European Film Noir (review)

European Film Noir represents a significant contribution to European film and cultural studies. Via a series of ten essays, this volume challenges the overwhelmingly American narrative of film noir and explores, in highly informative and often ground-breaking interventions, the trajectories of film noir in France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy. What emerges from these analyses is the transnational and transhistorical nature of film noir as a cultural form. For, as all contributors stress, European film noir is no mere imitation or pastiche of an American model but rather the product of rich and multiform appropriations and adaptations of an American-identified aesthetic. Such classical films noirs, and their neo-noirs counterparts, are interpreted as both staging a series of tangled and fraught European encounters with American culture (both attraction and repulsion) and as providing a narrative vehicle for engaging with specifically European national histories and preoccupations. Such a dual focus is evident in the two French contributions to the volume. Ginette Vincendeau's exploration of early French film noir stresses the need to locate film noir in terms of the relationship between narrative, visual style and tone rather than in relation to a defined corpus of French crime films. In a chapter spanning the 1930s to the 1960s, Vincendeau charts the emerging landscape of French film noir, identifying the specificity of a French tradition, such as the preference for atmosphere over action and plot and the marginalization of women protagonists. Indeed, Vincendeau underscores the paradox that some of the most recognizable features of French film noir are not to be found in the genre of the French policier but rather in powerfully influential film styles, such as poetic realism or the sombre portrayals of a 'social noir' that captured the urban deprivation and despair of the early post-war decades in France. In Phil Powrie's chapter on neo-noir to hyper-noir, such insightful analyses are developed in relation to the genre of the French thriller and its permutations and reinventions from the 1970s to the present day. In common with other contributions on European neo-noir, Powrie focuses on French neo-noir's dystopian social visions, primarily its depiction of masculinities in crisis. He explores the complex intertextual connections between French and American noir film cultures but is sensitive above all to specific evolutions in a French frame, particularly the development of a 'hyper-noir' sensibility from the late 1990s where conventional representations of gender and genre are recast via displays of graphic sex and violence. As a collection of essays, this volume is exemplary in the organization and coherence of its contributions, probing the contexts, conditions and connections that characterize a cross-cultural phenomenon like film noir. If, as a number of contributors assert, European film noir continues to be perceived as a lost continent or forgotten genre, then this volume more than amply testifies to its dynamic and multi-faceted presence in European cultural life.