![]() ![]() ![]() They choose a seemingly arbitrary survey of films, running from the emblematic Murder, My Sweet (1944), touching on Welles and Hitchcock, amongst less obvious choices, and concluding with an absurd celebration of Bound (1997). In the end, Oliver and Trigo’s understanding of noir is as meaningless as that in popular use, and this is both refreshing, insofar as it does not contribute to the endless taxonomic efforts of noir critics, and frustrating, insofar as there is a lack of rigorous criteria. Always, they discuss films that others have previously defined as such. 4 At other times, they pay lip service to noir stylistics, which, due to their ubiquitous documentation, seldom need justification. Most frequently, they rely on what they semi-derisively refer to as The Trait Ascribed to Noir by Humanist Film Critics (although without all the capitals): fatalism. Madness, for instance, is taken as sufficient to include Vertigo (1958). One such limitation is their habit of using any style or theme of noir that has been suggested, concluding that it, as synecdoche, stands for noir as a whole. To some extent, this frees up their debate, but it also limits it. 3 It is as if, by trying to pin down any stable characteristics in noir, the writers have damned the term to near-uselessness.Īuthors Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo markedly sidestep this tradition in Noir Anxiety, a new book of stand-alone applications of psychoanalytic theory, in the feminist and postcolonial tradition, to films noir. I will circumvent this opening-paragraph imperative by borrowing from another, the first line of an article by James Naremore: “It has always been easier to recognize film noir than to define the term. 2 Most literature on the subject, at any rate, includes some kind of preamble that establishes what the author believes noir entails. The others tend to accept some of Paul Schrader’s definitions in his heavily cited and inventorial “Notes on Film Noir”: noir as period, genre, or style. 1 Each generally offers its own criteria for what counts as noir, and a good eighth of the literature devoted to noir is concerned with this question only. Film noir has a truly legion number of books and articles devoted to it, from the trifling ( The Ultimate Film Noir Quote Book) to the pedantic ( Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir). ![]() Regrettably (or perhaps deservedly, depending on your point of view), there is no one to blame for this state of affairs but film critics and theorists. At its most empty, noir is synonymous with scary, or simply not brightly lit in this late stage of noir criticism-a most inundated area of film studies-it may be a more worthwhile endeavour to provide a list of films that are not noir. To point to one of literally countless examples, witness the Guardian recently declaring that The Butterfly Effect (2003) is “noirish.” It hardly seems worth commenting on the many reasons why this is simply not so. It is by now platitudinous to remark that film noir is, and has been for quite some time, a popularly meaningless term. ![]()
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