While looking into the 40s film production, particulary the American production, a great partition becomes evident: the luxurious creations from the main Hollywood studios like MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros and RKO, started giving way to a marginal, intermediate to low-budget production. These "alternative" films began to spring up showing a more nihilistic and cynical side of life in opposition to a cheerfulness and buoyancy of illustrious musicals.
The emergence of these secondary productions was possible at the time due to the existence of an audience for them. These films embraced more experimental attempts, trying out new tecniques that contrasted with the restricted agendas of the major institutions. Some of these new forms consisted of: voice-over narration (creating a confessional effect), some unconventional camera work, like the high-angular tilted camera (for impressive, exciting shots), or the eye-view (bringing the narrative to the first person, freeing the third person standpoint), the chiaro-escuro light contrast (for dense, atmospheric results). If aesthetically these films embarked on a more personal, dramatic angle; thematically they were characterised by the vicissitudes of urban life along with a shadowy, melancholic cosmopolitan setting. By the time the 50’s drew closer, this distinctive style was absorbed by the bigger productions, by then these films had already made an impact in the European taste and critics.
James Naremore argues that the zeitgeist ongoing in France predisposed them "to see America in certain ways", elaborating a reflection of it. Still according to the critic, by appreciating this new style of film that emerged in the States, the French were in fact praising their own cinema, and a similar kind of low-key lighting pictures they had fostered previously. Another historical junction which contributed to the establishment of this ethos, was the fact that in 1945 the publishing house Gallimard started circulating their translations of American and British crime novels referred as Série Noire. The following year the French critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier wrote articles stating the introduction of a new project in film-making: the American Film Noir.
It seems a general assumption among the specialised criticism, that these films were not thought of or known by that name anywhere other than France. It was not until the 1970’s that the coinage of the term Film Noir picked up in the States and started being extensively used in allusion to that style of film. However, Alain Silver disputes this postulation showing a photograph of Robert Aldrich, director of Kiss Me Deadly, holding a copy of Borde and Chaumenton´s first edition of the book Panorama du Film Noir Américain, in the set of Attack! already in 1956.
Nonetheless tracing filiations is less important here than stressing the pluralistic aspects these films embody, which have been described as "the product of a multifaceted interaction between developments within particular genres - the gangster/crime film and the gothic melodrama - fluctuating conditions of production and reception within the American film industry, and more diffuse cultural movements: modernism and post-modernism. Film noir was also the product of the complex interface between European and American cinema.". It seem to me that discussing the origins and giving nomenclatures to these films do not solve the actual questions they raised. I defend Film Noir as an inaccurate category, I will consider this ahead, however, the multicultural characteristics and the historical context in which these films flourished is the point worth of mention.
Wikipedia encyclopaedia explains Film Noir as essentially pessimistic stories that deal with "people trapped in a situation they did not want, often a situation they did not create, striving against random uncaring fate, and usually doomed. Almost all film noir plots involve the hard-boiled, disillusioned male (often a private eye) and the dangerous femme fatale. Usually because of sexual attraction or greed, the male commits vicious acts, and in the end both he and the femme fatale are punished or even killed for their actions". This concise and didactic definition implies a problematic issue: it seems to trap a large group of films into a reduced framework, excluding the possibility of any variation, or crossingovers in the stories. The definition above is partial and inconsistent, it does not do justice even to the small corpus I selected here, much less to the whole decade. Although organising knowledge is part of academic study, trying to establish neat classification borders for these films will inevitably fall in imprecision, perhaps missing out what they are in fact trying to communicate. As much convenient as it is to treat Film Noir as an umbrella term that encapsulates the marginal production of the 40s and early 50s, problematising on genre models is a common practice in Film Studies. In the case of Film Noir, critics will either reject the set boundaries or break it in sub-genres. Naremore considers it as "an unusually baggy concept, elaborated largely after the films themselves", but paradoxically he also refers to it as "necessary category" for film criticism.
As critics begun claiming some films as representatives of the invented genre Film Noir, the ones left out had to be fitted in another category. Some of these rejected films usually brought women as protagonists and thus a new classification started. Spicer postulates that "Hollywood drew extensively on Gothic tradition in the 1940s as a branch of the ‘woman’s film’, aimed at the numeric dominant female audience and displaying the ambivalent attitude towards the Victorian period. The first Gothic noir was Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940)". Here is an example of how difficult genre separation can become, this group of films, which share similar style and context of production, are assessed as two distinct genres. The basic criteria formerly employed to justify this division lies in the gender of the protagonist. By definition we have that Gothic Noir/Female Gothic films present heroines in the central role while Film Noir movies bring men as protagonists.
The term Female Gothic was coined in 1977 by Ellen Moers , who proposed an alternative way of thinking the gothic novel as a literary genre. Her studies concentrated on the role of women in this kind of literature, both as writers and as characters; however, she was not the first person to come up with a conception of generic conflict within the gothic novel. Moers built upon Robert Hume’s distinction between the novel of "terror", which had Ann Radcliffe as its foremost expression, and the novel of "horror," epitomised by M.G. Lewis. Hume’s classification benefited the male prevalent gothic written by Lewis, based on the German Schauerroman (horror-romance), overlooking Radcliffe’s importance to the gothic novel. This dismissal produced the gender related questions Moers problematised upon. Some of the question she raises relate to the gendered construction of the gothic hero and heroine, the link between the gothic settings and female sexuality, and the tension of monetary or class struggle with issues of femininity. Moer’s promoted a debate that made way for feminists theories and theorists, but her importance for this work regards the term she created.
Nowadays, in contemporary film jargon, Female Gothic is used to designate a kind of movie, generally produced in the 40’s, which has as central axis the "damsel in distress" created by the 18th century gothic novel. It also deals with some broader themes related to this Pre-romantic era, such as, psychic illnesses, fear of the supernatural and paranoia. Trying to fit films neatly into genres certainly leads to many mistakes, missing out on some films that could be thought as Female Gothic and including some others which purists would classify as crossovers or hybrids. Genres are not so promptly definable, and conforming to the could be an exclusive approach. A way of avoiding this is to look at a film-making periodic tradition.
Ian Conrich, however, has a much more elastic view of the question, he sees a broader, inclusive genre called Gothic Films and that extends its scope from George Mélièrs, Le Manoir du Diable (1896) to Toy Story (1995). "The Gothic in film is a form that has been generically mobile, repeatedly hybridising and mutating. Attempts to present a sufficiently expansive consideration of the Gothic film have been obstructed by its uniformity, with writers consequently preferring to examine specific divisions - the Hollywood monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s, the Horror films of Hammer, the cycle of the 1940 persecuted-women films and the dystopian visions of tech noir". The classification may have been pushed too far. A film that contains noir/gothic manifestations, as periferical elements in the narrative, can not be classified as noir/gothic on its whole. Toy Story, can be taken as an example of a film that contains some gothic feel, but it does not correspond to the essence of the movie. Conrich is probably referring to when Woody and Buzz Lightyear find themselves among deformed toys in sadistic Sid’s room, fearing being destroyed by his vicious dog Scud, but saying that Toy Story is a gothic movie might be pushing the borders of the term too far. To say it contains gothic features in its conception would be more appropriate for this film which is also an adventure, the story of a friendship and a comedy that children and parents will enjoy seeing.
Perhaps we should think of films as a production cycle, inserted in a tradition which share certain features. Andrew Spice points out that "Richard Maltby has argued that Hollywood feature film production is best understood as a volatile cycle of films initiated by a success of an originating film or films rather than as a stable arrangement of genres (Maltby,1995,p.107)". Durgnat says that Film Noir "describe not genres but dominant cycles or motifs, and in many, if not most, films would come under two headings, since interbreeding is intrinsic to motif processes". James Naremore sees it as "a series of historical frames or contexts" but he agues that "yet we must ground the term in some sort of adequate working definition if it is to warrant serious consideration as an object of either film or cultural history".
The emergence of these secondary productions was possible at the time due to the existence of an audience for them. These films embraced more experimental attempts, trying out new tecniques that contrasted with the restricted agendas of the major institutions. Some of these new forms consisted of: voice-over narration (creating a confessional effect), some unconventional camera work, like the high-angular tilted camera (for impressive, exciting shots), or the eye-view (bringing the narrative to the first person, freeing the third person standpoint), the chiaro-escuro light contrast (for dense, atmospheric results). If aesthetically these films embarked on a more personal, dramatic angle; thematically they were characterised by the vicissitudes of urban life along with a shadowy, melancholic cosmopolitan setting. By the time the 50’s drew closer, this distinctive style was absorbed by the bigger productions, by then these films had already made an impact in the European taste and critics.
James Naremore argues that the zeitgeist ongoing in France predisposed them "to see America in certain ways", elaborating a reflection of it. Still according to the critic, by appreciating this new style of film that emerged in the States, the French were in fact praising their own cinema, and a similar kind of low-key lighting pictures they had fostered previously. Another historical junction which contributed to the establishment of this ethos, was the fact that in 1945 the publishing house Gallimard started circulating their translations of American and British crime novels referred as Série Noire. The following year the French critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier wrote articles stating the introduction of a new project in film-making: the American Film Noir.
It seems a general assumption among the specialised criticism, that these films were not thought of or known by that name anywhere other than France. It was not until the 1970’s that the coinage of the term Film Noir picked up in the States and started being extensively used in allusion to that style of film. However, Alain Silver disputes this postulation showing a photograph of Robert Aldrich, director of Kiss Me Deadly, holding a copy of Borde and Chaumenton´s first edition of the book Panorama du Film Noir Américain, in the set of Attack! already in 1956.
Nonetheless tracing filiations is less important here than stressing the pluralistic aspects these films embody, which have been described as "the product of a multifaceted interaction between developments within particular genres - the gangster/crime film and the gothic melodrama - fluctuating conditions of production and reception within the American film industry, and more diffuse cultural movements: modernism and post-modernism. Film noir was also the product of the complex interface between European and American cinema.". It seem to me that discussing the origins and giving nomenclatures to these films do not solve the actual questions they raised. I defend Film Noir as an inaccurate category, I will consider this ahead, however, the multicultural characteristics and the historical context in which these films flourished is the point worth of mention.
Wikipedia encyclopaedia explains Film Noir as essentially pessimistic stories that deal with "people trapped in a situation they did not want, often a situation they did not create, striving against random uncaring fate, and usually doomed. Almost all film noir plots involve the hard-boiled, disillusioned male (often a private eye) and the dangerous femme fatale. Usually because of sexual attraction or greed, the male commits vicious acts, and in the end both he and the femme fatale are punished or even killed for their actions". This concise and didactic definition implies a problematic issue: it seems to trap a large group of films into a reduced framework, excluding the possibility of any variation, or crossingovers in the stories. The definition above is partial and inconsistent, it does not do justice even to the small corpus I selected here, much less to the whole decade. Although organising knowledge is part of academic study, trying to establish neat classification borders for these films will inevitably fall in imprecision, perhaps missing out what they are in fact trying to communicate. As much convenient as it is to treat Film Noir as an umbrella term that encapsulates the marginal production of the 40s and early 50s, problematising on genre models is a common practice in Film Studies. In the case of Film Noir, critics will either reject the set boundaries or break it in sub-genres. Naremore considers it as "an unusually baggy concept, elaborated largely after the films themselves", but paradoxically he also refers to it as "necessary category" for film criticism.
As critics begun claiming some films as representatives of the invented genre Film Noir, the ones left out had to be fitted in another category. Some of these rejected films usually brought women as protagonists and thus a new classification started. Spicer postulates that "Hollywood drew extensively on Gothic tradition in the 1940s as a branch of the ‘woman’s film’, aimed at the numeric dominant female audience and displaying the ambivalent attitude towards the Victorian period. The first Gothic noir was Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940)". Here is an example of how difficult genre separation can become, this group of films, which share similar style and context of production, are assessed as two distinct genres. The basic criteria formerly employed to justify this division lies in the gender of the protagonist. By definition we have that Gothic Noir/Female Gothic films present heroines in the central role while Film Noir movies bring men as protagonists.
The term Female Gothic was coined in 1977 by Ellen Moers , who proposed an alternative way of thinking the gothic novel as a literary genre. Her studies concentrated on the role of women in this kind of literature, both as writers and as characters; however, she was not the first person to come up with a conception of generic conflict within the gothic novel. Moers built upon Robert Hume’s distinction between the novel of "terror", which had Ann Radcliffe as its foremost expression, and the novel of "horror," epitomised by M.G. Lewis. Hume’s classification benefited the male prevalent gothic written by Lewis, based on the German Schauerroman (horror-romance), overlooking Radcliffe’s importance to the gothic novel. This dismissal produced the gender related questions Moers problematised upon. Some of the question she raises relate to the gendered construction of the gothic hero and heroine, the link between the gothic settings and female sexuality, and the tension of monetary or class struggle with issues of femininity. Moer’s promoted a debate that made way for feminists theories and theorists, but her importance for this work regards the term she created.
Nowadays, in contemporary film jargon, Female Gothic is used to designate a kind of movie, generally produced in the 40’s, which has as central axis the "damsel in distress" created by the 18th century gothic novel. It also deals with some broader themes related to this Pre-romantic era, such as, psychic illnesses, fear of the supernatural and paranoia. Trying to fit films neatly into genres certainly leads to many mistakes, missing out on some films that could be thought as Female Gothic and including some others which purists would classify as crossovers or hybrids. Genres are not so promptly definable, and conforming to the could be an exclusive approach. A way of avoiding this is to look at a film-making periodic tradition.
Ian Conrich, however, has a much more elastic view of the question, he sees a broader, inclusive genre called Gothic Films and that extends its scope from George Mélièrs, Le Manoir du Diable (1896) to Toy Story (1995). "The Gothic in film is a form that has been generically mobile, repeatedly hybridising and mutating. Attempts to present a sufficiently expansive consideration of the Gothic film have been obstructed by its uniformity, with writers consequently preferring to examine specific divisions - the Hollywood monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s, the Horror films of Hammer, the cycle of the 1940 persecuted-women films and the dystopian visions of tech noir". The classification may have been pushed too far. A film that contains noir/gothic manifestations, as periferical elements in the narrative, can not be classified as noir/gothic on its whole. Toy Story, can be taken as an example of a film that contains some gothic feel, but it does not correspond to the essence of the movie. Conrich is probably referring to when Woody and Buzz Lightyear find themselves among deformed toys in sadistic Sid’s room, fearing being destroyed by his vicious dog Scud, but saying that Toy Story is a gothic movie might be pushing the borders of the term too far. To say it contains gothic features in its conception would be more appropriate for this film which is also an adventure, the story of a friendship and a comedy that children and parents will enjoy seeing.
Perhaps we should think of films as a production cycle, inserted in a tradition which share certain features. Andrew Spice points out that "Richard Maltby has argued that Hollywood feature film production is best understood as a volatile cycle of films initiated by a success of an originating film or films rather than as a stable arrangement of genres (Maltby,1995,p.107)". Durgnat says that Film Noir "describe not genres but dominant cycles or motifs, and in many, if not most, films would come under two headings, since interbreeding is intrinsic to motif processes". James Naremore sees it as "a series of historical frames or contexts" but he agues that "yet we must ground the term in some sort of adequate working definition if it is to warrant serious consideration as an object of either film or cultural history".
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