Articles Did Film Noir Really Happen, or Was It a Set-up?
Below Citizen Kane (1941)
Did Film Noir
Really Happen,
or Was It a
Set-up?
Articles
Is film noir a genre? Many film scholars argue against
this notion, insisting it was reconstructed as a genre
only in retrospect that is to say, apart from any evi-
dence that, at the time of production, anyone was
aware that a film noir was, in fact, what they were
producing (Neale 2000). By way of contrast, science
fiction, a musical or a western manifests a conscious
intent to produce the given genre at the initial point
of production. To make matters more confusing, all
would agree that directors such as Robert Aldrich in
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Orson Welles in A Touch of
Evil (1958) are self-consciously quoting from the ear-
lier genre of film noir. But how is this possible if such
a thing never happened? Citizen Kane (1941) itself is
mentioned in passing by Nino Frank in his 1946 sem-
inal article, Un nouveau genre policier: Laventure
criminelle (widely regarded as the first declaration
of film noir). In that case, Welles would have to be
seen as reworking, at the end of its classic phase, a
genre he helped instigate in the first place, but which
never actually took place at the time. This is the sort
of time warp worthy of Chris Markers La Jete.
In a way, I am going to agree with both sides in this
debate. The chronology is clear: film noir was rec-
ognized as a genre after the fact. But, by the same
token, this does not mean nothing was happening
during the formation of something only recognized
in retrospect. Because of its rapid and surprising
development as a profitable industry, the history
of cinema was often driven, unlike that of other art
forms such as painting or poetry or sculpture, by a
necessity for novelty such that the necessary mass
consumption of its end products would not dwindle.
Roughly speaking, some of the deliberate attempts
at novelty uncovered new forms of visual expres-
sion leading to aesthetic and socio-historical break-
6 | film international issue 67
By Garry Leonard
Keywords film noir, genre, Orson Welles,
Nino Frank, crime film, the police drama, film
economy, Virginia Woolf
throughs (film noir) and others did not (3D movies, for
example). In other words, when it comes to cinema,
we should not give full credence to the intentional
fallacy that something not deliberately planned can-
not be looked upon as an aesthetic innovation.
Much of the aesthetic innovation D.W. Griffith
brought to montage was driven by a desire to find
more and more nuanced methods for delivering a
narrative that was intrinsically cinematic, and not
simply the illustration of a novel or historical event.
Not every aesthetic innovation is heralded by a man-
ifesto, followed by the formation of a definable work-
ing group, followed by a set of creations linked in one
way or another to this group (what we would term
a movement). Such was often the case in modern-
ism proper (dadaism, futurism, surrealism, cubism,
imagism) and this may be why a similar dynamic is
demanded in cinema.
And sometimes it is provided; such was the case
when the Russian cinema took up the aesthetic
implications of montage and worked them up into
a highly self-conscious and stylized format with
explicitly stated political goals. The distinctly dif-
ferent development of montage in Russian cinema
was not simply a reflection of differing artistic tem-
perament but also of the fact the American cinema
demanded consistent and reliable audiences for its
product and lacked the state sponsorship of a Ser-
gei Eisenstein, a form of support not solely related to
audience, which allowed him to proceed from purely
aesthetic considerations. But the emergence of film
Articles Did Film Noir Really Happen, or Was It a Set-up?
noir is a case of the necessity of stimulating the box
office leading to a startling and creatively productive
convergence of lighting, editing and screenwriting
innovations.
As a viable commercial enterprise, one begun in
storefronts, carnivals and music halls, cinema has
always depended, first and foremost, on novelty and
the resulting public interest in it as the sine qua non
of its development. At the outset, its sole claim upon
the publics attention was the usual effect of present-
ing to the curious public a moving image. Famously,
the Lumire Brothers predicted the rapid decline of
cinema based on the fact that they mistakenly took
this initial novelty to be the only possible one, and so
declared, prudently enough, that the rapid decline of
public interest was a foregone conclusion. In terms
of economics, they were absolutely correct. In terms
of assuming cinema was already everything it ever
could be, they could not have been more wrong.
The narrative editing techniques of Edwin S. Por-
ter, Griffith and others saved cinema from an early
death as a commercial entertainment. Following
upon this, the atmospheric studio pictures of Ger-
man expressionism gave it artistic cachet, and Eisen-
steins successful application of montage supplied a
political frisson. All of this and more, in only a decade,
elevated cinema from a crude and cheap entertain-
ment to both a major industry and a new art form.
By looking back at Nino Franks seminal 1946 article,
I think we can say what came to be known as film
noir was initially an attempt to inject new life into
the tired form of the crime story.
A possible niche was also opening up because the
built-in optimism of the musical, the romance and
the western all seemed like only part of the story
in the wake of the Great Depression and the rapid
rise of fascism leading to the onset of World War
II (Hillis 2005). Another reason, then, that film noir
reads so problematically as a genre is that it is, to
an extent, an implicit protest against genres. Film
noir begins as a collage of established genres but a
collage of the shadowy and understated realities of
these much more sunny genres. Extreme psycho-
logical situations are borrowed from melodrama,
but now passions drive people over the edge before
they can have an effective change of heart (Stevens
2010). The sexual betrayal and manipulation of the
femme fatale ensures that the sort of misunder-
I think we can say what came to be
known as film noir was initially an
attempt to inject new life into the
tired form of the crime story.
Below Double Indemnity (1941)
standings always worked out in a romance would
be intractable and self-destructive. The courage
and heroism of the cowboy leading to the re-estab-
lishment of law as a vehicle for justice, rather than
as a tool manipulated by the powerful, gets flipped
around into the figure of a detective who does his
best but can only claim small, local victories. The
adage of hard work and determination will lead to
financial success in the end, so doggedly present in
the musicals of Busby Berkeley, gets flipped around
to become the most defining feature of the anti-
genre of film noir: hard work and fair play only set
ones self up to become the fall guy of those who
cheat and exploit.
As Nino Frank makes clear, the crime drama was
ripe for renovation. The stories were heavily depen-
dent upon plot, action and expository dialogue. The
denouement revealed itself much like a crossword
puzzle; a clever detective successfully interpreted
and matched up vertical and horizontal clues until
all details had been filled in and a single clear coher-
ent story of what really happened issued forth for
all to see, with no box left unfilled. So something con-
scious at the time of production did happen, resulting
in something, labelled retrospectively, as film noir.
It happened in a historical and concrete way at the
level of production with an eye towards maintain-
ing profitability and, on a cultural level, its method
of striving for a lucrative novelty engendered a visual
vocabulary that inaugurated a visual form, one able
to generate subtle representations of various nebu-
lous fears and desires embedded in the collective
psyche of post-World War II America. The change, as
I say, was practical police dramas had grown boring,
detective mysteries predictable. To the extent that
movies were an industrial production that would
effectively disappear were its audience ever to do so,
finding another way to reintroduce novelty was as
www.filmint.nu | 7
Articles Did Film Noir Really Happen, or Was It a Set-up?
it still is paramount. Clearly, in this regard, cinema
is very different from, say, oil painting where aes-
thetic experimentation can reign supreme because
oil paintings are not part of an ongoing business plan
inextricably linked to mass production and mass
consumption.
In the heyday of the studio system, movies made,
or failed to make, their production costs in a matter of
months. Its all very well that Citizen Kane and Vertigo
(1958) now vie for first place on a prominent list of the
greatest movies of all time. Something else they had
in common, apart from their irrefutable artistic merit,
is that they were both, for different reasons, exempt
from market contingencies. Orson Welles, the wun-
derkind of American theatre, was lured to Hollywood
by being given a blank cheque to direct Kane while
Hitchcock, after decades of successful productions,
was permitted a directors cut. Just as well both these
movies were above the market since, in both cases,
the films performed poorly at the time of their release,
even as they reinvigorated the art of cinema. In cin-
ema, aesthetic advances are appreciated somewhat
after the fact. What begins as an attempt at novelty
becomes artistry. At the same time, depending on who
is producing, directing, writing, etc. a shift in a method
of visual expression can also clearly retain its connec-
tion as a mere gimmick. Even as I write this, such a
dynamic is playing out in the Cineplex; for every Ava-
tar (2009) employing 3D there is a Cloudy with a Chance
of Meatballs (2009) employing the same technique, to
much less effect. What seems artistic and integrated
in one example remains mere novelty in another. To
express the dynamic of novelty and aesthetics in the
parlance of agents and pitchmen, the history of cin-
ema is P.T. Barnum meets Leonardo Da Vinci.
In the case of film noir then, it is not strictly the
case that technical shifts have erroneously been
cobbled together in retrospect to represent a genre;
8 | film international issue 67
Below Laura (1944)
but nor is it the case that the style we came to know
as film noir was a purely intentional shift in artis-
tic design resulting in a new visual aesthetic. French
critics, so the argument goes, catching up with Hol-
lywood movies made during the war years (194044)
but not available for viewing during the German
occupation, noticed a certain darkness in the cin-
ematography and storylines of a dozen films or so.
Specifically, Nino Frank, writing in 1946, selected
four films The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity
(1944), Laura (1944) and Murder, My Sweet (1944) dis-
tinguishing them from earlier movies dealing with
crime and detection by noting they no longer have
any common ground with run-of-the-mill police dra-
mas.
In these new black, or noir films, according to Frank,
the markedly psychological plots and/or violent or
emotional action of these police dramas now have
less impact than facial expressions, gestures, [and]
utterances. The impact formerly found in narrative
devices (plot or action) has now migrated to non-
narrative visual, cinematic devices: facial expres-
sions (the close-up), gestures (also the close-up, and
more rapid editing) and utterances (the soundtrack,
especially the voice-over). This is hailed by Frank as
a significant improvement: after films such as these
the figures in the usual cop movie seem like man-
nequins. What strikes me in going over Nino Franks
1946 film review is that it is intensely practical about
the changes that have come about, and the reasons
for them. At every point, he connects his observa-
tions with what must have been the conscious inten-
tions of the film-makers. Their primary intention is
to rejuvenate the police drama: [W]e are witnessing
the death of this formula. So, it is not the birth of
film noir that is being noticed, but the death of the
police drama.
The relocation of impact from plot and action
to visual manifestations of anxiety and desire is
executed by minimizing narrative exposition and
emphasizing new visual juxtapositions relative to
temporality and spatiality (close-up of gestures and
expressions, the framing of objects not essential to
the plot or action). As a result, the thinking machine
prototype of Sherlock Holmes gives way to a detec-
tive with an emotional life. My point is that the
shift in emphasis Frank notes is not merely a con-
venient trope imposed by film scholars to aid in the
discussions and analyses of these movies. The shift
is intrinsic to the films themselves, and for a very
practical reason: the old formula was showing its
age and had become overshadowed by boring rep-
etition; to persist in it anyway would affect the box
office.
Articles Did Film Noir Really Happen, or Was It a Set-up?
Indeed, in the case of Otto Premingers Laura, Frank
finds that it still belongs to this outdated genre; but
Otto Preminger and his collaborators forced them-
selves to renew the formula by introducing a charm-
ing study of the furnishings and faces []. The result
is a film lacking in originality but perfectly distract-
ing and, one can say, successful. In other words,
(commercial) necessity is the mother of (aesthetic)
innovation; the shift is intrinsic to the actual produc-
tion of the films that is to say, palpably present in
a conscious decision-making process at the time of
production and therefore not a phenomenon made
visible only in retrospect. Unremarked at the time, it
is also commercially driven: the public is bored with
the formula of the police drama and must be dis- proof? Admirable films such as How Green Was My
tracted by a charming study of the furnishings and
faces. Like any innovation that is driven by outside
forces (i.e. holding on to a profitable box office figure)
the artistic possibilities were appreciated more fully
after the fact. By the time we get to Kiss Me Deadly
really only a little more than a decade later the
innovation is fully aestheticized which also marks
its decline as classic noir and inaugurates its post-
modern manifestation as neo-noir.
And so we can see (literally!) that this shift,
while motivated by business concerns, nonetheless
amounted to an aesthetic revolution; the impact
on the audience, once generated by plot twists and
action, shifted out of this narrative domain over into
the visual. In doing so, it discovered a more strictly
cinematic way to render extreme emotions engen-
dered by highly stressful situations.
This aesthetic shift permits a better business
model for Hollywood in another way, too: this new
method for producing an impact on the audience
is cheap. It flourishes in the medium of black and
white, for starters. Beyond that, the new focus on
hands, gestures, cigarettes, revolvers, lampshades,
shoes, hats, gloves and what have you, costs pennies
compared to building elaborate sets and designing
astonishing costumes (Keating 2010). As the verisi-
militude is now psychological rather than material,
even an obviously cheaply constructed set, or an
Below Touch of Evil (1958)
unconvincing use of a backdrop, need not diminish
the effectiveness of the technique.
These new noir productions actually look better a
bit roughed up and there is something about literal
verisimilitude that reduces emotional impact since
one of the understood results of being in the grip of
strong feelings is that we do not see in a neutral way;
rather, our gaze can seek out odd details in rapid suc-
cession. In Detour, Edgar Ulmer literalizes this fact by
giving us the point-of-view shot of a man who real-
izes he has killed unintentionally a second time. The
camera pans quickly from object to object in the
room in a manner that is out of focus and unstable.
As this movie amply displays, money spent on higher
production values would have been money wasted.
Godard hit on this fact when he famously noted that
to make a movie all you need is a girl and a gun,
thereafter making good on this boast with Breath-
less where visual innovations supplant the storyline
entirely and dialogue was improvised on the set.
Frank heralds this cheap way to produce dramatic
effect by noting today one can find more dramatic
energy in a static shot than in a majestic panorama.
His evidence is to place in tandem movies like Laura
and Double Indemnity with the expensive, high pro-
duction value movies released at the same time: The
Valley and The Letter, admirable and profoundly bor-
ing [] production values written in capital letters
[] filmed theater in all its splendor.
In her 1926 essay The Cinema Virginia Woolf
lamented fusty costume dramas and filmed the-
atre, as well:
The eye says, Here is Anna Karenina.
A voluptuous lady in black velvet wear-
ing pearls comes before us. But the brain
says, That is no more Anna Karenina than
it is Queen Victoria. For the brain knows
Anna almost entirely by the inside of her
mind her charm, her passion, her de-
spair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema
upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet.
In a way, Woolfs complaint is similar to that of Frank
regarding the detective as mannequin in the older
form of the police drama. Such a character is all
exposition just as the Anna Karenina is all exhibi-
Another reason, then, that film noir
reads so problematically as a genre
is that it is, to an extent, an implicit
protest against genres.
www.filmint.nu | 9
Articles Did Film Noir Really Happen, or Was It a Set-up?
In cinema, aesthetic advances are
appreciated somewhat after the
fact.
tion; neither convey any sense of having any interior-
ity, and this because no cinematic devices are being
employed to try and do so. They are simply there.
But what might the devices of cinema be, Woolf
asks. If it ceased to be a parasite, how would it walk
erect? By way of answering, Woolf recalls a star-
tling moment during her viewing of The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari:
[A]t a performance of Dr. Caligari the other
day a shadow shaped like a tadpole sud-
denly appeared at one corner of the screen.
It swelled to an immense size, quivered,
bulged, and sank back again into nonen-
tity. For a moment it seemed to embody
some monstrous diseased imagination of
the lunatics brain. For a moment it seemed
as if thought could be conveyed by shape
more effectively than by words. The mon-
strous quivering tadpole seemed to be fear
itself, and not the statement, I am afraid.
She goes on to note that the shadow was accidental
and the effect unintentional.
Still, it gives her an idea:
if a shadow at a certain moment can suggest
so much more than the actual gestures and
words of men and women in a state of fear, it
seems plain that the cinema has within
its grasp innumerable symbols for emo-
tions that have so far failed to find expres-
sion. Terror has besides its ordinary forms
the shape of a tadpole; it burgeons, bulg-
es, quivers, disappears. (My emphasis)
Woolf is predicting, in a general way, the eventual
and specific triumph of film noir and its invention
of a wide array of stylistic devices for conveying
thought and emotion as shape and shadow. Dr. Calig-
ari is, of course, a police procedural of sorts and the
influence of German expressionism on film noir is a
critical commonplace, as is the fact that several key
German expressionist directors (Fritz Lang, Ulmer,
Billy Wilder) created some of the most iconic exam-
ples of noir style.
In a manner that appears to take Woolfs advice,
albeit motivated by the economic rather than the
artistic, the noir style moved away from the descrip-
10 | film international issue 67
tive or illustrative in order to concentrate on refin-
ing editing and lighting techniques that permit the
translation of extreme emotion into the visual
something like Woolfs unexpected bulging, tadpole
shaped shadow on the wall that seemed to her to
be fear, rather than someone trying to act afraid
(the difficulty of which seems to lead to an overact-
ing that alienates the audience even more from the
intended effect).
Woolf may have gotten one thing wrong, however.
She seems to assume the movement of cinema away
from being a parasite and towards becoming a pow-
erful new art form with unique capacity to evoke
emotional states would occur as part of an artistic
push. In fact, with its highly developed interface with
commerce and mass production, cinema would have
probably stuck with the parasitic model if the nov-
elty for such fare was not seen as fading out. A great
deal of aesthetic advances in cinema begin as avant-
garde and only become part of cinema more generally
when these strange devices are required to keep the
attention of an audience beginning to lose interest.
To return to the case in point, in an attempt to
refresh the tired formula of the police drama, noir
films, in manner that will be noted in retrospect,
seem to have engaged more fully the implicit poten-
tial of cinema to evoke emotion indirectly, a potential
put forward as an aesthetic rumination by Virginia
Woolf in 1926.
It is also true that Frank hints at a socio-historical
driver to these changes that is more abstract, and
therefore more speculative:
There is nothing remarkable in the fact
that todays viewers are more responsive to
this stamp of verisimilitude, of true to life,
and, why not, to the kind of gross cruelties
which actually exist and the past conceal-
ment of which has served no purpose: the
struggle to survive is not a new story.
Here we have to actually tease out a bare nod to a
brutal world war only just ended and the liberation
of France not even two years previously.
In a way, those who see film noir as a retrospec-
tive construction more academic than literal have a
point. No concerted institutional shift is anywhere
recorded. And yet the change in the films themselves
did happen, and for the most mundane of reasons: in
order to produce visually an impact on the audience,
one that could no longer be conveyed by plot and
action alone. In doing so, we see a pattern many times
repeated in the history of cinematic genres: mere
illustrations gleaned from other sources (theatre, lit-
erature) become more and more uniquely cinematic,
Articles Did Film Noir Really Happen, or Was It a Set-up?

and therefore less and less derivative. Immediately

it began to revel in its capacity to do what literature
could not: evoke emotion through shadow and close-
up, gesture and object. What brought about film noir,
then, is both simple and profound: the mystery story
was reinvigorated for the sake of box office profits and
a new visual style one capable of showing shadows
and shapes as fear, rather than merely showing peo-
ple who act frightened was born.

Contributors details

Garry Leonard is Professor of Literature and Film

Studies at the University of Toronto.His recent
publications include: Without Contraries There is No
Progression: Early Cinematic Montage in the Poetry
and Illustrations of William Blake, University of Toronto
Quarterly (Fall 2011); Technically Human: Kubricks
Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Heideggers
Propriative Event, Film Criticism (Fall 2011); and Lets
Get Fiscal: Moving From Negotiation to Intimacy in the
Hollywood Romance, Film International (vol. 9, no. 5,
2011).

References

Hillis, Ken (2005), Film noir and the American Dream:

the dark side of enlightenment, Velvet Light Trap 55
(Spring), pp. 316.

Keating, Patrick (2010), Hollywood Lighting from the Silent

Era to Film Noir, New York: Columbia University Press.

Neale, Stephen (2000), Film Noir in Stephen Neale

(ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, New York:
Routledge.

Stevens, Jason W. (2010), McCarthyism Through

Sentimental Melodrama and Film Noir, in God-Fearing
and Free: A Spiritual History of Americas Cold War,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

www.filmint.nu | 11
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