In and Out of the Shadows of Noir

Abstract

If doubling has a home in American cinema, pitching its tent in the everyday after originating in the fantastic, it is surely film noir, that place/genre/style/cycle/mode where ambiguities and doublings, particularly those spawned by mirrors and shadows, become systematic duplicity. Its potential occupation of the underside of all American genres is intimated by its ability to slide into, and under the surface of, one after another, as not until the late 1960s — when its own defining black-and-white had become all-but inaccessible to American directors — did directors know that they were contributing to a genre called noir and not to (inter alia) ‘murder mystery’, ‘thriller’, ‘detective story’, or even ‘melodrama’ (Mildred Pierce (1945)). Its real name, perhaps hidden of necessity around and immediately after World War Two, is often seen as German, the expressionism that is also an imagistic source-book for Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), the lead film here in part for that reason. Some of the form’s examples and relatives are inspected below, early limbs of a family tree including Gilda (1946), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Vertigo (1958), its later extension beyond black-and-white, beyond the 1940s and 1950s and beyond the USA (Suzhou he (Suzhou River) (2000) being just one of many possible examples) marking the reverberation of its model of the relations between power, freedom and eros across post-war cinema in general, Gilles Deleuze’s ‘time-image’ being as much a matter of noirish temporal dislocations and spirals as anything else.