At the 78th Academy Awards, Ang Lee led the Oscars with "Brokeback Mountain". And few people care about the old aunt who led everyone back to the black and white movie at the award ceremony. In the barrage of the B station video, someone left a message: This aunt is so nervous.
He didn't know that the aunt was Lauren Bacall, who had been Hollywood's first most popular female star. Among the black-and-white images she is leading the audience to review at this moment is her famous 1944 work "The Man of the Lake", adapted from Hemingway's novel. She was 19 years old that year, and the male protagonist she played was Humphrey Bogart, who was chosen as the first of the "greatest male actors in a hundred years".
Stills from To Have and Have Not (1944).
Unbeknownst to them at the time, these films came to be known as "film noir" and deeply influenced generations of filmmakers and fans. An ideal film noir actor would be John F. Kennedy. The opposite of Wayne's tough, sunny, masculine hero, he wants to be melancholy, passive, not very handsome, and even a little old. And Bogart is that type.
The story in the film noir is basically the opposite of the classic American dream at that time. After reviewing the film noir, the host took the stage to adjust the atmosphere, shaking a sentence of baggage but not too loud. He muttered subconsciously: I am such a loser. But this sentence really hit the bull's-eye of film noir.
"Film noir always tells the story of the losers, and it has nothing to do with improving moral character or promoting the American Dream."
So, what exactly is film noir? And, why should we care about a film noir that an old aunt misses?
Maybe this editor's note will make more people start to care about film noir, and let's rub the hot spots:
The recent TV series "The Hidden Corner", which has recently spread all over the Internet, actually has some "film noir" elements. In the interview, director Xin Shuang mentioned that his own masterpiece is "Twin Peaks" directed by American director David Lynch. He said: "Although this is a 1990 film, it is still discussed to this day, and every time I watch it, there will be new discoveries, new clues.
In Film Noir, when author James Naremore discusses film noir in the 21st century, David Lynch's work is an important example of "film noir." The title of this chapter is also intriguing: film noir never dies...
You may not believe it, but in fact, you are probably already a "film noir" enthusiast, but you are blinded by yourself.
"Pulp Fiction", "Seven Deadly Sins", "Mulholland Road", "Old Nobody", "Birdman", "Dark Flower", "Daytime Fireworks", "A Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind"... If you've seen a few of them, or liked the genre, congratulations – you've entered the world of film noir.
Professor Hao Jian of Nortel wrote in an article about "Why do we rarely make film noir?" The article has a wonderful discussion about "The World of Film Noir":
Film noir has the schadenfreude and indifference of the devil, it is very obsessed with showing an irrational world, it is full of cynical laughter, it sells more despair, it forces us to examine the absurdity of the world. Film noir creates a world as seen by existentialists. It is also an existential world in Sartre's Disgusting than the existential world in Camus's Plague, which has a certain positivity and tenacity, a commitment to human subjectivity and dignity.
The lack of mainland film noir is a striking literary phenomenon. In addition to the well-known reasons, perhaps the main influencing factor is that the artistic concept of our dominant culture here emphasizes writing light, upward, and goodness, avoiding the exploration of the dark consciousness in human nature, and avoiding the exploration and expression of human nature's evil.
The stone of the Temple of Delphi Apollo in Greece is engraved with many proverbs, the most famous of which is: Man, know yourself. Recognizing evil in human nature is a good deed, and creating and watching film noir is a good deed.
Speaking of Film Noir, the book's author, James Naremore, is not only a film critic but also a university professor in the fields of English literature, film studies, and cross-cultural exchange. This book is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work of cultural studies.
The translator of this book is also a film director, Xu Zhanxiong. He said in the afterword that as one of the many fans who like film noir, Naremore's book is the most comprehensive one, which really puts the film term "film noir" in context, traces back to the source, and then expands the topic, strips away the cocoon, and triggers deep thinking.
If you use the "film noir" approach to "film noir":
Before you place your order, we regret to inform you that this book does not give a definitive answer to what film noir is. There are only 7 keys here - the author gives seven paths to enter film noir from the perspective of conceptual evolution, era background, censorship norms, business mechanisms, aesthetic style, theoretical analysis, and deductive rheology, if you are interested in opening the "mysterious black box" of film noir, you may wish to give it a try.
The opening quote from Film Noir
What kind of black is the "black" of film noir? Today, I will share with you a key to open the "mysterious black box" of film noir:
The birth of film noir
(Excerpt from Film Noir)
1. The black sensibility that pervades Paris
After the Second World War, Paris gave birth to something that could be called noir sensibility; but the form of expression of this sensibility was not limited to cinema, and even, if I were to choose a representative artist of this period, I would not choose a filmmaker. I would choose Boris Vian, a Rimbaudian figure, a friend of the former surreal raymond Keno and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.
Not only did Vian write witty avant-garde novels and proto-absurdist plays, but he also wrote satirical columns for Moderne and music reviews for Hot Jazz, and he was even the author of more than five hundred Dylan protest songs; he was also a trumpeter and singer, performing in nightclubs in Saint Germain such as "Forbidden". However, he was known for his unsigned black novels.
It was the summer of 1946, and the black-skinned "Black Novel Series," which Gallimard Had just published, was in vogue, and in order to challenge it, an editor at another publisher invited Vian to participate in the creation of murder novels. Two weeks later, Vian handed over "I Will Spit on Your Grave" (later adapted into the film "I Spit on Your Grave"), signed "Veron Sullivan," a pseudonym he used repeatedly, and often claimed to be just a translator responsible for translating Sullivan's work "from the American language."
For historical reasons, I am interested in the timing of the publication and adaptation of I Will Spit on Your Grave, as they coincide with what I call the first phase of American film noir: this period just before Hollywood cinema entered Paris after World War II and the French New Wave began.
Boris Vian
2. The French "invented" American film noir
We never know when the first film noir was made, but it was unanimously agreed that the first articles on Hollywood film noir would be published in French film magazines in August 1946, when "Veron Sullivan" was writing his novel.
The term film noir echoes the "black novel series", and its first use appeared in reviews of five films produced around World War II. At the time, these five films were being released in Paris in a row, and they were The Maltese Eagle, Double Reparations, Laura, Murder of a Lover, and — somewhat surprising given the fact that it disappeared from most subsequent articles — The Lost Weekend.
These films eventually became the prototype for this suddenly emerging category and would have had an unusual impact on French thought during the decade.
In a sense, it was the French who invented American film noir.
It was the latter that triggered the arrival of a golden age in French cinema. They soon discovered that the new Hollywood thrillers were very similar to those of the People's Front movement in their own country, such as "The Fugitive Babe," "The Northern Inn," and "Dawn Breaks"—dark melodramas that always took place in an urban criminal environment, with characters plagued by fate acting calmly under enormous pressure.
But "Fog Pier" or "Northern Inn" still has a hint of resistance after all, and the love in the film, although fleeting, still gives hope for a better world... If the characters are desperate, they can still arouse our pity or sympathy after all. But none of this exists in Hollywood film noir. There are only monsters and criminals here, their evil is completely unforgivable, and their actions prove that the only source of deadly evil lies in themselves.
In 1955, two French film critics, Raymond Boulder and Etienne Chaumerton, published Panorama of American Film Noir. The book has been called a "landmark work" by later research works. For them, film noir became a mature outlaw genre that systematically subverted the basic myths of Hollywood. They insist that real films in this genre do not only take place in "criminal environments", but represent "the perspective of a criminal".
In a surreal sense, these films are "moral": they do not provide legal agents who are righteous and awe-inspiring, but depict private investigators, dishonest cops, plainclothes detectives who commit murders, and lying district attorneys who hide in the dark. They always portrayed the upper echelons as corrupt, and when it came to gangsters, they replaced the "large primitives" of early gangster films such as Scarface (1932) with angelic killers and psychopaths.
Thus, an ideal film noir male lead is the opposite of John Wayne. Psychologically, he is passive, masochistic, and morbidly curious; physically, he is "mature, even a little old, not very handsome." Humphrey Bogart is of that type." Following the same logic, the heroine of a film noir would not be Doris Dee.
3. It is a fool not to be born a Frenchman
In the years before and after World War II, when the French themselves were in historical predicament, they elaborated on some of the most important existential propositions through readings of the novels of Dahir Hammit, Chandler, and James M. Kane, who were often compared to Wright, Hemingway, John Dos Pazos, and Faulkner.
In fact, it was the French who "discovered" some of these novelists, just as they later discovered the Hollywood author-director (in 1946, even Faulkner was a relatively neglected figure in the United States, and much of his income came from films like Sleepless and Awake and a story that had already been published in the Magazine of Ellery Quinn Reasoning; Jean-Paul Sartre called him "God").
The interest of Parisian intellectuals in a certain kind of American literature became so strong that the English writer Rebecca West teased Kane: "It is a fool for you not to be born French." If you guard against this small mistake in advance, the high-brow men will put you together with Gide and Mauriac. ”
West's comments tell some truth. The French love the exoticism, violence and romance of the Americans. They write a lot about Southern Gothic tones and tough guy modernism, and usually overlook anything that lacks what Andre Gide called "the signs of hell." André Malraux called Faulkner's Temple "Greek Tragedy Intervention Thriller", while Albert Camus confessed that he was inspired to write The Outsider after reading Kane's The Postman Always Rings Twice.
This passion for literary tough guys has an interesting correlation with the postwar social and political environment. In the United States, the postwar decade was an era of the Korean War, red fears, and a return to the consumer economy; in France, it was the revolts in the colonies and the parliamentary chaos that led to de Gaulle's rule.
Faced with a situation where they could only choose between capitalism and Stalinism, many French artists wanted to rebel with their personal style to achieve "freedom". For them, the pre-war American novel is an example—especially those depicting a violent, corrupt world in which ambiguous personal actions are the only gestures of redemption.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre in What is Literature? "It is not the cruelty and pessimism of the Americans that impress us. We see in their literature those who have fallen and lost on that too great continent, just as we have lost in history; who, though not traditional, have used all available means to try to present their fainting and abandonment in incomprehensible events. ”
Unlike the Surrealists, who regarded cinema as a vital part of their careers, existentialists were mostly writers and rather skeptical of Hollywood. However, given the French intellectual fashion led by Sartre, it's no surprise that the younger generation of filmmakers has a particular passion for American thrillers.
These films are always adapted from novels by respected writers; they sometimes employ more focused narratives; they are a labyrinth of closed scene schedules filled with alienated people.
Thus, Eric Houmai commented in 1955: "We instinctively prefer faces with evil signs and neon lights of bars to those radiant faces and the smell of pasture." ”
4. France is not far from the New Wave
Houmai and several of his Film Handbook colleagues belong to the same generation that absorbed existential and phenomenological nourishment from André Bazin. Bazin's existential style was well represented in his eulogy to Humphrey Bogart, written two years before his death (1957).
For Bazin, Bogart is important because "in a sense, his 'raison d'être is to survive", and the lines left on his face by alcoholism reveal "suspended corpses in each of us".
Jean Gabon, the male protagonist of the French pre-war film noir, appears romantic in comparison; Bogart is a man "defined by fate", and because he represents "the ambiguous protagonists of noir crime films", he has become a model of "actor/myth in the post-war period". Bazin says Bogart's portrayal of Sam Speder is on par with Citizen Kane, released almost simultaneously.
Humphrey Bogart
During the same period, younger critics in the Film Handbook began to project Bazin's ideas onto Hollywood, sometimes viewing film noir as an existential allegory of the white male situation. However, the most admired existential hero is not Bogart, but Nicholas Ray, who directed "Living by Night", "Lonely Place" and "Dangerous Places".
François Truffaut says that the basic theme of Ray's films is "moral solitude," while Jacques Riverette says Ray's concern is "the inner violent demon that seems to be associated with man and his loneliness."
It was at this junction that the terms "film noir" and "author-director" began to work together, expressing the same value from different angles. Film noir is an anti-Hollywood collective style that operates in the Hollywood system; the author and director are individual stylists who gain freedom through existential choices that transcend the studio.
But the author director is more important than the genre. Boulder and Chaudon's use of the film director's name was simply to follow the conventions of French scholarship, while the Film Manual school always placed the general form under the personal vision. In other words, France is not far from the New Wave.
To see what kind of future awaits, we need only look at Claude Chabrol's 1955 article "The Evolution of Thrillers" published in the Film Handbook: Chabrol claims that the literary sources of film noir have "dried up" and that its plot and scene scheduling have become clichés.
Deadn's Kiss did give this form a new lease of life, but it has become a "wonderful excuse": "[Dead Kiss] chose to create itself from the worst material, from the most lamentable and disgusting product of a genre in decay: a story of Miki Spillan. Robert Aldridge and A. I. Bezerides weaves from this tattered, dull cloth into the most colorful and mysterious arabesque cloth. ”
Clearly, an art film based on "worst material" is about to emerge. In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard's Exhausted was released, followed by Truffaut's The Gunsling Pianist. Both works fuse Bazin-esque neorealism and surrealist ruptures, are full of references to materials such as Bogart, Gun Madness, and Dangerous Places, and both turn exploitable film noir into an "excuse" for directors who want to express their individuality.
Burnout movie poster
Also in 1959, Boris Vian died in a cinema in Paris. The first era of film noir was over.
Introduction to the new book
Republic Offilm No.11
Guns and looks can kill people
From The Maltese Eagle to Pulp Fiction
Understand the seven key paths of film noir
James Naremore, a well-known American film critic and professor at Indiana University, interprets the classics of film noir. A comprehensive examination of film noir since the 1940s, interpreting dozens of classic films - "Double Compensation", "Maltese Eagle", "The Third Man", "From the Past", "Chinatown", "Pulp Fiction", "The Devil in Blue", "Mulholland Road", "Sin City", "Killing Casino"... From the perspectives of photographic composition and interior design, lighting and art, casting and parody, fashion and crossover, etc., the text of American film noir is carefully read, and the different styles derived from film noir are discussed in the struggle between the film industry and film aesthetics.
Film Noir is also a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work that brings outstanding insights into modern literature, fine arts, and popular culture, in addition to film and television.
Open the "Mysterious Black Box"