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IN THE DARK – FILM NOIR SERIES
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Once, some years ago, when I was but a bitter young nihilist, one of my older sister’s many loutish boyfriends suggested that the reason I liked "old movies" was that I held some sort of misplaced nostalgia for a simpler time.
Of course, being a typically angry young man, I found this thirtysomething hippie loser’s sophomoric armchair psychology thoroughly insulting, not simply because he failed to recognize that I was already much too jaded to hold such naive notions of the past, but also because the particular subgenre of classic cinema that obsessed this young cinephile was film noir, which entertained no delusions about the simplicity of any time – past, present or future. Certainly, my youthful cynicism was a pose, but hold any pose long enough and – as your mother told you – it just might stick. So film noir provided the validation I needed to remain fixated on the moral ambiguities of the universe, a place where, I was convinced, good and evil could not conceivably exist independently of one another if they existed at all.
So, it wasn’t mere obscurantism that led to my immersion in a world of gangsters, detectives, femme fatales and three-time losers, but instead that hard-boiled poetry spouted by shadowy figures photographed in expressionistic chiaroscuro compositions somehow seemed more symbolically relevant to my experience of the world than anything I would ever see at the multiplex – or even at the art house – in the early 1990s.
How strangely, fortunately romantic that my own pessimistic malaise could be reflected back at me so thoroughly in the antiheros and unhappy endings of film noir. If my love affair with cinema began anywhere, it was here, basking in the light of the cathode ray as I watched literally hundreds of film noirs on deteriorating VHS tapes, played through an antiquated VCR and viewed on a tiny TV screen in my parents’ basement. Admittedly, from a technological and esthetic standpoint, it was a less-than-ideal way to find an entrée into the appreciation of cinema as art, but for anyone who grew up in suburban Calgary, a good video store was the next best thing to the cinematheque we’ve never had.
So, there I sat, obsessively watching such popular classics as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) and The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), not to mention more obscure titles such as Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) and I Want to Live! (Robert Wise, 1958), until I became steeped in an alternative history of cinema, one that revealed all too clearly how deeply mistrusting, and even paranoid, that behemoth nation to the south of us could be. Sure, these antisocial – nay, anti-American – themes were all dressed up in stories of corruption and intrigue, but the high period of film noir, which extended from roughly 1945 to 1958, tapped into a primal dissatisfaction that had taken hold in the U.S. after the end of the Second World War. Some would argue that this climate of fear and paranoia still exists south of the 49th parallel to this very day.
Nevertheless, it was during the postwar period that the greatest directors of the time realized some of their most memorable noir pictures – a list that includes, but is not limited to, Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945), The Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), Gun Crazy (Joseph Lewis, 1949), Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1949), White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950), The Big Heat (Lang, 1953), Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) and Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958). Is it any wonder, watching films such as these, that one comes to understand that even the most seemingly banal genre picture can be transformed into a cinematic masterpiece in the hands of the right director? Yet, despite the artistry and style involved in every element of the best film noirs – from script and direction to performance and cinematography – many people today regard them solely as another form of retro kitsch, as though these films were somehow once intended to be realist works, literally representative of the culture that produced them.
Hey, it’s not for me to tell you how to enjoy your time in the cinema. I just don’t want to hear a whole lot of snickering in the audience when the Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF) presents five noir classics on the big screen in new re-release prints as part of this year’s Restored Classics program. If the CIFF screening of Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter a couple of years ago was any indication, many of the city’s hipsters aren’t capable of relinquishing their carefully cultivated sense of irony long enough to actually engage with a film on its own terms. And to a romantic like me, that’s a very sad thing. Almost makes me yearn for a simpler time, when people weren’t so goddamn impressed with their own cleverness. |
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