Invisible Cities, Visible Cinema: Illuminating Shadows in Late Film Noir

Abstract

The visible, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has taught us, always involves the invisible; what we see entails a zone of the not-seen.1 Seventies film theory too frequently thought of cinema as exemplifying the glare (or frenzy) of the visible, devoted to the lure of visual mastery. This led to a simplification of cinema’s ideological role as propping up the viewer’s investment in a visual image as the product of a gaze. However, such analysis too often celebrated the insight of the analyst over the complicity of the medium, rather than offering a detailed exploration of cinema’s complex stylistic interaction within modern visual culture. Cinema also offers an exploration of the vulnerability and limitation of vision. As an art of the visible, film must necessarily become an art of the invisible. This essay explores the cinematic portrayal of urban space, a theme by now well established in the field of film studies. But by exploring both the style and thematics of cinematic cities within a dialectic of vision that sees vision as specific, limited, embodied and also shaped by social and historical contexts, I hope to show that the visible city shadows an invisible city, not simply as a formal device, but as an essential structure of our modern environment. The visible twines about the invisible, not only in film style, but in our experience of the modern urban environment. For that reason cinema supplies one of the richest means of portraying, exploring and – ultimately – understanding the city. In the century that stretches from the late 1840s to 1950 new technologies transformed urban spaces and redefined modern visual experience. The invention of photography, the rise of mass media (from newspapers, to film, to television), the new visual modes of mass marketing and consumer culture (from the omnipresent advertising