James Naremore,  More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts

 University of California Press 1998

Reviewed by Freda Freiberg

Like the English word black, the French adjective noir embraces aesthetic, moral, emotional and racial categories. It can refer to the absence of light, the darkness of night, in which the outlines of things are obscured,  and identity is difficult to discern. A gloomy mood,  a macabre imagination and immoral behaviour are all described as noir.  In painting, literature and film, white artists have long exploited the association of blackness with villainy, corruption, decadence, depression, and death, creating potent melodramatic and expressionistic effects. Only recently have the racist implications of these associations become apparent - what noir might mean for les noirs, black people.

 One of the strengths of this new survey of  film noir is its sensitivity to the issue of race. Naremore admits that both the concept and the cult texts of classical film noir were creations of  white male Europeans and Americans. He rightly recognizes that films noirs could  be translated as films made by  blacks;  and proceeds accordingly to examine a broad spectrum of films directed by Afro-Americans, not just those that could be described as neo-noir or black revisions of classical white film noir motifs and styles - although he is especially interested in this category.

But race is just one of the issues that Naremore explores in a book that ranges far and wide. Because he views film noir as “only a discursive construction” (rather than a historically specific genre, style or cycle) but one with “remarkable flexibility, range and mythic force”, he covers sixty years of American film production, embracing modernist and postmodernist texts,  classical noir and neo-noir,  B&W and colour movies, as well as a similar span of critical discourse.  He traces the discursive, political, stylistic and industrial history of American film noir over these sixty years, relating the films and their critical reception to their social, cultural, political and industrial contexts.  Each of his seven chapters is devoted to a different theme. In turn, they survey  and explore the history of the concept of film noir; the hard-boiled fiction of  Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and Greene, and its filmic adaptations; forms and effects of moral and political censorship on studio-era noir;  economic and industrial issues;  styles of noir;  representations of racial difference; and the place of noir in an enlarged contemporary mediascape. He himself says that an alternate sub-title of the book could be “Seven ways of looking at American film noir” (p8).

In the course of these thematic explorations, Naremore makes passing reference to hundreds of film titles,  but devotes more extended treatment to a few films which he presents as outstanding  or exemplary cases of the theme under discussion.  Thus,  the original script of  Double Indemnity is presented as a powerful modernist text with a biting social critique, in which American hard-boiled fiction (represented here by Cain and Chandler) is inflected by Weimar cinema motifs and an alienated émigré view of American society (contributed by Wilder).  The film also serves to exemplify negative and positive effects of censorship.  The Blue Dahlia and  Crossfire, two early postwar films about neurotic war veterans faced with re-adjustment to civilian society, are examined as case studies of censorship.   Detour is discussed as an exceptional instance of low budget noir.  Out of the Past receives detailed analysis as an exemplary case of  the use of lighting and editing in classic B&W noir.  Chinatown is discussed as the most innovative and politically incisive of the retro-noir cycle of films which emerged in the Seventies.  The Glass Shield and Devil in a Blue Dress are isolated as examples of  “the most impressive Afro-American movies about crime” which share “a high degree of artistry, plus a tendency to refigure or transform the familiar patterns of noir.”  (p 246)  David Lynch’s Lost Highway,  Steven Soderbergh’s The Underneath (a re-make of Siodmak and Hellinger’s 1949 film, Criss Cross) and Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade are discussed as three different recent examples of  art-film noir.

Despite his measured scholarly tone and avoidance of  the movie buff’s rave-or-rejection mode of appraisal, it becomes clear, especially towards the end of the book, that he greatly admires certain films and dislikes others. He has  respect and affection for movies which bring a European artistic sensibility and a critical social perspective to work on popular genre conventions.  He has strong reservations about the films of the movie brat generation, movies about other movies. He clearly is more attuned to modernism than postmodernism, wants movies to say something about the real world, not just play clever games.  The Afro-American films he approves are not just nostalgic and not just about movies; they address the real condition of blacks in America. He becomes quite hostile towards some popular recent films. Unlike Chinatown,  LA Confidential  “uses the past superficially and hypocritically” ( p 275) .  Basic Instinct  is deemed a perverse and  pornographic reworking of Hitchcockian and Sternbergian narrative (p 264).  In comparison to Double Indemnity, Body Heat has a conventional narrative, familiar characters and a merely decorative location (p 263). He concludes that “most examples of neo-noir are less artistically sophisticated and politically interesting than the films they emulate.” (p 262).  Sexual politics seems not to count as politics. Having conceded that classical film noir was often misogynist and homophobic, he oddly refuses to see the unvanquished femmes fatales of  Body Heat and Basic Instinct as significant post-feminist narrative shifts.     

One wonders if James Naremore would have identified the misogyny and homophobia in classic era movies without two decades of feminist film criticism – which he fails to include in his initial survey chapter on the development of the discourse on film noir.  Later, as a prelude to his discussion of the race issue, he briefly acknowledges feminist work on noir, deeming it ambivalent and inconclusive. Perhaps he feels that the terrain of gender has been too well covered;  this is implied when he asserts that in reference to noir the race issue has been comparatively neglected. But, it seems to me that both the resurgence of interest in classic film noir and the popularity of neo-noir movies with audiences (and film students) over the past twenty years resulted to a large extent from the work of feminist and queer film critics and theorists.  Employing a variety of approaches (sociological, psychoanalytic,  structural and post-structural) , they revealed that the texts were driven aesthetically and emotionally by white male fears and desires, and that the place of woman in the text was to service those needs. Certainly, an initial concentration on the sadistic male gaze, seeking to pursue, investigate and tame or punish the independent woman, gave way to identification of an equally strong masochistic desire for  submission and self-destruction.  But these theories were tested out on classic noir films, and the debates were accompanied by, in fact necessitated, repeated viewings and close analysis of noir texts.

The feminist enterprise aside, Naremore has covered the ground  exhaustively, researching the histories and pre-histories of his subject comprehensively and intensively.  He has researched the industrial archives, the censorship archives,  the literature on modernism and post-modernism, 50 years of male film criticism on noir (in France, Britain and the US),  classic and recent American hard-boiled literature and the history of film technology, in addition to viewing hundreds of films and reading the critical literature on them.  He not only summarizes the pre-existing literature on his subject but uses his research to refute some of the prevailing myths about or around film noir.

Firstly, he contests the widely promulgated belief that film noir was adapted from low-status pulp fiction. His research leads him to place Hammett, Greene and Chandler inside the modernist literary scene and to claim that they enjoyed a respectable reputation  among the literati. Secondly, he contests the association of classic noir with low budget filmmaking.  By carefully examining film  budgets and industrial strategies, he demonstrates that all the cult noir movies, with the exception of Detour, were medium to high budget films. Thirdly, he refutes the identification  of noir with a particular style of filmmaking -  distorted angles, deep shadows, outdoor night locations, abrupt editing. He argues that the style of classic noir movies was in fact very varied, that many of them were shot in the studio and used the camera in quite straightforward or conventional ways. What unites them is less a common style of filming than a common visual iconography, which persists through the B&W era into the colour era and beyond.

With its extensively researched coverage of a broad span of films and issues, this book is a useful addition to the proliferating literature on film noir.  Because it situates the films firmly in their social, cultural and industrial contexts, in history, it pursues issues neglected by the practitioners of close textual analysis (of  both neo-formalist and  psycho-analytic persuasions). Its meticulous documentation, measured scholarly tone and elegant jargon-free prose make it ideally suited to the undergraduate film education market. It is more scholarly than the popular cult literature on noir and  more accessible than many other academic books on noir  which employ difficult theoretical concepts and  highly specialized  terminology.