The reception of American and French film noir in post-war Greece, 1945–58

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the distribution, promotion and critical reception of American and French film noir in Greece from 1944 to 1958 and to shed light to the reasons of the belated appearance of Greek noir examples. It is based on archival research that was made in the framework of the project ‘Film noir in Greece: Reception, assimilation, and imitation of a US film genre, from the post-war period until today’ (National & Kapodistrian University of Athens), financed by the Operational Programme Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning, P.A. 2014–20. Crime thrillers that were retrospectively labelled as film noirs, were not only known and enjoyed by the Greek public from 1945 onwards, but also their conventions and imagery were used in the journalistic discourse, showing a wider diffusion to society that was not only limited to communities of cinephiles. From this perspective, we examine the vocabulary and terminology invented and established by Greek reviewers and distributors, in order to describe the key features of the films that today we classify as film noir. We discuss how emblematic films that today form the canon of film noir were received at that time, as well as the negative discourses that appear at the same time in the public sphere, especially around issues of ‘moral panic’, violence and delinquency. Furthermore, the distinction in the reception of French vs. American films enables us to apprehend the different ideological stances towards these films and to understand why French crime films were more influential in Greece than their American counterparts.