In the Cold Night of the Day: On Film Noir, Hitchcock, and Identity

This article originates from a certain philosophical interest in one of cinema’s most elemental features: its dark side. Cinema is a medium technologically constructed as a constant interplay between light and darkness, between the opening and closure of camera and projector shutters, between the control of quantities of light waves within dark chambers and the chemical reaction of light-sensitive surfaces to these waves or their electronic recording by sensors, between bright screens and dark theaters. Beyond the technological, cinema is also about narratives, narratives that, at times, tell stories about dark characters, about sinister and evil antagonists that creep out of murky shadows uninvited and unexpected, who appear at night to haunt our dreams and affect the calmness of our day. It is about stories with entities who gain their forbidding powers in the gloomy veils of the night that offers them protection from the luminosity of the day; and about people who conspire for the creation of a new reality while hidden inside the shielding opaqueness of the night. What all this goes to say is that darkness and the night—or rather, the darkness of the night—becomes a connecting feature that moves us from the technicity of the medium to its produced works and their cultural reception, expressing an immanence within cinema’s own reality.

What, though, is it that we can learn about this nocturnal darkness, and by extension, about the relationship between night and day? To be certain, the night has come to represent an array of sinister or fearful characteristics that could be understood, to some extent, as constant from one work to the next. From a more philosophical perspective, it has been interpreted as the temporal space of our fears for the unknown, the metaphorical origin of life before order set in, or the realm of unconscious forces forever lying dormant—yet present—underneath the surface of our consciousness. By the same token, the day has become a metaphor for the light we seek to shed on the truth we aim to discover, the truth about our world and ourselves. If we were to extend this reading into the realm of subject formation, social living, and cultural production, could we imagine these nocturnal and diurnal temporal demarcations—or chronotopes—also expressing the desires and powers of women and men? And, most importantly, are these demarcations clearly delimited, or do they express instead the ambiguities of time’s flow, individuation, and the possibilities of artistic expression?

Like all conceptual formations, the nocturnal has its own history within the tradition of Western thought, artistic production, and social rites. In her recently published and translated monograph Night Passages (2013), Elisabeth Bronfen takes us through part of the rich complexity of this history, offering researchers a welcoming resource for the development of the nocturnal in numerous works from philosophy, literature, and film. In so doing, Bronfen’s work reminds us of the importance that has been given to the night throughout the history of aesthetic, social, and philosophical frameworks, thus showcasing that a focus on this concept is a much-needed and overlooked practice in current research. She shows us how a specific temporal part of a twenty-four-hour period serves more than just a quantitative sum of those hours between sunset and sunrise. The night, as exemplified in Bronfen’s work, becomes a qualitative category that expresses a certain social psychology linked to the fears and anxieties brought up by darkness itself, as well as the desires and aspirations connected to the dreams of the individual, all hidden from the normative surface—glaringly revealed in broad daylight—of a male-driven social reality.

As my current article was originally requested to be a review of Night Passages, I will spend some time going through the details of the book in order to highlight its potentials, as well as its theoretical weaknesses. Most interestingly for me as a film scholar, Bronfen’s book falls within a group of recent publications in the...