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  • Le Film noir français face aux bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre, 1946–1960 by Thomas Pillard
  • Keith Reader
Le Film noir français face aux bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre, 1946–1960. Par Thomas Pillard. Nantes: Joseph K., 2014. 349 pp., ill.

French film noir of the decade and a half after the Second War has hitherto been an under-explored area, like indeed so much of the period cavalierly dismissed by the young [End Page 571] Truffaut as ‘cinéma de papa’. That neglect has perhaps been compounded by a tendency to regard French film noir as mere imitation or even epigone of the American original — a misprision that will be far less easy to perpetuate in the wake of Thomas Pillard’s thorough and scrupulously documented study. Pillard identifies three distinct subsets of the genre — réalisme noir, the heir to poetic realism (late Carné, Yves Allégret); comic série noire (notably Eddie Constantine vehicles); and the gangster movie (Melville, Becker, Dassin). Due weight is given to the contribution of actors — Gabin of course, but also the often abject Bernard Blier’s ‘personnification défaillante de l’identité virile’ (p. 66), Raymond Rouleau’s work for André Hunebelle, and perhaps surprisingly Fernandel, star of Verneuil’s parody L’Ennemi public no. 1 (1953). Pillard does an excellent job of detailing the French specificities of his corpus while showing, in the wake of Richard Kuisel and Kristin Ross, how its films reflect and refract the complexities of Franco-American cultural relationships in the period under discussion. He cogently demonstrates how echoes of les années noires pervade films of his period, whether textually (Touchez pas au grisbi (Becker, 1953)) or contextually, as when he contrasts Gabin’s well-known Resistance record with the activities of Roger Duchesne — Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1955) — in collaboration with the Gestapo. Femmes fatales are at a premium as compared with Hollywood, replaced by what is less enticingly described as ‘la “garce idiote”’ (p. 224), and ethnic minorities unsurprisingly provide little more than exotic local colour. These films are by and large set in Paris — Marseille does not offer the competition one might have expected — and more often than not they are centred on Montmartre, notably its lower reaches near Pigalle. Belleville and Ménilmontant were not to come into their own until later, and the Left Bank appears only by way of Montparnasse, constructed in Decoin’s Razzia sur la chnouf (1955) as an area of multi-ethnic ill repute, representing more than anywhere else ‘la pénétration de la modernité culturelle américaine’ (p. 309). Pillard thus opens a window onto broader questions of French and Parisian cultural identity of interest beyond the field of film studies. The illustrations are well chosen and generally clearly reproduced, though sometimes on a rather small scale; and while there is no overall index the bibliography and filmography are extensive and clearly presented.

Keith Reader
ULIP
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