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4 Build My Scaffolding High
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4 BuildMyScaffoldingHigh NoirFilmsasConstrainedTexts Modern filmmakers are clearly unabashed in their affinity for noir, and the function of self-consciousness in their work. —Todd Erickson, “Kill Me Again: Movement Becomes Genre” Working in an industrially defined sub-genre with as distinctive a strategy and style as the B film noir imposed a number of constraints on “creativity” but . . . such constraints should not be seen as merely negative in their operation. —Paul Kerr, “My Name Is Joseph H. Lewis” Art is born of constraint, lives on struggle, dies of freedom. —André Gide, The Evolution of the Theater It is necessary to create constraints, to invent freely. —Umberto Eco, “Postscript,” The Name of the Rose W hile to some it may still seem strange to compare films noir to oulipian texts, there are in fact good reasons for doing so —both in terms of their modes of production and their critical reception. Due to censorship and the conventions of genre filmmaking in classic Hollywood, films made during the studio system era had to respect certain generic tendencies and leave many things unsaid. Yet, there was the imperative to make largely similar stories fresh and marketable. To overcome these challenges, Hollywood developed a consistent set of visual tropes to imply certain narrative events: the open window with the curtains flapping stood in for lovemaking; the descent of a staircase demonstrated a character’s falling fortunes; the failure to see oneself in a mirror implied a fatal lack of self-knowledge.1 Rather than being flattened by such conventions, these films were often enriched, the best of them demonstrating that such constraints could be a powerful, creative force for generating new texts. John O. Thompson summarizes the situation quite aptly: On constraint: having to work within limits produces formal solutions with their own elegance and beauty. Wouldn’t it be a bit philistine to point to the constraints of the sonnet as making it unlikely that the poet could produce satisfying work, having to keep to fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme? In media studies the outstanding example of formalist rehabilitation of elaborately con- [35.173.215.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:21 GMT) Build My Scaffolding High • 35 strained work has been our discovery of how very, very beautiful, whatever else they may be, the products of classic Hollywood studio system were. (1992, 296) Read out of context, this quote is equally descriptive of oulipian poetics.2 While all classic Hollywood films can rightly be considered constrained texts, we would maintain that films noir were constrained in a particularly oulipian fashion, as others have intimated without explicitly framing their argument in terms of the Oulipo. Indeed, the more one reads of noir scholarship , the more one has the impression everyone has been trying to understand noir constraint in an oulipian sense, but often without the prerequisite knowledge of the Oulipo to make their positions explicit—what we might call “pure” instances of plagiarism by anticipation of our Oufinopo, for they occur without the foreknowledge necessary to true plagiary.3 In their chapter on noir visual style, “Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir,” Janey Place and Lowell Peterson enumerate how certain stylistic qualities of noir were born of production realities but were in turn embraced for their narrative potentials; budgetary constraints and the limitations of cinema technology governed the production of noir films in the Hollywood system but led to more inventive filmmaking with its own distinctive look and stories befitting that look. As Place and Peterson explain, low-key lighting —bornoflowproductionvalues—combinedwithadesirefordepthoffocus to show noir protagonists in their environments resulted in the need for cinematographers to use wide-angle lenses (to compensate for low light levels) that “have certain distorting characteristics, which, as noir photography developed , began to be used expressively” ([1974] 1996, 67). They cite Orson Welles’s first shot of Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil as an example of the expressive use of such lensing that had once been pure necessity. Moreover, Place and Peterson note that expensive camera movements (such as “elaborate tracking or boom shot(s)”) tended to be avoided and replaced instead by juxtapositions of extreme high-angle long shots with huge “choker” closeups , generating “unsettling variations on the traditional close-up, medium and long shots” (67). In other words, some of the best-known examples of thenoirstyle intheclassicalperiodresultedfrombothbudgetaryconstraints 36 • the maltese touch of evil and the director’s willingness to embrace such constraints in an oulipian sense—to explore how they might stimulate the creative...