More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Context (review)

In More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Context, James Naremore argues that "the ‘original' film noirs can be explained in terms of a tense, contradictory assimilation of high modernism into the American culture industry as a whole" (7). He shows that, in fact, the genre was a continuation of the circulation and dissemination of modernist aesthetic and political ideologies, which put Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler in conversation with Baudelaire, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James.

Early in the book, Naremore defines film noir as belonging "to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema; in other words, it has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse" (11). This definition, as we see in the rest of the book, is as original as it is radical, because it not only casts a new eye on the noir style, with fascinating results, but it also takes the genre beyond the 1940s and 1950s to reveal its reincarnation in contemporary films, fashion, photography, fiction, architecture, and music. By removing the film noir genre from a narrow cinematic context of how actors are dressed, sets are designed, and urban life is photographed, the book presents the noir style as "a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies" (11). Naremore argues against confining the meaning of film noir to hopelessness, cynicism, and dark moods.

By placing film noir in the context of modernism, Naremore shows that the birth of the genre coincides with the international and popular reception of the tenets of the movement: "Like modernism, Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s are characterized by urban landscapes, subjective narration, nonlinear plots, hard-boiled poetry, and misogynistic eroticism; also like modernism, they are somewhat ‘anti-American,' or at least ambivalent about modernity and progress" (45).

What I especially like about the book is the intellectual discussion of the noir style as a commentary on society in the 1940s and 1950s, as nostalgia in the 1960s and 1970s, and as a style that has influences beyond film in the 1980s and 1990s. First, Naremore revisits Raymond Borde and Štienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir Américain (1955) and other classic studies of film noir in France to show that, above all, French discussions of noir were shaped by existentialist literature and philosophy: "Rohmer and several of his colleagues at Cahiers du cinéma belonged to a generation that imbibed its existentialism and phenomenology from André Bazin, who was a more conservative and in some ways more consistent writer than Sartre" (25).

Thus implicated in the aesthetics and ideology of existentialism, surrealism, and impressionism, the French critics were able to see in films like Double Indemnity, The Third Man, and The Maltese Falcon narratives of psychological and moral disorientation, and inversions of capitalist and Puritan values. For Naremore, the French New Wave grew out of this criticism of the noir style, which provided a grim depiction of progress, Taylorism, or assembly-line America. Writing about Double Indemnity, one of the favorite noirs of the New Wave directors, Naremore states: "In all its manifestations, it signifies the tendency of modern society to turn workers into zombies and robots, like the enslaved populace of Lang's Metropolis" (88).

Naremore also casts a much-needed light on the subversive strategies of noir directors and writers under the Breen Office, a Hollywood censorship arm. The Breen Office had specific rules against miscegenation, the negative representation of law and religious officers in film, and the display of lustful kissing, visible pregnancy, adultery, prostitution, perversions, and sympathy for law breakers. "Joseph Breen refused to approve the rerelease of the 1931 Maltese Falcon precisely because ‘the dame in the Kimono' (Bebe Daniels) wore insufficient clothing; as if in response, the 1941 production garbed Mary...