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This book aims to provide an overview of the history and development of film noir and neo-noir in five major European cinemas, France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, written by leading authorities in their respective fields. It contains a bibliography and extensive filmography. The book describes the distinctiveness of film noir or neo-noir within its respective national cinema at particular moments, but also discusses its interaction with American film noir and neo-noir. It commences with a reflection on the significant similarities and differences that emerge in these accounts of the various European film noirs, and on the nature of this dialogue, which suggests the need to understand film noir as a transnational cultural phenomenon. The problems of defining film noir and the reasons why it has almost always been regarded solely as an American form are discussed. Because British film noir had never received critical recognition, Andrew Spicer argues that British neo-noir had to reinvent itself anew, with little, if any, explicit continuity with its predecessors. The book also explores the changes in the French polar after 1968: the paranoia of the political thriller and the violence of the postmodern and naturalistic thriller. That new noir sensibility is different enough, and dark enough, from what preceded it, for us to call it 'hyper-noir'. British neo-noirs are highly intertextual and allusive, both thematically and visually. The book also discusses German neo-noir, Spanish film noir and neo-noir, and the Italian film noir.
if many of them use one or two of these tropes. Some films do, however, make more use of these characteristics than most, while at the same time pushing towards a new noir sensibility in the late 1990s, which combines the characteristics we shall explore in the first half of this chapter as part of the changes in the French polar after 1968: the paranoia of the political thriller and the violence of the postmodern and
11 The banlieue wore black: post-war French polar, from Becker to Corneau Philippe Met To the extent that investigation, detection or suspense are not all systematically foregrounded, and the police force itself is sometimes conspicuously absent, the distinctly Gallic polar is an admittedly fairly imprecise appellation, even when focus is restricted to the second post-war, as will be the case here.1 Its urban anchoring, however, is hardly questionable. Unsurprisingly in a highly centralised nation like France, immediate pre-war, proto-noir and/or poetic realism
connections to gender representation and national cinemas – the French polar (crime/ noir thriller), the American prison film, the frequently feminised melodrama, the Western – and yet they also modify the formula to create something new. They are resolutely and at times disturbingly masculine, their male characters constrained by heteronormative and toxic models of masculinity, their female ones usually
Asfalto demanded not so much film critique but an act of love in the private projection room of our dreams (Palacios, 2000: 14). This remark reminds us of Calparsoro’s own belief that cinema was there to assault us and inspire our emotions in the dark of the projection room: he and Palacios concur here that cinema is an emotional rather than intellectual exercise. The gap of a few years did not cool Palacios’s response; he would later observe that Asfalto was the summit of Calparsoro’s film noir of youth (Palacios, 2006: 380), reminding him of the French polars of the
Daeninckx, Meurtres pour mémoire, pp. 63–4; ‘DEforestation … DEmarcation … DEfence … DEliberations of the special DElegation from Lanta’, Murder in Memoriam, p. 52. 39 Daeninckx, Meurtres pour mémoire, p. 64; ‘DEportation was treated in exactly the same way as other administrative tasks. The bureaucrats seem to have filled in these forms with the same punctiliousness they brought to coal coupons or the new school year’, Murder in Memoriam, p. 52. 40 Charles Forsdick, ‘“Direction les oubliettes de l’histoire”: witnessing the past in the French polar
from 1954 onwards. In 1958 the influence of American cinema over French production was quite strong, especially in a genre soon to become the rival of comedy for popularity. The French polars (thrillers) of the 1950s and 1960s ‘were often adaptations of American detective stories transposed to the French context’ (Forbes 1992 : 48). The comedians of the earlier decades such as Bourvil and de Funès continued to exploit traditional venues of comedy while newcomers from the music hall, including Francis Blanche and Fernand
star personae and the generic conventions of the films in which they had starred in their heyday. The ambitious Delon-Belmondo vehicle also featured Vanessa Paradis as the archetypal daughter in search of the secret of her paternity. Leconte and producer Christian Fechner envisaged creating a nostalgic cinematic spectacle that would appeal to the popularity of the great vintage actors of the French polar. However the film
, Michel. Yet while the film is certainly informed by Audiard’s background, there are distinct differences between the heritage of 1950s and 1960s French polars and the more hybrid, unconventional genre play at work in Regarde les hommes tomber . For one, the film’s only law enforcement officer is also its tragic (and silent) victim, its detective is an unglamorous salesman and its figure fatale
Past in the Contemporary French Polar’, French Cultural Studies , 12 , 333–50 . Gaertner , Julien ( 2006 ), ‘L’Azur à l’ecran. Un Arret sur images’, www.cg06.fr/culture/pdf/rr178–lazur.pdf (accessed 10 December 2006). Guilloux , Michel ( 2002 ), ‘La Repentie’, L’Humanité (17 April), 23. Herpe , N. and Kohn, O. ( 1996 ), ‘Entretien avec Laetitia Masson’, positif