHS in the 80s. I was so taken with these movies, for reasons I only faintly grasped at the time. Hitchcock uses horror as a backdrop for the human struggle to come to terms with the symbolic order. Horror goes where we consciously cannot go. At least, this is Slavoj Zizek's interpretation of Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds--elaborated in Zizek's lovely little film, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Here's a clip where Zizek explains his interpretation of Hitchcock:




In deconstructing the famous blue pill/red pill scene from The Matrix, a take, of course, on Plato's Cave, Zizek argues that the choice offered Neo between fiction and reality is a false one. The two are mutually reinforcing. "Fictions structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself." Zizek wants a "third pill," one that allows us to see the reality in fiction, or to see how fiction makes reality more real. This is how he wants us to interpret Hitchcock. Zizek claims that the key to understanding horror films is to imagine the same story without the elements of horror.

There are non-horror elements that disturb reality in The Birds, such as the intrusion of a strange, seductive woman into the Oedipal relationship between Mitch and the mother he lives with. But these intrusions can be digested or incorporated into the symbolic order. The birds, then, represent an intrusion into the reality that disintegrates it, that upends the symbolic order, that lays bare a more primal  human condition. The Birds do what Mitch's mother wishes she could but cannot due to the symbolic order that structures her reality. Horror does what our unconscious wishes we could do but cannot.

Given that I'm more an expert on Zizek and contemporary critical theory than I am on Hitchcock and film history, I will conclude with a question for our readers, many of whom might be cinephiles, newly drawn to the USIH blog this week thanks to the For the Love of Film blogathon. Is Zizek's a standard interpretation of Hitchcock? Or is it new to you?

America's Touch of Evil: The Contained Turmoil Of The 1950s

[Note: This is the fourth in a series of movie profiles at USIH in support the Film Noir Foundation. Please see the first post by Ben Alpers for more information. Click here to make a donation to the Foundation.]

-------------------------------------------

Touch of Evil, one of the last mid-century noir films, suffered the indignity of not even being nominated for an Academy Award in a year, 1958, when Gigi won best picture and took nine awards. To make matters worse, Orson Welles---the writer, director, co-star of Touch of Evil, and a star figure in the noir genre---was not even recognized for editing in relation to one of the most famous long tracking shots in film history.

Welles' long shot is famous not so much for its length. At 3 minutes and 28 seconds, a great many films exceed it (one recent film, Russian Ark, is 99 minutes of one shot!). Rather, Welles' shot is admired for its artistry, intricacy, and tension. Here it is:



I love the explosive climax.[1]

Touch of Evil's qualities as a film were, at the start, radically underestimated. After many editing controversies, Universal International came to view the film as having low (profit-making) potential. Wikipedia succinctly explains what happened next:

It was released as a B-movie, the lower half of a double feature. The A-movie was The Female Animal, starring Hedy Lamarr, produced by Albert Zugsmith and directed by Harry Keller, whom the studio had hired to direct the re-shot material in Touch of Evil. The two films even had the same cameraman, Russell Metty. Welles's film was given little publicity despite the many stars in the cast. Though it had little commercial success in the US, it was well-received in Europe, particularly by critics like future filmmaker François Truffaut.

The context of the film's release and reception mirror, in some ways, prominent noir themes: cynicism, skepticism, and the film as a victim of circumstance. Even Welles, despite his unlikeable role in the film itself, emerges as a kind of doomed hero in relation to his art.

From where does the film's story come? Touch of Evil is loosely based on Badge of Evil (1956), a novel written by "Whit Masterson"---a compact pseudonym for the authors Robert Wade and William Miller. The central character in that book is an assistant district attorney, Mitch Holt---given the name Ramon Miguel 'Mike' Vargas in the film, and played by Charlton Heston (Heston as a Mexican would become a joke in later films). Holt's wife is named Consuelo in the book, but named Susan 'Susie" Vargas in the film and played by a sexy Janet Leigh (lower right). Orson Welles plays police captain Hank Quinlan (right) in the film; the character has the same name in the book. Quinlan and his police partner become the primary suspects as the story develops, both in the film and the book. But the film takes a turn from the book's narrative in that Quinlan is the more powerful (and more guilty) of the suspected partners, the other being police sergeant Pete Menzies, played by Joseph Calleia and named Leron McCoy in the book.

Got it? Just remember that the most important characters are Mike Vargas (Heston), Susie Vargas (Leigh), Hank Quinlan (Welles), and Menzies (Calleia), and you'll successfully navigate the plot and avoid the "MacGuffins" that David Sehat rightly warned us against. If you haven't seen the film before, I recommend reading the AMC Filmsite summary here. Indeed, because of that detailed summary, I am going to discuss my idiosyncratic impressions rather than make any attempt at comprehensiveness.[2]

I have seen Touch of Evil only once, but the film's aesthetic, acting, and general cynicism impressed me as few others films before or since. As usual, scenes and performances leave the deepest marks.[3] First, Orson Welles was fantastic. He effectively played one the most unlikeable, fascinating, monstrous, and despicable figures I've seen on screen. The manipulative Quinlan has been described elsewhere as a "tragic figure who has a 'touch of evil' in his enforcement of the law." I also recall the tension of the Grandi family gang members coming to abduct Janet Leigh. I remember vividly the hotel scene where it appears that that the Grandi family gang is going to rape Leigh---again for the tension. I was impressed with the dark mood of the film—particularly the final scenes in an oil production facility (like the one below) near the film's climax.



The film's side characters are memorable. AMC's Filmsite sums up their mood-altering diversity:

Other unusual and seedy characters include a nervous and sex-crazed motel manager, a blind shopkeeper, a drug smuggler, a sweaty drug dealer with a poorly-fitting wig, a terrorizing gang of juvenile delinquents, and an intense good cop - an international narcotics officer who is honeymooning (but ignores his wife), all in a sleazy border town (and a number of dark hotel rooms) within a twenty-four hour period.

Zsa Zsa Gabor (right) makes a short appearance as the owner and madame of a strip club.

As a start toward bringing my impressions together, I offer first this sweeping contextual assessment---also from AMC's Filmsite:

It was regarded as a rebellious, unorthodox, bizarre, and outrageously exaggerated film, affronting respectable 1950's sensibilities, with controversial themes including racism, betrayal of friends, sexual ambiguity, frameups, drugs, and police corruption of power.

Indeed, to expand on this, I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period's intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city's messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative. The affluence and mood of containment in the period could not bottle up the dissatisfaction that emerged later, for instance in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (published in 1963, and recently re-evaluated by Louis Menand in a New Yorker article titled "Books as Bombs"). But other books, articles, and works of art---as well as movements like the Beats (also known for their dark motif)---belie America's view of itself as noble, exceptional, and successful. Touch of Evil, then, appears right when Americans were least likely to see the relevance of its themes to their predicament, hence the relative failure of the movie at release.

The cross-border aspects of the film's plot, as well as the dirty nature of Hank Quinlan's means, speaks to America's growing realpolitik in dealing with its imperial interests in the 1950s. The imperative of the time was that Communism must be contained abroad, whether via idealistic public pronouncements like the Truman Doctrine, or by quietly sending "advisors" to Vietnam and secretly placing missiles in Turkey. Covert operations are planned in this period, if not enacted. Quinlan's character embodies a growing sense of controlling our enemies, communist or no, "by any means necessary." America uses what George Cotkin (channeling Jean-Paul Satre) calls "dirty hands," or what Welles labels the "touch of evil," to keep order.

The anti-imperialist message, I confess, is my gloss. In The Cultural Front, Michael Denning's brilliant 1997 book about the laboring of American culture, Welles emerges as the pre-eminent anti-fascist of American theater and cinema. Denning first mentions Touch of Evil as an "allegory of fascism." For Welles, the Popular Front's fight against fascism "was a matter of politics and aesthetics." But Denning's narrative contains other quotes from Welles that allows us to see his repulsive Quinlan character in a broader light. In a 1958 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, Welles reflected: "Quinlan is the incarnation of everything I struggle against, politically and morally speaking." Indeed, Touch of Evil was glossed by Welles himself an anti-racist film. At another point, Welles also asserted that Quinlan reflected a "hatred of the abuse of police power." [4] Finishing the logic of my own interpretation, U.S. military might---despite the rumblings of 1950s domestic ideologues---was pre-eminent in the 1950s. America acted as the world's policeman and was a de facto, relatively benevolent imperial power. My more particular 1950s gloss, then, goes to Touch of Evil's capacious themes.

Though marketed as a B-Film and underappreciated in its own time, Touch of Evil gained critical appreciation by the century's end. In 1993, the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry, citing the film as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Along with Gigi, however, Touch of Evil did not place in the top 100 of the American Film Institute's latest list (published in 2007, though Touch did make a 2001 list of the top 100 thrillers).

Unlike Ben Alpers, I have no direct experience either screening a noir in class or discussing a singular example with my students. I show a lot film in my U.S. surveys as a way to enliven material the text presents dryly. I primarily use documentaries (e.g. The Weather Underground, The Fog of War, Roger and Me) or films that dramatically represent materials from an interesting angle (e.g. Band of Brothers episodes, The Birth of a Nation). But observing the discussion of noir this week makes me think that I should reconsider fiction-based film as emblematic of the dark undercurrents of the late 1940s and 1950s. In so doing, I will also have to get over the fear that an outsider observer (e.g. dean, senior professor) or a cranky student will accuse me of wasting valuable history class time with a feature film unrelated to an explicit historical topic.

So, if a noir makes an unscheduled appearance this term in my classes---a direct, tangible result of this year’s Film Noir Foundation blogathon(!)---which film should I show? Touch of Evil is a bit long at 112 minutes (the 1998 version). I could show clips, but I severely dislike this practice in relation to screening. To me, either the whole film is relevant and worthy, or it isn't (yes, I'm an extremist). Perhaps the best question to ask is this:

Which noir most efficiently conveys the greatest number of noir themes in the least amount of time? - TL

-------------------------------------------

[1] Directors Martin Scorcese and Paul Thomas Anderson have the distinction of being famous for two long shots each: Scorcese for Goodfellas and Raging Bull, and Anderson for Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

[2] AMC Filmsite summaries are awesome. I use the summary for The Birth of a Nation (a film that needs all the aids it can get) with students, and they seem to appreciate it universally.

[3] I'm pretty sure I saw the 1998 version, edited by Walter Murch and produced by Rick Schmidlin.

[4] Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997): 365, 375, 395, 400, 533n29.

America's Touch of Evil: The Contained Turmoil Of The 1950s

[Note: This is the fourth in a series of movie profiles at USIH in support the Film Noir Foundation. Please see the first post by Ben Alpers for more information. Click here to make a donation to the Foundation.]

-------------------------------------------

Touch of Evil, one of the last mid-century noir films, suffered the indignity of not even being nominated for an Academy Award in a year, 1958, when Gigi won best picture and took nine awards. To make matters worse, Orson Welles---the writer, director, co-star of Touch of Evil, and a star figure in the noir genre---was not even recognized for editing in relation to one of the most famous long tracking shots in film history.

Welles' long shot is famous not so much for its length. At 3 minutes and 28 seconds, a great many films exceed it (one recent film, Russian Ark, is 99 minutes of one shot!). Rather, Welles' shot is admired for its artistry, intricacy, and tension. Here it is:



I love the explosive climax.[1]

Touch of Evil's qualities as a film were, at the start, radically underestimated. After many editing controversies, Universal International came to view the film as having low (profit-making) potential. Wikipedia succinctly explains what happened next:

It was released as a B-movie, the lower half of a double feature. The A-movie was The Female Animal, starring Hedy Lamarr, produced by Albert Zugsmith and directed by Harry Keller, whom the studio had hired to direct the re-shot material in Touch of Evil. The two films even had the same cameraman, Russell Metty. Welles's film was given little publicity despite the many stars in the cast. Though it had little commercial success in the US, it was well-received in Europe, particularly by critics like future filmmaker François Truffaut.

The context of the film's release and reception mirror, in some ways, prominent noir themes: cynicism, skepticism, and the film as a victim of circumstance. Even Welles, despite his unlikeable role in the film itself, emerges as a kind of doomed hero in relation to his art.

From where does the film's story come? Touch of Evil is loosely based on Badge of Evil (1956), a novel written by "Whit Masterson"---a compact pseudonym for the authors Robert Wade and William Miller. The central character in that book is an assistant district attorney, Mitch Holt---given the name Ramon Miguel 'Mike' Vargas in the film, and played by Charlton Heston (Heston as a Mexican would become a joke in later films). Holt's wife is named Consuelo in the book, but named Susan 'Susie" Vargas in the film and played by a sexy Janet Leigh (lower right). Orson Welles plays police captain Hank Quinlan (right) in the film; the character has the same name in the book. Quinlan and his police partner become the primary suspects as the story develops, both in the film and the book. But the film takes a turn from the book's narrative in that Quinlan is the more powerful (and more guilty) of the suspected partners, the other being police sergeant Pete Menzies, played by Joseph Calleia and named Leron McCoy in the book.

Got it? Just remember that the most important characters are Mike Vargas (Heston), Susie Vargas (Leigh), Hank Quinlan (Welles), and Menzies (Calleia), and you'll successfully navigate the plot and avoid the "MacGuffins" that David Sehat rightly warned us against. If you haven't seen the film before, I recommend reading the AMC Filmsite summary here. Indeed, because of that detailed summary, I am going to discuss my idiosyncratic impressions rather than make any attempt at comprehensiveness.[2]

I have seen Touch of Evil only once, but the film's aesthetic, acting, and general cynicism impressed me as few others films before or since. As usual, scenes and performances leave the deepest marks.[3] First, Orson Welles was fantastic. He effectively played one the most unlikeable, fascinating, monstrous, and despicable figures I've seen on screen. The manipulative Quinlan has been described elsewhere as a "tragic figure who has a 'touch of evil' in his enforcement of the law." I also recall the tension of the Grandi family gang members coming to abduct Janet Leigh. I remember vividly the hotel scene where it appears that that the Grandi family gang is going to rape Leigh---again for the tension. I was impressed with the dark mood of the film—particularly the final scenes in an oil production facility (like the one below) near the film's climax.



The film's side characters are memorable. AMC's Filmsite sums up their mood-altering diversity:

Other unusual and seedy characters include a nervous and sex-crazed motel manager, a blind shopkeeper, a drug smuggler, a sweaty drug dealer with a poorly-fitting wig, a terrorizing gang of juvenile delinquents, and an intense good cop - an international narcotics officer who is honeymooning (but ignores his wife), all in a sleazy border town (and a number of dark hotel rooms) within a twenty-four hour period.

Zsa Zsa Gabor (right) makes a short appearance as the owner and madame of a strip club.

As a start toward bringing my impressions together, I offer first this sweeping contextual assessment---also from AMC's Filmsite:

It was regarded as a rebellious, unorthodox, bizarre, and outrageously exaggerated film, affronting respectable 1950's sensibilities, with controversial themes including racism, betrayal of friends, sexual ambiguity, frameups, drugs, and police corruption of power.

Indeed, to expand on this, I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period's intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city's messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative. The affluence and mood of containment in the period could not bottle up the dissatisfaction that emerged later, for instance in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (published in 1963, and recently re-evaluated by Louis Menand in a New Yorker article titled "Books as Bombs"). But other books, articles, and works of art---as well as movements like the Beats (also known for their dark motif)---belie America's view of itself as noble, exceptional, and successful. Touch of Evil, then, appears right when Americans were least likely to see the relevance of its themes to their predicament, hence the relative failure of the movie at release.

The cross-border aspects of the film's plot, as well as the dirty nature of Hank Quinlan's means, speaks to America's growing realpolitik in dealing with its imperial interests in the 1950s. The imperative of the time was that Communism must be contained abroad, whether via idealistic public pronouncements like the Truman Doctrine, or by quietly sending "advisors" to Vietnam and secretly placing missiles in Turkey. Covert operations are planned in this period, if not enacted. Quinlan's character embodies a growing sense of controlling our enemies, communist or no, "by any means necessary." America uses what George Cotkin (channeling Jean-Paul Satre) calls "dirty hands," or what Welles labels the "touch of evil," to keep order.

The anti-imperialist message, I confess, is my gloss. In The Cultural Front, Michael Denning's brilliant 1997 book about the laboring of American culture, Welles emerges as the pre-eminent anti-fascist of American theater and cinema. Denning first mentions Touch of Evil as an "allegory of fascism." For Welles, the Popular Front's fight against fascism "was a matter of politics and aesthetics." But Denning's narrative contains other quotes from Welles that allows us to see his repulsive Quinlan character in a broader light. In a 1958 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, Welles reflected: "Quinlan is the incarnation of everything I struggle against, politically and morally speaking." Indeed, Touch of Evil was glossed by Welles himself an anti-racist film. At another point, Welles also asserted that Quinlan reflected a "hatred of the abuse of police power." [4] Finishing the logic of my own interpretation, U.S. military might---despite the rumblings of 1950s domestic ideologues---was pre-eminent in the 1950s. America acted as the world's policeman and was a de facto, relatively benevolent imperial power. My more particular 1950s gloss, then, goes to Touch of Evil's capacious themes.

Though marketed as a B-Film and underappreciated in its own time, Touch of Evil gained critical appreciation by the century's end. In 1993, the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry, citing the film as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Along with Gigi, however, Touch of Evil did not place in the top 100 of the American Film Institute's latest list (published in 2007, though Touch did make a 2001 list of the top 100 thrillers).

Unlike Ben Alpers, I have no direct experience either screening a noir in class or discussing a singular example with my students. I show a lot film in my U.S. surveys as a way to enliven material the text presents dryly. I primarily use documentaries (e.g. The Weather Underground, The Fog of War, Roger and Me) or films that dramatically represent materials from an interesting angle (e.g. Band of Brothers episodes, The Birth of a Nation). But observing the discussion of noir this week makes me think that I should reconsider fiction-based film as emblematic of the dark undercurrents of the late 1940s and 1950s. In so doing, I will also have to get over the fear that an outsider observer (e.g. dean, senior professor) or a cranky student will accuse me of wasting valuable history class time with a feature film unrelated to an explicit historical topic.

So, if a noir makes an unscheduled appearance this term in my classes---a direct, tangible result of this year’s Film Noir Foundation blogathon(!)---which film should I show? Touch of Evil is a bit long at 112 minutes (the 1998 version). I could show clips, but I severely dislike this practice in relation to screening. To me, either the whole film is relevant and worthy, or it isn't (yes, I'm an extremist). Perhaps the best question to ask is this:

Which noir most efficiently conveys the greatest number of noir themes in the least amount of time? - TL

-------------------------------------------

[1] Directors Martin Scorcese and Paul Thomas Anderson have the distinction of being famous for two long shots each: Scorcese for Goodfellas and Raging Bull, and Anderson for Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

[2] AMC Filmsite summaries are awesome. I use the summary for The Birth of a Nation (a film that needs all the aids it can get) with students, and they seem to appreciate it universally.

[3] I'm pretty sure I saw the 1998 version, edited by Walter Murch and produced by Rick Schmidlin.

[4] Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997): 365, 375, 395, 400, 533n29.

Film Noir and U.S. Intellectual History

This week, USIH is proud to take part in For the Love of Film (Noir), this year's Film Preservation Blogathon.  The Self-Styled Siren Farran Smith Nehme (the formerly [thanks, Farran, for getting me up to speed--Ben] pseudonymous hostess of The Self-Styled Siren, a marvelous film blog) and Marilyn Ferdinand of the also wonderful blog Ferdy on Films host this Valentine's Day (week, really) event to benefit the cause of film preservation. This year's blogathon will benefit the Film Noir Foundation, which is raising money to restore a nitrate print of The Sound of Fury (1950).  Last year's blogathon raised over $30,000 for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  Help us beat last year's total by donating generously to the Film Noir Foundation at this link! Donors will be entered into a raffle for a variety of film-noir related prizes.  Throughout the week, USIH's team will be blogging about film noir.  This post kicks off our participation in the blogathon with some thoughts about the place of film noir in U.S. intellectual history.  Enjoy!  

"If we want to understand it...we need to recognize that film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema."

--James Naremore¹

"A fourth important trend in the movies of the late twentieth century is an obsession with the ambiguities and the consequences of crime.  Film noir of the 1940s and 1950s was predicated on such ambiguities and consequences, of course, but the sensibility of that moment seems to have become a directorial norm by the 1980s."

-- James Livingston²

I

One of the courses I regularly teach is a seminar on film noir.  I've taught it numerous times at the University of Oklahoma's Honors College.  And I've taught it in the American Studies Institute at the University of Leipzig, where I spent a year on a teaching Fulbright in 2007-2008.  I tend to open the course by having my students write down three things that they think of when they hear "film noir." I then go around the room and ask the students what they've written down.  In Germany, this request yielded little response. While my German students had heard of film noir, they weren't sure what it was.  My U.S. students, on the other hand tend to have a rich sense of what film noir is. This semester, my students' responses were particular impressive. They covered a wide range of noir thematics (e.g. crime), spaces (e.g. the city), iconography (e.g. trenchcoats, cigarettes, venetian blinds),  and characters (e.g. private eyes and femmes fatales).  Some mentioned specific noirs and neo-noirs.  As we've gotten into the semester, I've discovered something interesting about their noir literacy:  while some of my students are film noir buffs, many of them had never actually seen a film noir before. Yet even this latter group have a sense of what film noir is, without having much experienced it themselves.   I should add that the contrast with my German students is particularly striking because American Studies majors in Germany generally have a very rich sense of American popular culture.  What can we make of the fact that Americans--even those who have never seen a film noir--know what film noir is?

II

My single favorite book on film noir is James Naremore's More Than Night.  As the quotation above suggests, in many ways the starting point of Naremore's book is his sense that, to begin thinking about film noir, we should see it first as an idea.  As many readers of this blog probably know, the term "film noir" was coined in 1946 by French film critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier, who used it to describe a series of American movies from the first half of that decade that they saw as similar to each other....and fascinatingly different from the usual Hollywood fare.³ At the time, Hollywood classified the films that the French called noir in a variety of genres.  But the French continued to identify films noirs among Hollywood movies from the late 1940s and 1950s, though the leading French writers on noir, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, declared the cycle of film noir over by the end of that decade.

While most scholars begin their discussion of film noir by tracing the literary and cinematic precursors of the films that came to be known as film noir (these usually include pulp fiction, Weimar film/German expressionism, Hollywood gangster and horror films, and, more occasionally, French poetic realism), Naremore instead starts with the roots of the idea of film noir: what did the French critics see in these films that fascinated them?  why did they call them film noir?  Interested readers can grab a copy of More Than Night (which is now available in a nicely priced Kindle edition for those so inclined) to see Naremore's answer to these questions in detail.  But he emphasizes that, for French critics, these films resonated with a number of important aesthetic and intellectual movements in France, notably surrealism and existentialism.  In a very real sense, film noir began life not on the screen, but in the world of ideas in post-war France, among intellectuals longing both to recapture the lost world of Popular Front French culture and to forge a critical response to the (American dominated) world in which they found themselves after the War.

III

Although the classic film noirs (as identified by the French) were products of Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, and many were well-known by American audiences at the time, the idea of film noir did not enter American cultural discourse until the 1960s at the earliest.  Only then did large number of Americans begin to read the French critics on film noir.  And a number of Anglophone film critics, most notably Raymond Durgnat, began to write about film noir (meanwhile, French film criticism had largely moved on to other obsessions).

By the 1970s, the idea of film noir had gained real cultural prominence in the United States.  American critics begin to write their own works on noir.  And the young "movie brat" filmmakers of the New Hollywood had encountered both the French critics and the films they called noir in their film-school educations.  The idea of film noir thus played an important role in their understanding of classical Hollywood cinema and its legacy.  As they sought to recapture and rework Hollywood's glorious past, they self-consciously created neo-noirs (in a way that Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s had not self-consciously created noirs).

The single most important early U.S. essay on film noir was Paul Schrader's "Notes on Film Noir" (written for the 1971 Los Angeles International Film Exposition and published in Film Comment in the Spring of 1972). A film critic and recent graduate of UCLA film school, Schrader was about to embark on a filmmaking career of his own, first as a screenwriter and later as a director. Since its publication, Schrader's essay has in many ways framed the discussion of film noir in the U.S.  Schrader was interested in both noir thematics and noir aesthetics.  And he saw noir as distinctly a product of post-war America.⁴  Schrader sensed that both young filmgoers and young filmmakers were fascinated by film noir, and that this fascination reflected deep and disturbing facts about the U.S. in the early 1970s:

American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character, but compared to such relentlessly cynical films noir as Kiss Me Deadly or Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the new self-hate cinema of Easy Rider and Medium Cool seems naive and romantic. As the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late Forties increasingly attractive. The Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties.

IV

Neither Paul Schrader nor his essay are mentioned by James Livingston in The World Turned Inside Out, his fascinating and provocative account of American thought and culture at the end of the 20th century.⁵  But Livingston's cover features an image from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), whose screenplay was written by Paul Schrader, shortly after his essay on film noir.  Although it's rarely spoken of as a neo-noir, Taxi Driver is, among other things, a meditation on the themes that Schrader had explored in his "Notes on Film Noir."  To mention just a few examples: The first "catalytic element" that Schrader notes as a necessary precondition to film noir is "war and post-war delusion." Taxi Driver takes place in an updated version of this milieu; practically the first thing we learn about its protagonist, Travis Bickle, is that he is a Vietnam veteran. Taxi Driver takes full advantage of the "love of romantic narration" that Schrader also associates with noir. Just as Schrader sees the central theme of classic noir to be the dashing of the hopes of the Thirties, so Taxi Driver revolves, at least in part, around the dashed hopes of the Sixties.  And it most resembles what Schrader identifies as "the third and final phase of film noir, from 1949-'53, [which] was the period of psychotic action and suicidal impulse.  The noir hero, seemingly under the weight of ten years of despair, started to go bananas."  Unlike other critics, who, Schrader notes, prefer earlier noirs, he considers this phase "the cream of the noir crop."

Paul Schrader, the (public) intellectual-turned-screenwriter, reminds us of an important fact about modern (and post-modern) culture industries in general, and film noir in particular.  Not only must historians of recent U.S. thought and culture pay attention to both "high" and "low" culture, but (what we think of as) "high" and "low" culture are in constant discussion with each other, such that one cannot be understood without the other.

The idea of film noir, a fundamentally intellectual creation designed to explain a series of (at the time slightly disreputable) films, traveled from its "high" 1940s French (modernist) cultural setting to a "high" 1970s U.S. (postmodernist?) cultural setting only to become firmly lodged in the much broader ("low") culture. 

This is a point akin to the one James Livingston makes throughout The World Turned Inside Out.  And yet, while I share his sense that we always have to keep both "high" and "low" in view when thinking about recent U.S. thought and culture, I think the picture is a little different from the one painted by Livingston.  "You could say," he writes in his book's Coda,

that when the professors started talking about gender trouble in the big words of postructuralism, they were translating the evidence available on screen, for example, from I Spit on Your Grave, a truly awful movie.  Or not--think of The Matrix, which makes Jean Baudrillard and Cornel West, two professors, its patron saints.  You could say, in conclusion, let's get over the either/or choice. By now we know this postmodern impulse goes both ways, up and down, as the line between lowbrow and highbrow culture dissolves in the late twentieth century.⁶

I have a number of problems with Livingston's ways of framing this point.  To take the end of this passage first, as the case of film noir suggests, the easy commerce between high and low is not simply a postmodern phenomenon.  As James Naremore suggests, both the films that became known as noir and the idea of film noir itself were products of a very active high-low dialogue taking place within the horizon of mid-twentieth-century high modernism.   Secondly, "evidence available on screen" does not necessarily come from some pre-intellectual (or even pre-academic) space.  To return to film noir: intellectuals played key roles in making film noir an important part of post-1975 US culture.  In a way, The Matrix series--with its unusually conspicuous display of academics and their works--is a bit of a distraction.  By focusing on its presentation of a Baudrillard book and Cornel West himself, we lose sight of the many more usual--and direct--ways in which intellectuals like Paul Schrader affect what shows up on screen.

V

As James Naremore tells us, the French film critics who named film noir in 1946 were, among other things, thinking of the first films that the French had called "noir," the poetic realist thrillers of the Popular Front era.  At least for French critics on the left in the 1940s, these films, although often grim, evoked positive memories of an era before the horrors of war and occupation.

Among many similarities between the newer U.S. film noirs and the older Popular Front thrillers was the role that the past itself played within the films' narratives.  Protagonists of American film noirs, from Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) in Out of the Past (1947) to Al Roberts (Tom Neal) in Detour (1945) to both Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and the title character (played, of course, by Rita Hayworth) in Gilda (1946) are often trapped by their past.

In the French noir precursors, too, the past often sealed the protagonists' fate.  But more often than their U.S. successors, characters in the French poetic realist films of the 1930s could also be more simply nostalgic about their pasts.  There's a wonderful scene toward the end of Pépé le Moko (1937) that perfectly displays this tendency. Pépé (Jean Gabin), a master criminal on the lam who is unable to leave the Casbah in Algiers, has apparently been stood up by Gaby (Mireille Balin), a beautiful tourist whose presence reminds Pépé of the Paris that he longs for but can never see again.  Tania (Fréhel), a fellow resident of the Casbah who is also waiting for her man and is similarly nostalgic for her past as a singer in Paris, tells Pépé that "when I feel down, I change eras."  She then puts on a record while describing how in her youth she'd sing to crowds in Parisian music halls.

The record is "Ou Est Il Donc?," a song that was a hit for Fréhel herself over a decade earlier and whose lyrics are themselves about nostalgia for Paris.  On screen the middle-aged Fréhel sings along with her younger self, as Tania and Pépé share a moment of nostalgia for a city they'll never see again.  I imagine that French audiences in 1937 probably felt some nostalgia, too, for the less threatening world of the mid-1920s in which Fréhel recorded her song.  We know that French critics of the '40s felt nostalgia for Popular Front films like Pépé. And, decades later, Paul Schrader and other American film critics and filmmakers felt nostalgia for the great Hollywood film noirs of the '40s and '50s and the industry that produced them.

However much the past tends to spell doom for the protagonists of film noir, and however much those who made noirs in the '40s and '50s--and neo-noirs in the '70s and beyond--were often drawn to the form by rather grim social realities, from even before Americans began writing and thinking about film noir in the early 1970s, these films have been objects of nostalgia.  Even a cynical neo-noir like Chinatown simultaneously debunks the history of Los Angeles while, as an aesthetic object,  glamorously evoking the greatness of Hollywood's past.

Like Tania playing her phonograph record in Pépé le Moko, when Americans see, or make, film noir, we are, in a sense, changing eras.

__________________________________________________

¹ James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 10-11.

² James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 65.

³ France had, of course, been deprived of Hollywood films for most of the War, so when the occupation ended, they experienced a half-decade or so of Hollywood movie making in an unusually concentrated fashion. The movies that the French initially designated "films noirs" in August 1946 included The Maltese Falcon; Double Indemnity; Laura; Murder, My Sweet; and The Lost Weekend. 

⁴ More recent scholars like Sheri Chinen Biesen have argued that film noir should be seen as product of the War years themselves. 

⁵ Andrew Hartman reviewed Livingston's book on this blog here.  Livingston's response to Andrew's review can be found here.

⁶ Livingston, 134.

Film Noir and U.S. Intellectual History

This week, USIH is proud to take part in For the Love of Film (Noir), this year's Film Preservation Blogathon.  The Self-Styled Siren Farran Smith Nehme (the formerly [thanks, Farran, for getting me up to speed--Ben] pseudonymous hostess of The Self-Styled Siren, a marvelous film blog) and Marilyn Ferdinand of the also wonderful blog Ferdy on Films host this Valentine's Day (week, really) event to benefit the cause of film preservation. This year's blogathon will benefit the Film Noir Foundation, which is raising money to restore a nitrate print of The Sound of Fury (1950).  Last year's blogathon raised over $30,000 for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  Help us beat last year's total by donating generously to the Film Noir Foundation at this link! Donors will be entered into a raffle for a variety of film-noir related prizes.  Throughout the week, USIH's team will be blogging about film noir.  This post kicks off our participation in the blogathon with some thoughts about the place of film noir in U.S. intellectual history.  Enjoy!  

"If we want to understand it...we need to recognize that film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema."

--James Naremore¹

"A fourth important trend in the movies of the late twentieth century is an obsession with the ambiguities and the consequences of crime.  Film noir of the 1940s and 1950s was predicated on such ambiguities and consequences, of course, but the sensibility of that moment seems to have become a directorial norm by the 1980s."

-- James Livingston²

I

One of the courses I regularly teach is a seminar on film noir.  I've taught it numerous times at the University of Oklahoma's Honors College.  And I've taught it in the American Studies Institute at the University of Leipzig, where I spent a year on a teaching Fulbright in 2007-2008.  I tend to open the course by having my students write down three things that they think of when they hear "film noir." I then go around the room and ask the students what they've written down.  In Germany, this request yielded little response. While my German students had heard of film noir, they weren't sure what it was.  My U.S. students, on the other hand tend to have a rich sense of what film noir is. This semester, my students' responses were particular impressive. They covered a wide range of noir thematics (e.g. crime), spaces (e.g. the city), iconography (e.g. trenchcoats, cigarettes, venetian blinds),  and characters (e.g. private eyes and femmes fatales).  Some mentioned specific noirs and neo-noirs.  As we've gotten into the semester, I've discovered something interesting about their noir literacy:  while some of my students are film noir buffs, many of them had never actually seen a film noir before. Yet even this latter group have a sense of what film noir is, without having much experienced it themselves.   I should add that the contrast with my German students is particularly striking because American Studies majors in Germany generally have a very rich sense of American popular culture.  What can we make of the fact that Americans--even those who have never seen a film noir--know what film noir is?

II

My single favorite book on film noir is James Naremore's More Than Night.  As the quotation above suggests, in many ways the starting point of Naremore's book is his sense that, to begin thinking about film noir, we should see it first as an idea.  As many readers of this blog probably know, the term "film noir" was coined in 1946 by French film critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier, who used it to describe a series of American movies from the first half of that decade that they saw as similar to each other....and fascinatingly different from the usual Hollywood fare.³ At the time, Hollywood classified the films that the French called noir in a variety of genres.  But the French continued to identify films noirs among Hollywood movies from the late 1940s and 1950s, though the leading French writers on noir, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, declared the cycle of film noir over by the end of that decade.

While most scholars begin their discussion of film noir by tracing the literary and cinematic precursors of the films that came to be known as film noir (these usually include pulp fiction, Weimar film/German expressionism, Hollywood gangster and horror films, and, more occasionally, French poetic realism), Naremore instead starts with the roots of the idea of film noir: what did the French critics see in these films that fascinated them?  why did they call them film noir?  Interested readers can grab a copy of More Than Night (which is now available in a nicely priced Kindle edition for those so inclined) to see Naremore's answer to these questions in detail.  But he emphasizes that, for French critics, these films resonated with a number of important aesthetic and intellectual movements in France, notably surrealism and existentialism.  In a very real sense, film noir began life not on the screen, but in the world of ideas in post-war France, among intellectuals longing both to recapture the lost world of Popular Front French culture and to forge a critical response to the (American dominated) world in which they found themselves after the War.

III

Although the classic film noirs (as identified by the French) were products of Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, and many were well-known by American audiences at the time, the idea of film noir did not enter American cultural discourse until the 1960s at the earliest.  Only then did large number of Americans begin to read the French critics on film noir.  And a number of Anglophone film critics, most notably Raymond Durgnat, began to write about film noir (meanwhile, French film criticism had largely moved on to other obsessions).

By the 1970s, the idea of film noir had gained real cultural prominence in the United States.  American critics begin to write their own works on noir.  And the young "movie brat" filmmakers of the New Hollywood had encountered both the French critics and the films they called noir in their film-school educations.  The idea of film noir thus played an important role in their understanding of classical Hollywood cinema and its legacy.  As they sought to recapture and rework Hollywood's glorious past, they self-consciously created neo-noirs (in a way that Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s had not self-consciously created noirs).

The single most important early U.S. essay on film noir was Paul Schrader's "Notes on Film Noir" (written for the 1971 Los Angeles International Film Exposition and published in Film Comment in the Spring of 1972). A film critic and recent graduate of UCLA film school, Schrader was about to embark on a filmmaking career of his own, first as a screenwriter and later as a director. Since its publication, Schrader's essay has in many ways framed the discussion of film noir in the U.S.  Schrader was interested in both noir thematics and noir aesthetics.  And he saw noir as distinctly a product of post-war America.⁴  Schrader sensed that both young filmgoers and young filmmakers were fascinated by film noir, and that this fascination reflected deep and disturbing facts about the U.S. in the early 1970s:

American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character, but compared to such relentlessly cynical films noir as Kiss Me Deadly or Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the new self-hate cinema of Easy Rider and Medium Cool seems naive and romantic. As the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late Forties increasingly attractive. The Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties.

IV

Neither Paul Schrader nor his essay are mentioned by James Livingston in The World Turned Inside Out, his fascinating and provocative account of American thought and culture at the end of the 20th century.⁵  But Livingston's cover features an image from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), whose screenplay was written by Paul Schrader, shortly after his essay on film noir.  Although it's rarely spoken of as a neo-noir, Taxi Driver is, among other things, a meditation on the themes that Schrader had explored in his "Notes on Film Noir."  To mention just a few examples: The first "catalytic element" that Schrader notes as a necessary precondition to film noir is "war and post-war delusion." Taxi Driver takes place in an updated version of this milieu; practically the first thing we learn about its protagonist, Travis Bickle, is that he is a Vietnam veteran. Taxi Driver takes full advantage of the "love of romantic narration" that Schrader also associates with noir. Just as Schrader sees the central theme of classic noir to be the dashing of the hopes of the Thirties, so Taxi Driver revolves, at least in part, around the dashed hopes of the Sixties.  And it most resembles what Schrader identifies as "the third and final phase of film noir, from 1949-'53, [which] was the period of psychotic action and suicidal impulse.  The noir hero, seemingly under the weight of ten years of despair, started to go bananas."  Unlike other critics, who, Schrader notes, prefer earlier noirs, he considers this phase "the cream of the noir crop."

Paul Schrader, the (public) intellectual-turned-screenwriter, reminds us of an important fact about modern (and post-modern) culture industries in general, and film noir in particular.  Not only must historians of recent U.S. thought and culture pay attention to both "high" and "low" culture, but (what we think of as) "high" and "low" culture are in constant discussion with each other, such that one cannot be understood without the other.

The idea of film noir, a fundamentally intellectual creation designed to explain a series of (at the time slightly disreputable) films, traveled from its "high" 1940s French (modernist) cultural setting to a "high" 1970s U.S. (postmodernist?) cultural setting only to become firmly lodged in the much broader ("low") culture. 

This is a point akin to the one James Livingston makes throughout The World Turned Inside Out.  And yet, while I share his sense that we always have to keep both "high" and "low" in view when thinking about recent U.S. thought and culture, I think the picture is a little different from the one painted by Livingston.  "You could say," he writes in his book's Coda,

that when the professors started talking about gender trouble in the big words of postructuralism, they were translating the evidence available on screen, for example, from I Spit on Your Grave, a truly awful movie.  Or not--think of The Matrix, which makes Jean Baudrillard and Cornel West, two professors, its patron saints.  You could say, in conclusion, let's get over the either/or choice. By now we know this postmodern impulse goes both ways, up and down, as the line between lowbrow and highbrow culture dissolves in the late twentieth century.⁶

I have a number of problems with Livingston's ways of framing this point.  To take the end of this passage first, as the case of film noir suggests, the easy commerce between high and low is not simply a postmodern phenomenon.  As James Naremore suggests, both the films that became known as noir and the idea of film noir itself were products of a very active high-low dialogue taking place within the horizon of mid-twentieth-century high modernism.   Secondly, "evidence available on screen" does not necessarily come from some pre-intellectual (or even pre-academic) space.  To return to film noir: intellectuals played key roles in making film noir an important part of post-1975 US culture.  In a way, The Matrix series--with its unusually conspicuous display of academics and their works--is a bit of a distraction.  By focusing on its presentation of a Baudrillard book and Cornel West himself, we lose sight of the many more usual--and direct--ways in which intellectuals like Paul Schrader affect what shows up on screen.

V

As James Naremore tells us, the French film critics who named film noir in 1946 were, among other things, thinking of the first films that the French had called "noir," the poetic realist thrillers of the Popular Front era.  At least for French critics on the left in the 1940s, these films, although often grim, evoked positive memories of an era before the horrors of war and occupation.

Among many similarities between the newer U.S. film noirs and the older Popular Front thrillers was the role that the past itself played within the films' narratives.  Protagonists of American film noirs, from Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) in Out of the Past (1947) to Al Roberts (Tom Neal) in Detour (1945) to both Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and the title character (played, of course, by Rita Hayworth) in Gilda (1946) are often trapped by their past.

In the French noir precursors, too, the past often sealed the protagonists' fate.  But more often than their U.S. successors, characters in the French poetic realist films of the 1930s could also be more simply nostalgic about their pasts.  There's a wonderful scene toward the end of Pépé le Moko (1937) that perfectly displays this tendency. Pépé (Jean Gabin), a master criminal on the lam who is unable to leave the Casbah in Algiers, has apparently been stood up by Gaby (Mireille Balin), a beautiful tourist whose presence reminds Pépé of the Paris that he longs for but can never see again.  Tania (Fréhel), a fellow resident of the Casbah who is also waiting for her man and is similarly nostalgic for her past as a singer in Paris, tells Pépé that "when I feel down, I change eras."  She then puts on a record while describing how in her youth she'd sing to crowds in Parisian music halls.

The record is "Ou Est Il Donc?," a song that was a hit for Fréhel herself over a decade earlier and whose lyrics are themselves about nostalgia for Paris.  On screen the middle-aged Fréhel sings along with her younger self, as Tania and Pépé share a moment of nostalgia for a city they'll never see again.  I imagine that French audiences in 1937 probably felt some nostalgia, too, for the less threatening world of the mid-1920s in which Fréhel recorded her song.  We know that French critics of the '40s felt nostalgia for Popular Front films like Pépé. And, decades later, Paul Schrader and other American film critics and filmmakers felt nostalgia for the great Hollywood film noirs of the '40s and '50s and the industry that produced them.

However much the past tends to spell doom for the protagonists of film noir, and however much those who made noirs in the '40s and '50s--and neo-noirs in the '70s and beyond--were often drawn to the form by rather grim social realities, from even before Americans began writing and thinking about film noir in the early 1970s, these films have been objects of nostalgia.  Even a cynical neo-noir like Chinatown simultaneously debunks the history of Los Angeles while, as an aesthetic object,  glamorously evoking the greatness of Hollywood's past.

Like Tania playing her phonograph record in Pépé le Moko, when Americans see, or make, film noir, we are, in a sense, changing eras.

__________________________________________________

¹ James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 10-11.

² James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 65.

³ France had, of course, been deprived of Hollywood films for most of the War, so when the occupation ended, they experienced a half-decade or so of Hollywood movie making in an unusually concentrated fashion. The movies that the French initially designated "films noirs" in August 1946 included The Maltese Falcon; Double Indemnity; Laura; Murder, My Sweet; and The Lost Weekend. 

⁴ More recent scholars like Sheri Chinen Biesen have argued that film noir should be seen as product of the War years themselves. 

⁵ Andrew Hartman reviewed Livingston's book on this blog here.  Livingston's response to Andrew's review can be found here.

⁶ Livingston, 134.