



Any discussion of French film noir must begin by challenging a few myths.

Sight & Sound’s Deep Focus: Film Noir season runs October-November 2016 at the BFI Southbank, London, and until 4 December at the Ciné Lumière, London.

Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s seminal A Panorama of American Film Noir, first published in 1955, sees film noir – despite the French name – as an American phenomenon. French attempts are dismissed as imitation and confined to the post-war period. In a remarkable case of cultural amnesia that overlooks France’s contribution to the genre, the French critic Nino Frank is credited with coining the phrase in 1946, in the excitement of discovering a batch of Hollywood noir movies banned during the war. Another legend sees the expression ‘film noir’ originating in the Gallimard Série noire imprint of crime novels, founded by Marcel Duhamel in 1945.

Yet, as the film critic and theorist André Bazin noted, “In French pre-war cinema, even if there wasn’t exactly a genre, there was a style, the realist film noir,” referring to films that critics such as Frank had named as such before the war. For instance, a review of Pierre Chenal’s Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Turn, 1939) – the first adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice – states: “Here is another film noir, which belongs to the sinister series which starts with Les Bas-fonds and Crime et châtiment and continues with Pépé le Moko and Le Quai des brumes, La Bête humaine and Hôtel du Nord. No doubt this series has produced the most significant French films of the last few years.”

The importance and impact of American film noir are of course not in question. Nevertheless, as the above suggests, and scholarship now amply demonstrates, a powerful current that merits the adjective ‘noir’ runs through French cinema. Many of the films are famous in their own right. Some are regarded as part of a movement known as poetic realism: dark, melodramatic films that fuse two apparent opposites – a ‘realistic’ description of working-class lives with a poetic, or lyrical, style. (Pierre Chenal’s 1934 La Rue sans nom is the first film to be called as such, and the movement’s greatest classics are probably Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes in 1938 and Le Jour se lève in 1939.) Other titles are famous as the work of filmmakers known for their proclivity for dark subjects and style (Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean-Pierre Melville). But longer and deeper continuities sustain the persistence of noir in French film, which will be examined here in its heyday, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s.





Although the phenomenon was not confined to France, French writers showed a strong attraction to the underbelly of society, the ‘bas-fonds’ (‘lower depths’), from the early modern period onwards and in particular in the 18th-century roman noir, examining those living on the margins of the big cities, the poor and the criminals. This first culminated in the 19th century in the aftermath of the French Revolution and against the background of urbanisation and capitalism, with a particular focus on Paris. A supreme early expression was Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), soon followed by many novelists (Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue), journalists and campaigners, and even a criminal turned chief of police, Eugène François Vidocq. It is no accident that Edgar Allan Poe located his short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841, credited as the first detective story) in Paris; in turn, it gave rise to a long tradition of international crime literature to which all film noir is directly or indirectly indebted.

Meanwhile, the late 19th century saw a fundamental shift in attitudes to the bas-fonds from revulsion to fascination. This was in part due to the Romantics and their love of bohemia. They continued to be fascinated by the poverty, vice and crime that defined representations of the urban lower depths, but they observed it with a greater poetic – and increasingly, nostalgic – sensibility. Such attitudes are in evidence in the work of a number of 20th-century French-language writers who produced key texts for French film noir, among them Pierre Mac Orlan, the author of Le Quai des brumes, who coined the phrase ‘social fantastic’, a precursor of ‘poetic realism’.

Mac Orlan and others, such as Francis Carco and Eugène Dabit, were close to the so-called populist literature of the 1920s that focused on the working classes, but which were not untouched by crime. Concurrently, crime literature thrived; particularly influential were two Belgian writers, Stanislas-André Steeman and, especially, Georges Simenon. Their novels explored all backgrounds, with a predilection for the teeming faubourgs of Paris and low dives in the port towns of Le Havre or Marseille. For decades to come, Simenon would prove one of the richest single sources of noir stories, both for his ‘hard novels’ in which crime is located in the everyday, and for his policiers featuring the solid, pipe-smoking Inspector Maigret. Two early Maigret adaptations, Jean Renoir’s La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads, 1932) and Julien Duvivier’s La Tête d’un homme (1933) set the tone for a certain social voyeurism and the ambiguous intermingling of criminals and law-abiding citizens against picturesque mean streets.





From different corners of high and low literature, this interest in the dark corners of French society proved highly successful (extending also to popular song) and provides part of the cultural background that eventually led to French film noir. But the migration of these motifs to French cinema only came about through developments in photography and cinematography that converged in the French capital between the two world wars. Although dark melodramas and crime cinema existed in the silent period, French film noir proper began with the coming of sound around 1930.

The review of Le Dernier Tournant quoted above laments the “special atmosphere” of “characters led to destitution and death by an implacable destiny”, concluding, “It seems unfortunate that the French film ‘school’ is represented by films which… are long poems to discouragement.” While this atmosphere was indeed predicated on narratives of doom and despair, it also owed a lot to trends in visual arts that were not confined to the ‘French film school’.

Life in the shadows

Paris in the 1930s was a magnet for photographers, particularly Central and Eastern European émigrés, and the attraction of the city was reinforced by the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany: André Kertész, Brassaï, Germaine Krull and François Kollar, to name the most famous, documented French society, often relishing the city’s less salubrious corners. Particularly famous is Brassaï’s collection The Secret Paris of the 30s, with its nocturnal sewage workers, barmen, pimps and prostitutes, in a dense, inky idiom. His combination of glamorous chiaroscuro, louche subjects and poetic tone was extreme. Yet its shadowy iconography and mingling of working and criminal classes found echoes in the flourishing sensationalist press of the time (eg, Détective, a popular weekly magazine published by Gallimard from 1928, which specialised in sensational murder enquiries and mysteries), and had clear parallels in film, notably Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), La Nuit du carrefour and La Bête humaine (1938); Anatole Litvak’s Coeur de Lilas (1932); Jacques Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu (1934); Duvivier’s La Tête d’un homme, La Bandera (1935) and Pépé le Moko (1937); Jean Grémillon’s Gueule d’amour (1937); Carné’s Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève; and Chenal’s La Rue sans nom and indeed Le Dernier Tournant.

It is a cliché to point to the impact of German expressionism on film noir, yet like all clichés it contains some truth. Many German émigrés transited via France en route to Hollywood and left an indelible mark. Some filmmakers (Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, G.W. Pabst) stayed only briefly, but others, such as Robert Siodmak, had a greater impact (Mister Flow, 1936; Mollenard, 1938; and Pièges, 1939, all contain noir thriller elements).





German directors of photography such as Curt Courant and Eugen Schüfftan worked extensively on French films, importing expressionist imagery. They also directly trained, or indirectly influenced, French colleagues such as Jules Kruger, Marc Fossard, Claude Renoir and Nicolas Hayer. Some of the most memorable noir images in the 1930s and beyond can be traced to German-inspired cinematography: Courant’s glittering work on the murder scene in La Bête humaine, Schüfftan’s dramatic lighting effects in Le Quai des brumes, and Hayer’s brooding shadows from Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943) to Melville’s Le Doulos (1962). As critic Emile Vuillermoz put it in 1939, “Noir is currently the colour of fashion in our studios.”

The precision and beauty of this type of lighting, both contrasted and diffuse, in conjunction with the remarkable sets of Lazare Meerson and Alexandre Trauner (and their disciples) defined French film noir by marrying an international visual style to minutely observed French decors. In the process, they imbued sordid lower-depths locations, such as the bars in Le Grand Jeu and Le Quai des brumes or the workhouse in Renoir’s Les Bas-fonds (1936), with a poetic grandeur. In respect of this visual style, as well as in terms of subject matter and literary origins, French film noir in the 1930s overlaps more or less with poetic realism, even though a few poetic realist films are less easily identified as noir, largely because of the absence of a criminal element within them – such as Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) – or because of their comic slant, such as Carné’s Hôtel du Nord (1938).





The noir visual aesthetic continued, often in even darker mood, in post-war classical French cinema that looked back towards the pre-war films, such as Carné’s Les Portes de la nuit (1946), Clouzot’s Quai des orfèvres (1947) and Yves Allégret’s Une si jolie petite plage (Such a Pretty Little Beach, 1948). But noir left poetic realism behind in gangster films, such as Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), and the resistance drama Marie-Octobre (Duvivier, 1959) and many others. The arrival of the New Wave and its taste for location shooting inevitably had an impact, yet it did not banish the glamour of night-time urban scenes – far from it, as we can see in precursors such as Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1956) and Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold (1958), but also in the New Wave’s own noir pastiches, such as François Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist (Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965). Made just before colour became the norm, these noir tributes may be seen as the last outposts of stylish black-and-white cinematography.

French film noir thus has long antecedents in written and visual representations of the bas-fonds, and visual characteristics informed by contemporary professional practice and geopolitical developments. Equally significant was the immediate French social background, including the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the left-wing Popular Front alliance of 1936-38, the war and German occupation of 1940-44, and the post-war advent of American-inflected modernity. As products of popular culture, French film noirs neither adopt an explicitly political stance nor simply ‘reflect’ contemporary events. But they undoubtedly bear the traces of their respective traumatic social contexts. In the late 1930s, for instance, some can be read as meditations on Popular Front hopes and then disillusionment, and in the post-war period, they explicitly engage with American culture, providing a cultural framework for shifting definitions of national identity. But the area in which they most visibly echo changing social parameters is in their delineation of gender relations.





Just like its American counterpart, French film noir is the genre par excellence of masculinity in crisis, brimming with vulnerable men drawn to crime, ‘victims’ of alluring females, or preys to a cruel fate. Building on the charisma of glamorous stars, the films side with these maladjusted figures. In the 1930s Jean Gabin epitomised the tragic proletarian hero haunted by the past, lured by a scheming – or even innocent – woman, defeated by evil patriarchs or just circumstances (Pépé le Moko, Gueule d’amour, La Bête humaine, Le Quai des brumes, Le Jour se lève).

As we have seen, these overtly pessimistic scenarios drew critical disapproval in some quarters, yet their murderous and/or suicidal heroes did not trouble the censors (unlike in Hollywood, where various remakes saw their endings modified) and they continued to draw audiences. During and immediately after the war, the more weary masculinity of central male figures, in Le Corbeau, Les Portes de la nuit, Quai des orfèvres, Une si jolie petite plage and Manon (Clouzot, 1949) can easily be mapped against the traumatic defeat of France, the humiliations of the German occupation and the retributions that followed.

While some scholars see the godfather-like protagonists of the post-war gangster films as a symbolic restoration of patriarchal power, equally striking is these characters’ ultimate powerlessness and penchant for nostalgia, despite the films’ surface modernity. In Touchez pas au grisbi and Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955) and many others, a stint in jail is a coded reference to the war years, and regret for the passing of the pre-war ‘good old days’ is pervasive. This is also striking in the self-conscious tributes to Hollywood noir towards the end of the period, as seen in Melville’s anachronistic gangsters in Le Doulos and Le Samouraï (1967), respectively played by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon.





Against this panorama of flawed, yet glamorous and charismatic male figures, the women of French film noir are less exalted, presented as marginalised and often degraded figures. Here too historical patterns emerge. Notable women in pre-war noir include the hapless prostitute of La Chienne (Janie Marèse), the kept women of Pépé le Moko and Gueule d’amour (Mireille Balin in both cases), the capricious child-woman of La Bête humaine (Simone Simon) – charming yet clichéd products of populist literature. One exception is the idealised romantic ‘waif’ of poetic realism, the archetype being Michèle Morgan in Le Quai des brumes. But across the decade, none of these women is endowed with much narrative agency or erotic power. In the 1940s, Le Corbeau testifies to stronger female figures emerging in the war years, in noir as well as other genres.

But with some exceptions, such as Les Portes de la nuit, in which the standard poetic realist woman is made to look like a Hollywood icon (initially to be played by Marlene Dietrich, replaced by the inexperienced Nathalie Nattier), post-war noir takes a striking misogynist turn. Extreme noir melodramas such as Manon, Manèges (Yves Allégret, 1950) and Voici le temps des assassins (Deadlier than the Male, Duvivier, 1956) showcase women as evil or perverse creatures bent on destroying men. Only in the rare instances when the noir women are embodied by major stars such as Simone Signoret in Les Diaboliques (Clouzot, 1955) and Brigitte Bardot in La Vérité (Clouzot, 1960) do they attain real glamour and a degree of complexity. Meanwhile, the policiers infantilise gangsters’ molls, symbolised by the slaps they frequently receive; Melville’s films relegate them further to the role of alibi, whether treated cruelly (Le Doulos) or kindly (Le Deuxième Souffle, 1966; Le Samouraï).





The sense of the popularity of French noir being used to mete out a symbolic backlash against the growing post-war emancipation of women in real life is hard to escape. Nor is this trend contradicted by auteur cinema adaptations of US noir fiction, such as Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist, The Bride Wore Black (La Mariée était en noir, 1968) and The Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississipi, 1969). With very few exceptions, women in French film noir are denied both the transgressive power of the femme fatale and the affirmative role of the ‘good girl’ of their American counterparts. The real drama is always that of the young homme fatal or of the ageing patriarch.

Throughout the period evoked above, there were other successful genres in French cinema besides film noir, including comedy and costume film. Yet, as in Hollywood, it is noir that caught the cultural imagination. Like 19th-century readers of Hugo and Balzac and 20th-century fans of Simenon, we are endlessly drawn to the dark universe of crime, failure and melodrama, almost always ending in death. It is indicative that the best filmmakers in the period (Renoir, Duvivier, Clouzot, Melville among them) all worked in this idiom, producing a string of beautiful, sombre films. Like the literature of the bas-fonds, film noir projects a fantasy that may not be factually accurate but nevertheless gets to the heart of the darkest corners of society and human nature.