Film Noir: 100 All-Time Favorites. Edited by Paul Duncan and Jürgen
Müller. (Taschen, £34.99) 688 pages, illustrated (colour and B&W), ISBN:
9783836543569, hardback
Review by Sheldon Hall
Taschen likes to produce big, heavy books, and this is one
of its biggest and heaviest to date. Don’t drop it on your foot. The company
previously published a shorter handbook on this subject, entitled simply Film Noir (2012), and the editor of that
volume, Paul Duncan, now co-edits this triple-sized follow-up. The erstwhile
co-authors of the earlier book, Alain Silver and James Ursini, are among the
better-known contributors here (27 are credited) in a chronologically organised
survey of a hundred films spanning from 1920 (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) to 2011 (Drive). Those two titles give an indication of the perennial
problem with film noir: deciding what it is. Is it a genre, a style, a mood, or
all three? Not surprisingly, the various authors do not agree on the answer.
The entries on individual films – each running to between
four and eight pages in length – are preceded by three longer pieces which give
some thought to the nature of the object in question: a reprint of Paul
Schrader’s classic article ‘Notes on Film Noir’ (no source is given for it, but
it was first published in the magazine Film
Comment in 1972), a lengthy analysis of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947) by Jürgen Müller and Jörn Hetebrügge,
and ‘An Introduction to Neo-noir’ by Douglas Keesey. The first of these is the
most useful, placing the ‘original’ cycles of films noir in the social and
cultural context of the 1940s and 1950s, describing the influence of the
‘hard-boiled’ school of crime fiction, and suggesting some of the stylistic,
thematic and atmospheric qualities associated with the noir form.
In their chapter ‘Out of Focus’, Müller and Hetebrügge
justify the choice of The Lady from
Shanghai for an extended case study because it is ‘exemplary’ and ‘the
epitome’ of film noir style. But its extreme qualities also make it somewhat
untypical and more representative of its director than of noir generally. The authors
take the view that both Welles and the film are great because they broke
standard Hollywood conventions (which they evidently regard as stale and
boring). That may be true in this case but it is much less so of many if not
most of the other noir films of the ‘classical’ period, which as often as not
drew heavily on those conventions while adding to their range and variety. The
extensive illustrations which are as much the raison d’être of Taschen’s books
as the text are rather disappointingly used in this chapter. While Müller and
Hetebrügge describe shots from the film in some detail, their analysis is not
accompanied by stills or frame grabs illustrating those particular images so
the reader cannot judge the accuracy of the description. There are a dozen
frame blow-ups from the climactic hall-of-mirrors sequence, but that is not
among the scenes analysed at length.
While Schrader’s piece is insistent that film noir is particular
to the years 1941-58, the rest of the book suggests that its history is much
longer: no fewer than 45 of the hundred films selected for the book were made
outside that key period. Among the dubiously relevant later titles included are
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966)
and The Passenger (1975), both of
which are distinctly lacking in the stylistic and generic qualities associated
with classic noir, along with Peeping Tom
and Psycho (both 1960), The Getaway (1972) and Black Swan (2010). In casting the net so
widely, the editors risk making noir a category so diffuse and nebulous as to
be meaningless. Although most of the chosen films deal in some way with crime,
virtually anything ‘a bit dark’ could be made to fit into parameters as loose
as these. As if to prove the point, a filmography of 1,000 titles includes such
unlikely candidates as Metropolis (1927),
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948), The Wages of Fear (1953), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972), Lethal
Weapon (1987), The Matrix (1999) and
almost everything by Hitchcock (including the lighter ones).
Douglas Keesey’s discussion of ‘neo-noir’ suffers
particularly from this lack of clear definition: although he refers to noir as
a genre, his chapter ranges over a diverse selection of relatively recent films
which seem to me to have little in common in either narrative or stylistic
terms. In referring back to the postwar cycle Keesey relies on the old-hat
notion that they reflect male anxieties about the threat posed by newly
independent career women – a character type conspicuous by her absence from
most of the films. He also seems not to know that the French ‘Série Noire’ –
often credited with giving rise to the filmic nomenclature – was so called not
because it was a ‘dark series of books’ or punningly suggested ‘a bad series of
events’ (his translations) but because the volumes had black covers.
I don’t want to sound too harsh about this beautifully
produced book which, with its lavish illustrations taking up three-quarters of
most double-page spreads, makes for a very pleasant browse or, at an RRP of nearly
£35, a very expensive doorstop. I’m just not sure that it helps to shed any
more light on a form – style, genre, whatever you want to call it – that seems
more shadowy the more scholars focus on it.
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