Portland State University Modernism Gendered Reading Questions I have uploaded chapter 2 of “More than Night Film Noir in Its Contexts”. not more than 350 | Course Hero

Portland State University Modernism Gendered Reading Questions I have uploaded chapter 2 of “More than Night Film Noir in Its Contexts”. not more than 350 words1. In what way are ideas around modernism gendered? Quote from the text.2. Pick either Hammett or Greene and briefly discuss their importance to noir and the major characteristics of their fiction. Quote from the text.3. What are some of the ways that Double Indemnity challenged the production code? 2
MODERNISM AND
BLOOD MELODRAMA
Copyright © 2008. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Three Case Studies
After an art-historical category has been named and its key members identified, critics usually
try to explain its causes or genealogy. This is the task undertaken in the second chapter of
Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton’s Panorama du film noir américain, in which the
authors discuss six major “sources” of American film noir. Three of the sources are
sociological: a new realism about violence in the wake of World War II, a rise in the American
crime rate, and a widespread institutionalization and popularization of psychoanalysis. The
rest are artistic: the hard-boiled crime novel, the European cinema, and certain Hollywood
genres of the 1930s—especially horror films at Universal, gangster movies at Warner, and
classic detective pictures at Fox.
Somewhat surprisingly, Borde and Chaumeton argue that European cinema was a “feeble”
influence and that American noir should be understood chiefly within the “Hollywood
professional context.” Even so, the genres they mention (such as the 1930s horror picture)
were sometimes indebted to European émigrés, and the artistic ideology they describe clearly
belongs to an older, cosmopolitan tradition. At one point, they argue that noir made gangsters
more psychologically complex and sympathetic, horror more quotidian, and detective fiction
less rational. Leaving aside the references to popular formulas, these are more or less the
values of modernist literature since the beginning of the century.
Here we need to keep in mind that virtually all of the initial cycle of American films noirs
were adapted from critically admired novels. We also need to remember that the Parisian
critics who invented the idea of American film noir in the late 1940s were writing at a time
when their city was attempting a return or a repetition of its cultural role in the 1920s and
1930s. Existentialism was replacing surrealism as the dominant philosophy, but Paris was
once again a staging ground for revolutionary artistic movements, a capital of jazz, and a cheap
haven for foreign writers. The initial discourse on Hollywood’s dark cinema therefore
coincides with one of the last important moments in the history of international modernism.
Sometimes the connection between the Parisian cinéphiles and the older generation of high
modernists was quite specific. For example, Nino Frank, who is usually credited with the first
application of the term film noir to American thrillers, was a close friend of James Joyce
during the 1930s and helped Joyce translate “Anna Livia Plurabelle” into Italian; according to
Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, Frank often took Joyce to the movies.
Naremore, James. More Than Night : Film Noir in Its Contexts, University of California Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/psu/detail.action?docID=470964.
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Copyright © 2008. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
This does not mean that the French imagined everything they saw at the cinema. If Paris was
a center of modernism, so, in a more qualified sense, was Los Angeles, which provided a
temporary home for central European exiles from the war and for major American writers such
as William Faulkner. A great many films of the 1940s were clearly indebted to modernist art,
and sometimes the indebtedness went beyond mere technique. During the period in question,
however, it makes just as much sense to argue that certain directors, writers, and photographers
were trying to invest melodramatic formulas with a degree of artistic significance. By 1945,
modernism had assumed an overriding importance, supplementing the older canon, shaping
most artistic practices, and determining critical interpretation of the past and the present. It was
quite simply the most respected art among the educated classes—the kind that was regarded as
more authentic, more important as a commentary on modern experience, and more relevant to
the intellectual concerns of the day. It was also becoming institutionalized and fully absorbed
into what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called “the culture industry.” Thus in a 1944
commentary on James Hadley Chase’s best-selling noir novel, No Orchards for Miss
Blandish, George Orwell grumbled, “Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs.”1
If modernism did not directly cause the film noir, it at least determined the way certain
movies were conceived and appreciated. There was, in fact, something inherently noirlike in
the established tradition of modern art. To make this point clear, let me offer a few
commonplace generalizations about high modernism—bearing in mind that, like film noir,
modernism is an idea constructed ex post facto by critics, and that it refers to a great many
artists of different styles, sexes, nationalities, religious persuasions, and political inclinations.
(One of the first appearances of the term in English is in a 1927 poetry anthology by Robert
Graves and Laura Riding, but it did not gain widespread use until the 1960s.) I shall draw most
of my examples from English and American literature, in part because noir has always had
strong literary associations, and in part because I am leading up to a discussion of several
English-language writers who worked for the movies.
First of all, modernism was an older, more wide-reaching manifestation of the same
dialectic between Europe and America (or between vanguard art and mass culture) that
produced the discourse on film noir itself. A metropolitan development largely associated with
white male artists, it was fully established in New York, Chicago, and the major European
capitals by 1914, slightly before World War I shattered the confidence of the previous
century’s established institutions. Because it was generated during the second industrial
revolution, it was frequently about things such as metro stations, rail travel, cinemas, jazz, and
the spaces of urban modernity. But modernism had a complex, ambivalent relation to the
dominant economy. After World War I, as economic power shifted westward, and as
Hollywood began to dominate the world’s imagination, the leading modern writers grew
increasingly conflicted in their attitude toward the United States, which seemed both a dynamic
force of change and a threat to civilized Europe. This ambivalence was especially apparent in
Weimar Germany, where a complex discourse on Americanism persisted throughout the 1920s;
its larger history, however, can be traced back to nineteenth-century artists such as Charles
Baudelaire, whose paradoxical aestheticism was developed in direct response to bourgeois
capitalism and the rise of urban mass culture.2
In some of its most elite manifestations (such as the writings of T. S. Eliot), modernism was
Naremore, James. More Than Night : Film Noir in Its Contexts, University of California Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/psu/detail.action?docID=470964.
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Copyright © 2008. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
critical not merely of America but of modernity altogether—including Enlightenment
rationalism, industrial technology, and liberal or social democracy.3 In formal terms, it was
often detached, aestheticized, and self-reflexive, and at its extremes it led to what Spanish
philosopher José Ortega y Gasset called a “dehumanization.” The most radical modernist
painting emphasized the surface of the canvas rather than the thing depicted; and the most
radical modernist writing, beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé, subverted what Roland Barthes
would later term “readerly” values. The modernist devaluation of content, however, was
usually more advertised than practiced. One of the obvious aims of the new art was to create
scandal and thereby challenge dominant values at the levels of both the signifier and the
signified. Vanguard art in the 1920s was not merely a matter of paintings that problematized
vision or novels in which nothing seemed to happen; it was also an assault on bourgeois
Europe’s ideals of sexuality, family, and religion, and on provincial America’s fundamentalism
and Babbittry.
Even before the censorship scandals over Madame Bovary, Ulysses, and The Rainbow,
European literature was preoccupied with individual subjectivity—a topic that led naturally to
explorations of sex and the “primitive” unconscious. Prior to World War I, in the work of
British and American authors such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Maddox Ford
(all of whom were indebted to Gustave Flaubert), impressionistic narration and the control of
point of view became the hallmarks of modern literary art. Additional support for “deep”
narrative techniques, involving stream of consciousness and nonlinear plot, was ultimately
found in Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud. Sometimes these techniques
were used to reveal savagery or death instinct—a killer inside us, living below the surface of
rational life.4 Furthermore, the new novel mounted an implicit critique of industrial
modernity’s sense of progressive or nonrepeatable time. As David Lodge puts it, one of the
chief characteristics of modernist fiction is that it “eschews the straight chronological ordering
of its material, and the use of a reliable, omniscient and intrusive narrator. It employs, instead,
either a single, limited point of view or multiple viewpoints, all more or less limited and
fallible; and it tends toward a complex or fluid handling of time, involving much crossreference back and forward across the temporal span of the action.”5
The modernist concern with subjectivity and depth psychology was given a further impetus
by social modernity and the emancipation of women, which brought new subjectivities into
being. However, the relationship between modernism and the new woman was troubled,
particularly in the case of the male moderns, who offered a liberating honesty about sex while
at the same time mounting a gendered opposition to establishment culture. A locus classicus is
the climactic scene of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (often described as the urtext of British
modernism), in which Marlow finds it impossible to tell the truth to Kurtz’s sheltered fiancee,
“the Intended.” At about this time in London, T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound were attempting to
replace the flowery rhetoric of late-Victorian poetry with “hard” and “clear” imagery. Attacks
on the supposedly genteel, ladylike taste of the middle class were intensified in the years after
World War I, when all forms of writing, from verse to journalism, became more plainspoken
and “masculine.” For those writers who had experienced combat, beautiful images and poetic
diction seemed almost obscene: a horse should be called a horse, not a “steed” or a “charger,”
and a good novelist or newspaper editor should approach language in much the same way as
Naremore, James. More Than Night : Film Noir in Its Contexts, University of California Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/psu/detail.action?docID=470964.
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Copyright © 2008. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Pound approached poetry, ruthlessly cutting excess verbiage and euphemisms.6 The time was
ripe for movements such as the German Neue Sachlichkeit, for the iconoclastic criticism of H.
L. Mencken, and for tough-guy stylists such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Ernest Hemingway.
But if the old sensibility was characterized as feminine, so were the more threatening
aspects of the modern society—at least in the hands of many male artists. As Andreas Huyssen
points out in After the Great Divide (1986), one important characteristic of high modernism
was its growing hostility toward mass culture, which it often personified in the form of a
woman. (Here it should be noted that the modernists did not dislike popular art; what they
increasingly criticized was a commodified, mass-produced, supposedly “feminine” culture that
took the form of slick-paper magazines, Books-of-the-Month, and big-budget productions from
Broadway and Hollywood.) At this level, the masochistic eroticism of the aesthetes and
decadents at the end of the nineteenth century sometimes joined forces with an almost sexual
ambivalence toward industrial progress, which was associated with erotic females who
threaten men. Consider Franz Kafka’s Trial, in which a nightmare bureaucracy is connected
with lascivious and enigmatic women; consider also the German art cinema of the 1920s,
especially Metropolis and Pandora’s Box, in which a beautiful robot and a sexy flapper evoke
fears of creeping Americanization. In English literature, a loosely related example is T. S.
Eliot’s Waste Land—one of the most influential poems of the early twentieth century, in which
a free-floating male sexual anxiety blends with dystopian horror.7
The themes I have been discussing tended to converge on representations of the Dark City, a
literary topos inherited from the nineteenth century, which became more significant than ever.
William Blake’s London had been the blighted, “mind-forged” creation of industrial
rationality; Baudelaire’s Paris had been the perversely seductive playground of a flaneur;
oppressive and pleasurable, alienating and free, the Dark City possessed many contradictory
meanings, all of which were carried over into the modernist era. In the twentieth century,
however, the streets at night were transformed into the privileged mise-en-scène of the
masculine unconscious (most notably in the Nighttown episode of Ulysses, in which a
notorious harlot turns men into swine). For some modernist artists, the nocturnal city also
began to resemble an American-style metropolis—a spreading empire of mechanization and
kitsch that endangered the urbanity of old Europe.
A great deal more could be said about high modernism, but these observations should
indicate the degree to which early examples of the so-called film noir tend to reproduce themes
and formal devices associated with landmarks of early-twentieth-century art. Like modernism,
Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s are characterized by urban landscapes, subjective narration,
nonlinear plots, hard-boiled poetry, and misogynistic eroticism; also like modernism, they are
somewhat “anti-American,” or at least ambivalent about modernity and progress.8 By the same
token, critical discourse on these films usually consists of little more than a restatement of
familiar modernist themes.
The affinity between noir and modernism is hardly surprising. In the decades between the
two world wars, modernist art increasingly influenced melodramatic literature and movies, if
only because most writers and artists with serious aspirations now worked for the culture
industry. When this influence reached a saturation point in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it
inevitably made traditional formulas (especially the crime film) seem more “artful”: narratives
Naremore, James. More Than Night : Film Noir in Its Contexts, University of California Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/psu/detail.action?docID=470964.
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Copyright © 2008. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
and camera angles were organized along more complex and subjective lines; characters were
depicted in shades of gray or in psychoanalytic terms; urban women became increasingly
eroticized and dangerous; endings seemed less unproblematically happy; and violence
appeared more pathological.
The qualified transformation of thrillers was aided by Hollywood’s appropriation of talent
and ideas from Europe, where intellectuals had more power than in the United States, and
where a less rationalized, more elite media culture produced the Weimar silent film, the French
film noir, and the Gaumont-British pictures of Alfred Hitchcock. The European art cinema was
unable to compete with Hollywood on its own ground, but it strongly influenced many
American directors and genres. The Weimar Germans (led by Fritz Lang) specialized in gothic
horror, criminal psychology, and sinister conspiracies; the French (including Rene Clair,
Marcel Carné, and Jacques Prévert) produced realist pictures about working-class crime;
Hitchcock (assisted by such figures as Michael Balcon, Charles Bennett, and Ivor Montagu)
concentrated on international intrigue. What united the three types of cinematic modernism was
an interest in popular stories about violence and sexual love, or in what Graham Greene once
called “blood melodrama.”9
A similar development can be seen in the world of Anglo-American literature, where the
major forms of “bloody” popular fiction, including the detective story, the spy thriller, and the
gothic romance, were “made new” in the 1920s and 1930s. These forms had long been of
interest to vanguard artistic intellectuals; in fact, shortly after the turn of the century, crime and
paranoid conspiracy fiction strongly appealed to the leading psychological novelists in Britain
and America. Henry James, for example, experimented with both the ghost story and the spy
novel, and Joseph Conrad, who specialized in ironic tales of “secret sharers” and imperialist
adventurers, once told a French colleague that society itself was nothing more than a criminal
conspiracy: “Crime is a necessary condition for all types of organizations. Society is
essentially criminal— or it would not exist.”10 By the 1930s, Wyndham Lewis was
complaining that the entire social imaginary resembled a Kriminalroman.
Authors like Conrad and James, however, did not seem to be writing for the same public as
Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. (James described “The Turn of the Screw” as “an
amusette to catch those not easily caught…the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious.”)11 In the
English language during the first three decades of the century, crime novels were usually
conservative, supporting the prewar culture that modernism regarded as bankrupt. The
Christie-style detective story, one of the most successful creations of modern publishing,
seemed especially retrograde when viewed from a modernist perspective and was sometimes
criticized for appealing to a genteel audience of females and academics.12 Two symptomatic
developments of modernity enabled a countertradition to emerge: first was the rapid growth in
the 1920s of sensationalized American pulp fiction addressed chiefly to working-class men;
second was the development in the late 1920s and 1930s of literary novels about crime,
published in hardback and supported by middle-class book clubs. In these venues, a secondgeneration modernism interacted with mass culture and eventually made its way into the
respectable realms of New York publishing, Broadway theater, and Hollywood.
In one sense, the movies had always been interested in the new wave of crime writers; of
the four American thrillers initially described as noir by the French, two were remakes. Unlike
Naremore, James. More Than Night : Film Noir in Its Contexts, University of California Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/psu/detail.action?docID=470964.
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Copyright © 2008. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
their predecessors, however, all four of the 1940s pictures were A-budget productions,
bearing the marks of literary sophistication, attracting favorable commentary from urban
reviewers, and competing for Academy Awards.13 Likewise, Hollywood was never unaware
of vanguard European cinema. The most obvious sign of “artistic-nes…
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