At least it is an object of beauty as long as one restricts oneself, without looking more closely, to the classics and to the presumed knowledge of one's predecessors. A first, slightly disquieting remark: speaking about film noir consists, from the beginning, in being installed in repetition, in taking up the unanalysed discourse of those predecessors, with pre-established definitions (film noir is a cinephilic ready-made) that are impossible to criticize (who has seen and studied all the films listed by Silver and Ward, Foster Hirsch or Robert Ottoson?). Film noir is, then, an affair of heirs disinclined to look too closely at their inheritance, who take pleasure in regularly putting back into circulation topoi like the femme fatale, the shining pavement of the deserted street, unexpected violence, the private detective . . . Doubtless there is something true there, but what that truth relates to remains a question: American society, the world history of cinema (German expressionism, French poetic realism and Italian neo-realism), the directors, the actors, the spectators? Complacent repetition is more or less general, rare being those who venture to say that film noir has no clothes: Paul Schrader, James Damico, Paul Kerr and occasionally Foster Hirsch have had courage to cry out in the desert that the classical list of criteria defining film noir is totally heterogeneous and without any foundation but a rhetorical one. Moreover they cry out in vain, for it does not in the least disturb the publication of learned books on film noir in which one always finds the same arguments of which Paul Kerr has drawn up a highly amusing, bric-a-brac list. Some of these arguments are even to be found in the founding book by Borde and Chaumeton: this book has not been superseded since 1955 because it cannot be so long as the uncriticized list of heterogeneous criteria upon which it was built is retained. Its successors have only lengthened the list of films to be included, adding photographs and more extensive technical documentation: a look at these works' general presentations shows that the argumentation has remained fundamentally the same, without innovation. It is only in a few articles, here and there, that renewed arguments can be seen to appear (role of B-film production and post-war technique for Paul Kerr, a distinction between two periods for Paul Schrader, a definition of a basic plot structure for James Damico). Schrader's and Damico's essays have the additional interest of emphasizing the importance in film noir of the sentimental plot structure, of the melodramatic weight of the spectator's appreciation of this sort of film : let us recall that, by those in charge of publicity at the time of its release, Gilda and films like it were presented as 'romantic melodrama'.