French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (review)

This study examines the formative influence of noir traditions on French popular cultural production from the war years to the present day. Above all, it focuses on the extensive transatlantic exchanges between France and America and revisits the critical assumption that postwar French noir fiction and film were the result of a purely imitative appropriation of a hard-boiled American tradition. Indeed, Rolls and Walker reveal a far more complex process of cultural negotiation, centring their investigation on the reception of American texts and films in France and tracing the development of an indigenous production in parallel with, and often in reaction against, such widely exported products of American popular culture. As the authors demonstrate in a series of close readings of French noir prose fiction and film, the lens of American noir also offered French authors and filmmakers a highly effective narrative vehicle for examining, in transposed critiques of the legacies of war, occupation, and decolonization, France's own internal tensions. The study is divided into two parts. The first examines French noir prose fiction, beginning with the wartime production of Léo Malet, and the processes by which French literature was 'noired' in the aftermath of Liberation. Close readings of selected novels by Boris Vian, in particular J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946), early French Série Noire authors such as Terry Stewart, and Anglo-American writers such as Peter Cheyney provide thought-provoking explorations of the role of translation in developing a canon of noir writing in France from the 1940s onwards. The metaphors and motifs of 'strangulation' are employed in two chapters to illuminate the intertextual relations at work in early French noir fiction and how such intertextual references continue to resonate with the fiction of Amélie Nothomb in a blurring of the boundaries between noir fiction and the mainstream. In the second part, French film noir is read from a similar comparative perspective, beginning with Michel Gast's adaptation of Vian's J'irai cracher sur vos tombes from 1959, and offering close analysis of the work of key American filmmakers such as Jules Dassin and Bob Swaim for a French filmic canon of noir. The figure of the femme fatale in French film noir is reviewed, as are the ambivalent cultural affiliations of leading French directors such as Bertrand Tavernier, both an American cinéphile and a scathing critic of the impact of globalization and American cultural domination on the French film industry. The final chapter is devoted to the subject of the remake, offering a case study of the adaptation process at work in Jacques Audiard's De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté (2005) as remake of James Toback's Fingers (1978). The study would have benefited from an overarching conclusion to bring together the key strands of argument. However, this does not detract from the intellectually rich project of the volume and its lively and topical repositioning of French noir in both aesthetic and political terms.