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Joan Copjec
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This dialecticized or oscillating structure is absent from Dark Passage, and not only from the scene where Parry escapes from Madge's apartment. As Parry jumps to the ground and rushes out into the street to board a trolley car, the camera continues to keep him fully in view. The absence of an answering look is now marked not only by the continued refusal of a reverse shot, but additionally by the disturbing depopulation of the field we are given to see. The street and the trolley car are inexplicably empty. Our disquiet continues throughout the bus sequence that follows. Narratively this sequence is set up for suspense: the bus will not leave until two more tickets are sold. We are therefore led to expect a tense countdown as the selling of the tickets is measured against the arrival of the police. But this is not what we get. The sequence is cut to disperse rather than to build suspense. A policeman does arrive, nonclimactically, at the station and, as we watch the four other passengers board the bus one by one, we wonder if Parry will make it on before he is spotted. As the last of the other passengers walks toward her seat, the camera pans slightly forward to reveal Parry, already seated. Not only does his sudden appearance here not answer to the diegetic look of the police, it also fails to respond to the extradiegetic look of the spectator; that is, Parry's appearance neither meets nor surprises our expectations, it simply disregards them. To whom, then, is Parry visible?
It can be argued that he is visible to no one; not articulated within a dialecticized structure, his visibility is for no other subject. If he is seen, nevertheless, it is by something more 'rigid' than a subject, something incapable of being deceived, the way a subject is deceived. But if the dialectic of desire - hence suspense - and the possibility of deceit are both eliminated from the world of Dark Passage, then we have not only left the world of detective fiction far behind, we have also left behind many of the commonplaces of film noir criticism. As an example of film noir, the film would be described by this criticism as a dark sort of 'thriller', filled with deceptions, false leads and sudden reversals. Would we deny these basic descriptions of the genre? Yes. What is taken for deception is, in fact, something much more sinister: the emergence of a split between power and those whom power subjects such that the very world of these subjects appears incomprehensible to them. The world no longer unfolds in nonsimultaneous parts, as in detective fiction; in film noir it breaks up into inconsistent and always alien fragments. As a consequence of this, nothing can remain hidden in the noir universe only to become visible in a future moment. The noir hero is embarrassed by a visibility that he carries around like an excess body for which he can find no proper place. Already encumbered by his own overexposed being, the noir hero has no desire to seek his being through another. The links of intersubjectivity, invisible yet essential to detective fiction, are here dissolved. A different kind of struggle with a different, unyielding adversary remains.
sick
Film theory still operates largely according to the structuralist assumption Lefort indicts. We conceive a film as a system of relations among 'minimal significant units', at various levels of articulation. Anyone familiar with the study of film noir, for example, can recite a list of such units or elements thought to be necessary to the definition of the genre: a femme fatale, a morally compromised detective, an urban setting, voice-over narration, convoluted plot structure, chiaroscuro lighting, skewed framing, and so on. Lefort's implied argument that any such list, along with a specification of the relations among its individual terms, is bound to remain a mere heap of traits with no real coherency is borne out by the continued suspicion regarding the very status of film noir. We pay too much attention to the established terms and their relations without ever inquiring into the principle by which they are established. In virtue of what, we neglect to ask, is this particular organization instituted?
Sometimes, however, we are fooled into believing that we have asked this question, and are able to answer it, by making reference to a film's historic context. Film noir criticism correlates filmic elements with historical 'sources' - World War Two, an increase in crime, mounting paranoia regarding the working woman's place in society, and so on - thinking that it has thereby located the 'generative principle' of the films. But this reference to external sources in no way resolves the question of the internal logic of the films; the question is merely deferred. Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, authors of the first (1955) book-length study of film noir, acknoweldge [sic] this point even as they examine what they take to be the sources of the films. After discussing the rising incidence of crime during the period of the production of films noirs, they comment:
The question remains: why did crime suddenly assume such importance in Hollywood productions during these last ten years? For the existence of a phenomenon does not itself explain its artistic exploitation: artists and the public could misrecognize it, intentionally reject it, or consider it unaesthetic. Why were American spectators so sensible to films of violence and murder?
As it has come down to us through the decades, it is an object of beauty, one of the last remaining to us in this domain, situated as it is between neo-realism and the New Wave, after which rounded objects like these will no longer be made. It is an object of beauty because Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall are to be found there, because it is neatly contained in a perfect decade (1945-55), because it is simultaneously defined by its matter (black and white) and by its content (the crime story), because it is strange (see its relation to German expressionism and to psychoanalysis), because one cannot but love it (in contrast to its companion-objects, it is the only one that makes a place for affect and that functions as both a rallying cry and a point of exclusion), because it assures the triumph of European artists even as it presents American actors, because it is a severe critique of faceless capitalism, because it prolongs the reading of detective novels while feeding comparatism, because there is always an unknown film to be added to the list, because the stories it tells are both shocking and sentimental, because it is a great example of cooperation - the Americans made it and then the French invented it - and because a book can be made of all these reasons, in which one would finally have the feeling of having it all. On the whole, film noir is like a Harley-Davidson: you know right away what it is, the object being only the synecdoche of a continent, a history and a civilization, or more precisely of their representation for non-natives.
:)
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'.
One. of the most striking points about the critical discourse on film noir is that the starting dates of the films are no more challenged than are the other criteria of definition, even by those (Paul Kerr for example) who contest the latter. Certainly they are stretched back a bit (to 1941 for the father, The Maltese Falcon, or even 1940 if Stranger on the Third Floor is recalled) and forward a bit (to 1958 if Touch of Evil is to be included). A few ancestors such as Scarface or Marked Woman (on account of the final shot and of Bogart) can be found, but the charm of the genre must be respected and no one goes any further back than these few forerunners. My purpose here is to show that this way of breaking up time has no real validity whatsoever. 1945 marks the end of World War Two, which is not a cinematographic event, and 1955 marks either the appearance of the book by Borde and Chaumeton or the year that the RKO studio sold its stock of films to television, events that are totally incommensurable with the historical weight of the first date. To put it another way, what is completely strange in discourse on film noir is that the more elements of definition are advanced, the more objections and counter-examples are raised, the more precision is desired, the fuzzier the results become; the closer the object is approached, the more diluted it becomes. The result is that the energy deployed passes entirely into refuting or circumventing objections and not into searching for a more solid foundation. The cause of this situation seems to me to be a triple lack, historical, aesthetic, and theoretical: a historical lack concerning the American production of the detective film and the appearance in France of the notion of film noir; an aesthetic lack concerning the image and mise en scene (film stock and lighting, but also composition of the image and stock scenes); finally, a theoretical lack concerning the plot structure and characters of these detective fictions, including those found in the detective novel.
In fact, discourse on or around film noir is always and necessarily a discourse of consolidation (I could even say, of consolation) that allows us to forget what the founders Borde and Chaumeton had none the less taken the trouble to pinpoint with a great deal of intellectual honesty. The notion of film noir, for them, was meaningful only for French spectatos cut off from the American cinema during the war years and discovering in Paris during the summer of 1946, under the impetus of the Blum-Byrnes accords, a few detective films that would form the core of the genre. From 1946 to 1955, the critical work on film noir is effectively that of consolidation intended to justify the first impression, this initial astonishment that leads to the discovery in the post-war American cinema, coming from a nation whose military power and economic well-being were so striking, of films with an appearance of poverty in which the optimistic and moral lesson could not always be easily discerned by non-natives. The dates that have been agreed upon are thus ones that concern French critical reception and not American production.
What is furgott�n in the wake of this is the French climate that allows film noir to be erected as an historical object. The French have a paradoxical image of the United States: on the one hand, it permitted victory in the struggle against Nazism and offers the image of a people whose standard of living is sharply superior to that of the French, who until at least 1955 were caught in an economy of scarcity inherited from the war and even from the pre-war period. But, on the other hand, the United States is an imperialist menace that threatens to impose upon France values and a culture that are not its own: if the Americans are superior and even saviours in the military and economic domains, they are judged to be inferior and dangerous in the domain of culture, for they threaten to replace red wine with whiskey, Marcel Proust with the dime detective novel, and 'Le Temps des cerises' with jazz. [...]
lol
Film noir then comes to occupy a bizarre position: it can be the rallying cry of those who do not want to be caught up in the Communist Party and the moralism with which it was associated after the war, as it can be the love-object of those who want to hate the United States but love its cinema. By affirming that film noir is a harsh critique of American capitalism, by explaining the importance of European directors and cinematographers, by emphasizing the membership of Dashiell Hammett, presented as the father of the hard-boiled novel and thus of the genre, in the American Communist Party, film critics (that is, those cinephiles to whom writing is necessary) gave themselves the means to justify a love that was forbidden - whether it was the war (the impossibility of seeing the films), the Communist Party (whether one was a member or an opponent of it), or the supporters of a morality of hardship (often the same), if not all three, that forbade it. Finally, the invention of a new genre, at a few years' distance from the New Wave, is one way among others for a generation coming onto the labour market, forgetful or ignorant of pre-war production, to force recognition of its own signature. Film noir thus finds itself to be literally (but also in all senses of the term) a critical object: invented by French criticism, it allows one to love the United States while criticizing it, or more exactly to criticize it in order to be able to love it, in a relation that is not without connection with, on the one hand, the conflicts inherent in the Oedipal relation and, on the other (by the split that such an attitude implies), a fetishistic economy.
The first thing that must be recognized is that, first of all, the expressionism at work here was present in the United States and in Russia from at least 1915 , if not in Denmark from 1911 or France from 1913, and that, moreover, a certain continuity exists through the 1920s and 1930s, but with the use of real night-time exteriors suffering a massive disappearance after 1934. The second thing that must be recognized is that 'noir' lighting also owes its perpetuation to the gothic film, whose ambiance and decor (an old house or mansion without electricity) allows effects of darkness to be played upon. Thus, before singing the (deserved) praises of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur at the beginning of the 1940s (see Cat People, 1942), it would be necessary to recognize, after the role of Alvin Wyckoff in the 1910s, that of Tod Browning in the 1920s, notably with respect to the films he made with Lon Chaney, as well as the influence of Lee Garmes (notably for his work in Shanghai Express [von Sternberg, 1932], or in City Streets [Rouben Mamoulian, 1931 ]) . We should in fact recall that the cinematographers used in films noirs are not callow youths seeking to impose a new style: on the contrary, they are usually veterans who got their start in the 1910s and 20s. Tony Gaudio (High Sierra) began working in 1911 , John F. Seitz (The Big Clock, Double Indemnity, This Gun for Hire) in 1916, Sol Polito (Sorry, Wrong Number) in 1918, Musuraca (Stranger on the Third Floor, Out of the Past and Where Danger Lives) in 1923, Joseph LaShelle (Laura, Fallen Angel, Where the Sidewalk Ends) in 1925, John Alton (The Big Combo, He Walked by Night, The People Against O'Hara, The Crooked Way) , in 1928.
This film, dating from 1933, was directed by Michael Curtiz, with William Powell and Margaret Lindsay in the main roles, and is an adaptation of a story by Raoul Whitfield, a colleague and friend of Dashiell Hammett. The hero, emblematically, is an American named Free. Like Samuel Spade or Philip Marlowe, he is a private detective, obliged to be in contact with corruption, fighting alone against all for the re-establishment of right. Like them, he got his training in the institution: an intelligence officer in Paris, he is unmasked by the French police. Abandoned by his bosses, he is deported to New York where he suddenly finds himself in the middle of the Depression. His first employers refuse to recognize him, and he is forced to seek work on his own. He finds a position with a shady and spineless detective who survives by kidnapping dogs and returning them to their owners for ransom. Free brings real, honest clients to the agency, but his boss finds it easier to be paid by a gangster in whose service he puts his knowledge of the law. It is in this framework that Free is obliged to carry out surveillance on a young woman who hangs out in chic clubs and fancy restaurants (she is a gambler) and is apparently connected with gangsters, but who quickly becomes an ally in his struggle against corruption. After some friction and bitter-sweet relations, they end up recognizing their mutual love once they have gained victory over evil. The film itself is not lacking in noir scenes, for example the first scenes in the shabby rooms of the detective agency or the incident in which the heroine is the victim of an attempted assassination in an apartment entirely plunged into darkness except for the windows lit from the street. What interests me in this film is the connection established between the private detective and the Depression: Free is dropped by the national institutions that were supposed to protect him and obliged to make do for himself. Tempted by fast and easy money, he none the less remains faithful to an ideal of justice, with a rigour tempered only by love. Private Detective 62 has one of the most classic of noir scripts, as much in its pessimistic tendencies (the solitary struggle of the individual in a universe overrun by evil) as those that are sentimental (pure love surviving in evil's midst). Above all, it makes evident the fact that this sort of script treats the question of the relations between the individual and institutions dialectically. As for the urban decors, they set forth an opposition between poverty and luxury every bit the equal of The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) and its followers.
[...] It has less often been noted that the gangster, as a character whose social ascension is 'too' fast, is the dark image of individualism subjected to religious condemnation ('whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased'), from which the sin of pride is by no means absent. But the gangster is also a social condemnation to the extent that he reestablishes a class difference within society by placing a trench between poor and rich, between isolated individuals and those who enter into a system of organized understandings. Whether one is confronted in these fictions with rich bourgeois, the mafia, unions, or Nazi or communist networks (depending on the period), the fundamental question is always that of the struggle between freedom and individual happiness on one side and, on the other, the understandings and systems that secretly are spreading or threatening to spread their ramifications through the whole country by forbidding the sacrosanct operation of free enterprise and free competition. The private detective is a petty-bourgeois jealous of his independence, convinced of his moral worth and concerned with protecting what is, in his eyes, the exemplary value of American democracy. That in the process he conquers the young woman, who has all the attributes of the upper middle class, is only the necessary tribute to be paid to social ascension (but here by a love that glorifies the petty bourgeoisie) and a defeat inflicted upon the other camp. From this point of view, the detective film cannot be considered to be a critique of the system; on the contrary, it functions as a necessary denial of capitalism's tendency towards concentration, by constantly reaffirming the virtues of the petty bourgeoisie and of free enterprise, so long as the latter keeps a human scale.
At least two things were brought up to date through the detective film and the character of the private detective. The first was the repetition of the citizen's allegiance to national principles, but through a constant pact according to which national institutions can only maintain their power through the individual, through the simple citizen apparently lost in the masses and in the immensity of the country. [...]