French critics in the years immediately following World War II took notice of the writings of American authors Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and others, and went on to note that “Americans also make noir films.” Heretofore, such hardboiled crime stories had been referred to as Crime Melodramas.
“Film Noir” has been used to describe many different films over the years. Film critic Raymond Durgnat’s position is that film noir is not a genre at all, but is defined by tone rather than genre. However, this definition seems to me to be too broad to be of any use when discussing the genre, and yes, I consider Film Noir a genre.
Nouveau Noir
Chinatown, 1973
Many fine films have been called Film Noir, such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, 1981, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, 1973, and my personal favorite, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, 1974. (Note that the aforementioned films were shot in color and, therefore, lack the exquisitely subtle shades of black and white photography usually associated with classic Film Noir.) More importantly, these films belong to the era of the New Hollywood (c.1967-1981) and are postmodern, deconstructive in form. The protagonists in these films are inept and unprepared to meet the challenges before them as opposed to the heroes of classic Film Noir such as, for example, Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep, 1946, in which Philip Marlowe (the epitome of the hardboiled private detective played by Humphrey Bogart) is on top of his game and in control even when that appears not to be the case.
Classic Film Noir
The Maltese Falcon, 1941
To my mind, classic Film Noir began with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, 1941, and ended with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, 1958. These films reflect their times and became increasingly dark. Although originally written in 1929, The Maltese Falcon, from the novel by Dashiell Hammett, was produced on the eve of America’s entry into World War II when Europe and Asia were already under the storm clouds of war. This now famous version was the third film remake of the story. The first version was produced in 1931 and the second in 1936 with the title, Satan Met a Lady, but it is the 1941 version with the definitive dark mood and look that exemplifies Film Noir.
Femme Fatale
Double Indemnity, 1944
With the approach of the war’s end, a new malaise gripped the country. Returning veterans came home, their youth chewed up by the savagery of combat, only to find high unemployment and despair. In the absence of the men in uniform, the nation’s women had been called into service to fulfill the labor demands of the wartime economy. Women came to enjoy the freedom of working outside the home as well as the increased security of a paycheck. Resentment grew toward these newly liberated women. This bitterness can be found in the prevalence of the femme fatale in such films as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, 1944, and Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, 1947. Ambitious women, who had to first be punished and then rescued by a man, were also a target for disdain. Michael Curtiz’ wonderful film, Mildred Pierce, 1945, is an excellent example of the disapproval of competent women in post-war America.
The Red Scare
Pickup on South Street, 1953
With the coming of the cold war, a shift in the nation’s psyche, bordering on paranoia, not surprisingly, found its way into films. Typical of the period are Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, 1953, and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, 1955, in which the roles of common criminals are superseded by enemy agents intent in destroying the American way of life. However after the “red scare” of the McCarthy era subsided, the themes of Film Noir returned to relative normalcy in which the antagonists resumed criminal activities on a far lesser scale than world domination.
Corruption
Touch of Evil, 1958
A new order began emerging in which good and evil were no longer clear-cut. This sentiment was reflected in film. (Film in general being reactive rather than proactive in matters of social consciousness). Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, 1958, which serves as a bookend to the era of classic Film Noir, is a fine example of this change in the national humor with its focus on corruption in offices of authority. Orson Welles plays corrupt Police Captain Hank Quinlan at odds with courageous Miguel Vargas, a Mexican law enforcement officer. It must be noted that Miguel Vargas is played by Charlton Heston in dark makeup as Hollywood was still years away of portraying a heroic Hispanic man with a Hispanic actor.
Lighting
However, dark subjects alone do not make a movie fit neatly into the canon of Film Noir. Films from the classic period are as defined as much by their look as by their themes.
Out of the Past, 1947
Lighting is of particular importance in defining the genre. Abandoning the technique of a strong key light near the camera and a muted fill light to the side to soften shadows used in common three-point lighting , noir lighting reverses the lighting to produce high contrast and deep, often jagged, shadows to add drama. Two other devices often found in Film Noir are strong back-lighting to cast characters in dark silhouette or the opposite, equal lighting of both characters and settings with the use of unusual composition in the frame to add dramatic effect.
Mise-en-Scène
The Lady from Shanghai,
The mise-en-scène found in classic Film Noir also adds significant tension. Typically shot at night, exterior scenes feature waterfront docks, dark alleyways, and empty streets often glistening wet as if it has just rained (even in Los Angeles), and interior scenes are often shot in nightclubs, casinos, or taverns. The aforementioned femme fatale or fallen woman, who leads or attempts to lead the hero to his mortal or moral doom or both, is nearly always present. Orientalism—subtly suggesting exoticism, eroticism, and mystery—is also found in many Films Noir.
And so…
As I stated in the beginning, the term Film Noir has been used to describe a great many films, and one’s view of what makes a film a Film Noir varies greatly. I can leave you with this thought from critic Marc Vernet’s “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom, “On the whole, film noir is like a Harley-Davidson: you know right away what it is… .”
A view of the changing aesthetic as Hollywood emerged from the studio system.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a catastrophic event signaling the beginning of an era of discontent and civil unrest not only in America, but throughout the western world. It was an era of political murder,
Dallas, Novmber 22, 1963
riots, and war that led a generation, which David Halberstam dubbed “the best and the brightest,”[1] to question the nature of its society and its system of values. This cultural re-examination reverberated throughout society. Neither politics, nor economics, nor art escaped re-assessment as to their worth to the human condition. Film—art’s most modern, pervasive, and compelling incarnation—reflected the self-doubt and disillusionment that permeated to the very core of the collective cultural psyche. It is within this atmosphere of doubt and alienation that new forms of cinematic expression emerged from the ashes of mainstream American filmmaking known as the Hollywood Studio System.[2] This new expression, which built on familiar narrative traditions but gave them an innovative and distinctive form, is known as “New Hollywood.”[3] It is my contention that the rise of the New Hollywood was in response to the malaise confronting society and not simply in response to economic factors concerned with production. If my argument has merit, evidence should be found in a number of significant films of the era and supported by serious criticism. To that end, I shall examine arguments of Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze and John Cawelti, among others, in relation to three films that span the temporal frame of the New Hollywood and are representative of its aesthetic: The Graduate (1967), Chinatown (1974) and Blade Runner (1982).
This aesthetic, or sensibility, is referred to as “postmodernism.” [4] The problem with labels is that they are defined after the fact. They cannot be assigned to movements or to representative works until enough time has passed to assess and define their subject characteristics. Such is the problem with the term “postmodernism.” However, in discourses concerning cinema, as well as the other arts, in the second half of the twentieth century and continuing into the present, postmodernism generally includes references to and re-examinations of earlier styles and conventions, deliberately mixing different styles and media which is often self-referential with an incorporation of images relating to consumerism, mass communication, international capitalism, and other references to post-industrial society. Often such references are used as parody or ironically. (OED)
It is within this definition that I shall examine the deconstruction of the classic Hollywood narrative structure, a structure that was—and remains—in a great majority of films and is designed to hide cinema’s artifice. The classic paradigm has a simple linear structure—a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is nothing before the beginning; any reference in the narrative to anything that happened before the story is only for exposition of essential story content necessary to maintain continuity. The beginning represents the normal world in stasis. At the end of the beginning, a crisis arises that throws everything into disarray and demands action and a resolution. The middle is a series of conflicts in which each succeeding conflict raises the stakes by becoming a greater impediment to resolution. The end is the resolution of the crises and a return to stasis. The resolution does not necessarily have to be favorable, but the narrative has a definite ending. The story is self-contained; nothing exists outside the diegesis or temporality of the narrative. The postmodern aesthetic seeks to deconstruct this paradigm. Gilles Deleuze argues that the desire for such deconstruction of the classic narrative paradigm—what he calls a ‘crisis in the action image’—is a result of World War II, its aftermath, unsteadiness of the “American Dream,”[5] and the new consciousness of minorities as external factors. (242) Deleuze’s discourse in this aspect supports my own observation stated earlier. However, he also states that internal factors linked closely to art and cinema such as the rise in the number and inflation of images, new literature narrative structures, and a crisis within Hollywood itself with its old genres also lent to the larger crisis. (242) In regard to these additional internal factors, I am not in accord; I see these factors as symptomatic, rather than causal. Film is a reactive medium; it responds to and reflects the culture of which it is apart. Cinema’s great contribution at this level is its ability to provide clarity and to organize expression already at work in the collective cultural psyche. The inspiration must exist, if only in the mind of the filmmaker, before the image can be brought to life.
However, regardless of the cause, external or internal, Deleuze points to five characteristics which he identifies in post-war American cinema outside of Hollywood. Briefly, the first is that the role of the single action hero has been divided into multiple characters who are linked weakly but share the same reality in cinematic terms. Second, “linkages, connections, or liaisons are deliberately weak.” (243) Causality is reduced so that fate plays a significant role with chance becoming a prime motivator of action. Third, the narrative becomes episodic in that the characters drift through a series of seemingly unrelated events which are connected only through the passage of the characters. Fourth is the conscious use of clichés to maintain a reference to a world that no longer has either totality or linkage. The use of cliché becomes self-referential, exposing films’ own cinematic construction contrary to classic narrative convention. Deleuze’s fifth characteristic is perhaps not only the most problematic, but also the most important to the postmodern aesthetic of the New Hollywood. It is the condemnation of the plot. (243-5) Where classic narrative structure contains a beginning, middle and end, the postmodern sensibility recognizes that something existed before the beginning, that there are other narratives coexisting in the diegetic space, and that there is an existence that continues after the end. The form is “open-ended” in that the narrative fails to end, but rather simply stops, thereby compelling the audience to contemplate several possible “realities” without the comfort afforded by resolution. I shall revisit this concept in a moment when I examine the films.
Like Deleuze, Fredric Jameson situates the postmodern aesthetic as a result of forces at work in society; however unlike Deleuze, Jameson identifies postmodernism as a reaction against established forms of high modernism and also as an effacement of boundaries between high culture and mass culture. Jameson insists that postmodernism “expresses the inner truth of …newly emergent social order of late capitalism.” (129) This concept finds importance in the aesthetic of the New Hollywood films. In this context, Jameson identifies two significant features of postmodernism: pastiche and schizophrenia. Pastiche is similar to parody, but unlike parody, pastiche mimics other styles, but does not mock them. Its purpose is to bring attention to stylistic conventions, not to afford laughter at their expense. Jameson contends that “in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles….” (132) Thus, society’s perception of reality is formulated from a series of recycled images.
A second feature of postmodernism that Jameson identifies is what he refers to as schizophrenia, not a clinical schizophrenia, but rather a fragmentation of time, a temporal discontinuity, in which society is caught in a perpetual present which “becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and ‘material’.” (138) The result is that society loses its sense of its history by being bombarded by an ever present “now.” In cinema, this temporal discontinuity is readily apparent in techniques of editing which can either jump around in the temporal diegesis or compress time in a linear narrative. In either case, the audience is always “in the present” in respect to the story time even if the narrative is placed in the distant past or distant future.
Such temporal transference is apparent in the three films that I shall examine which serve as examples of the progression of the postmodern aesthetic represented in New Hollywood cinema. The narrative present in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) corresponds to the contemporary period of its release; Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) is set in the 1930’s and is considered a “nostalgia film” by Jameson; (133) and Ridley Scott’s vision of a technological society gone mad, Blade Runner (1982) is set well into the future.
However, although each film is set in a different time and visual space, they display similar elements of the postmodern aesthetic. Perhaps because it was made on the cusp of the New Hollywood era, The Graduate is the most subtle in its presentation. The protagonist, Benjamin Braddock, is alienated in a world of rampant consumerism as represented by gifts from his parents—a new Italian sports car and not only ridiculous, but superfluous dive equipment. Director Mike Nichols turns the traditional paradigm of the love story in on itself by showing Ben adrift in a world of financial success, material gain, and loveless sex. A particular scene, which references the postmodernist aesthetic of mass media and consumerism, incorporates a television in the background on which a game show depicts contestants who must publicly humiliate themselves for money.[6] Because the television show contestants are newly wedded couples, the show parodies the idea of romantic love, the underlying theme of The Graduate itself, as a self-reflexive element within the film.
The Graduate, 1967
In The Graduate, other reference to the alienating effects of modern society can be found throughout the film. One scene takes place in a strip club which highlights eroticism as symptomatic of late capitalist society and underscores Ben’s loveless affair with the film’s antagonist, Mrs. Robinson. Another reference is a blaring car radio at a drive-in which interrupts conversation between Ben and his new love, Elaine. Mass media has disrupted personal communication, not furthered it. Another element which cannot be overlooked is the many references to water. Ben’s aquarium in which a toy diver rest at the bottom echoing the scene of Ben himself at the bottom of the pool in his dive suit; Ben drifting without purpose in the pool; and rain when Elaine discovers the truth about Ben and her mother all suggest the feeling of drowning in a world where mass culture has isolated the individual.
The idea of drowning water and the control of it is central to the narrative of another film of postmodern expression: Chinatown. Set in 1930’s Los Angeles, Chinatown is Roman Polanski’s deconstruction of the detective story of the Film Noir genre. Like the western, the detective story pays homage to the myth, “Only the individual of integrity who exists on the margins of society can solve the crime and bring about true justice.” (Cawelti 185) By looking back and referencing a past genre, Chinatown begins by presenting both a nostalgic look and a nostalgic theme as suggested by Jameson. (133) However, Polanski soon departs thematically. Private detective Jake Gittes is soon overwhelmed by the vice and corruption that he finds, which he can to nothing about, when he uncovers a conspiracy to control Los Angeles’ water supply. In the end, instead of protecting the innocent and bringing the guilty to justice, Gittes becomes the cause of his client’s death and the betrayer of a helpless girl.
Postmodern in form, Chinatown uses the old form of Film Noir to express a new idea.
Chinatown, 1973
Although used not entirely in a Deleuzian sense to reference a world without totality, clichés are abundantly used to reference a world that Gittes fails to comprehend throughout the film. Gittes uses a camera to record an image cliché that bears false witness which in turn is published in the newspaper to discredit an innocent person. Technology is misused to hide, not reveal, truth. Cliché references to orientalism, including the film’s title, brings to mind such Noir films as The Lady from Shanghai, The Big Sleep and Murder, My Sweet that previously referenced a world of mystery and intrigue. Seeing—or in the case of Jake Gittes, failure to see—is referenced by Gittes’ camera as he takes the false picture; by a pair of eyeglasses which are an important clue that Gittes fails to recognize; and in the final scene as Evelyn Mulrey’s eye is shot out in her violent death which Gittes fails to prevent. Gittes failure to deal with a post-industrial world, which has become too big and too corrupt, leads to tragedy. His failure to successfully negotiate an increasingly threatening world is alluded to by another failure that led to death in the section of Los Angeles known as “Chinatown” prior to the temporal space of the current narrative. Chinatown acknowledges an existence prior to its own diegetic space and, because of Gittes’ failure, a future beyond it in which little has changed. The story ends without the comforting resolution of classic narrative structure. Uncontrolled capitalistic greed and evil continue to rule the day.
With regard to Chinatown’s use of Film Noir conventions to present a new postmodern theme, John Cawelti states, “On one level, it [Chinatown] relates to the traditional literary mode of burlesque or parody in which a well-established set of conventions or a style is subjected to some form of ironic or humorous exploitation.” (190) However, that which Cawelti identifies as “parody” is Jameson’s postmodern characteristic of pastiche. “Pastiche is…the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask…” ( 131) In the case of Chinatown, the stylistic mask of Film Noir is used to contain a postmodern ethos of a post-industrial world that has grown too big to either understand or control.
Whereas Chinatown is set in the same temporal space that it mimics, Ridley Scott sets
Blade Runner, 1982
his decidedly stylistically dark film, Blade Runner, in the Los Angeles of 2019. Blade Runner was produced near the end of the New Hollywood era and has a distinctly dark mis-en-scène, which mimics the Film Noir genre of the 1940’s and 50’s with glistening rain-soaked streets shot at night and dimly lighted interiors. It is a polluted world with garbage strewn streets and decaying buildings on which giant electric advertising signs announce rampant consumerism. Orientalism is observable everywhere but is no longer presented as mysterious or exotic as in earlier Films Noir. Late-capitalism has risen to a level that it creates nearly human androids—called replicants—to serve as slaves that must be hunted down and killed when they rebel against the social order that both created them and dooms them to early death.
The central protagonist, Decker, is a “blade runner” or special police officer who hunts down and “retires” rebellious replicants but finds that his quarries are superior to humans in nearly every way. The replicants possess strength, wisdom and compassion seemingly well beyond their human counterparts. Referring to the replicant leader Roy, the character J.F. Sebastian, a genetic engineer in the film, says, “You’re so perfect.” The fine line between human and replicant becomes completely blurred when Decker falls in love with Rachel, a replicant that has all human traits including a memory of childhood. Blade Runner clearly asks the question, what is it to be human in a world devoid of humanity?
The world of Blade Runner is a completely postmodern world of consumer capitalism that has altered the environment, removed to “Off-world” colonies, and alienated all who remain because they are either poor or deemed inferior. The film enjoins its audience to see this world through multiple references to eyes. The retinas of the replicant’s eyes continually reflect into the camera, a shot normally avoided in cinematography. Roy, the leader of the rebellious replicants, tells Chew, the genetic engineer who created Roy’s eyes, “If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.” Tyrell, the creator of the replicants, wears very thick glasses, suggesting that he cannot “see” what he has done by creating the replicants, and later before killing him, Roy blinds Tyrell with his thumbs to punish him for his failure of not “seeing.” However, the most significant reference is the test to find out whether or not a subject is a replicant by closely observing the involuntary response of the subject’s pupils under stress, a suggestion that humanity and truth are in the eyes as the windows to the soul. But of all of the references to “seeing,” the most self-reflexive is in the opening scene in which an eye fills the screen and looks directly at the camera. In turn, the lens of the investigating apparatus examines the eye in the same manner as the camera lens examines what is before it to reveal reality and truth.
The foregoing three films, The Graduate, Chinatown and Blade Runner, demonstrate the gradual acceptance by the audience of the postmodernist aesthetic incorporated into the cinema of the New Hollywood. Its nearly universal acceptance into the present is demonstrated in the popularity of later mainstream films such as the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) in which, as in Chinatown, the individual finds that he is no match for the corruption of late-capitalist society. The incorporation of a postmodern aesthetic in New Hollywood cinema without disregarding classical paradigms of structure, which ensure narrative continuity by hiding the apparatus, can be reasonably seen as aiding in the general acceptance of postmodernist principals, whereas the rejection of classical structure in more avant-garde cinema, as envisioned by Gilles Deleuze among others, has secured far fewer, but nevertheless devout, followers.
The general acceptance of a postmodern aesthetic when combined with narrative continuity within the diegesis—at least until the film’s conclusion—validates the argument that audiences recognize, at least on a subliminal level, changes brought on by late-capitalism and mass media culture. Audiences respond positively to the films while at the same time they may deplore the conditions that the films depict. The success of New Hollywood cinema, and the postmodernist aesthetic it contains, which was gained through the films of directors that successfully slipped the bonds of the old Studio System, serves as testimony confirming cinema’s ability to respond to the changing values of society in spite of—or perhaps because of—changing economic factors effecting production.
Work Cited
“postmodernism, n.” OED Online. December 2006. Oxford University Press. 11 Dec. 2007. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/30007406>.
Aylesworth, Gary. “Postmodernism”. Winter 2005. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Dec 12 2007. <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2005/entries/postmodernism/>.
Cawelti, John G. “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films.” Film Genre Reader. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. 183-201.
Cook, David A., ed. A History of Narrative Film. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004. 848-856.
Deleuze, Gilles. “From Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 240-69.
Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1973.
Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. 3rd. ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. 389-401
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. 1st ed. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983. 111-25.
The Graduate. Dir. Nichols, Mike. Perf. Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross. 1967.
Chinatown. Dir. Polanski, Roman. Perf. Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston. 1974.
Blade Runner. Dir. Scott, Ridley. Perf. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer and Sean Young. 1982.
[1] See Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest, Greenwich, Conn., Fawcett Publications, 1973.
[2] For a discussion of the Hollywood Studio System, see Susan Hayward, “Studio System,” in Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, pp. 389-401.
[3] Sometimes referred to as “The New American Cinema,” it is roughly a period from 1967 to 1982 when young directors and seasoned directors were able to find funding and thus gain control of over their films. For further discussion, see David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 4th ed., pp. 848-856.
[4] Gary Aylesworth, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, attributes the first modern use of the term to Jean-François Lyotard in his The Postmodern Condition published in 1979, well after the recognition of the existence such aesthetics.
[5] The concept of the “American Dream” is a nebulous one. Generally, it is taken to mean that anyone, regardless of background, can succeed. This concept was delivered a severe blow by the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the Martin Luther King and the Robert F. Kennedy assassinations in 1968.
[6]The Newlywed Game, American Broadcasting Company, 1967.
