Une grève, sanglante et poétique (A Strike, Bloody and Poetic): French Film Noir and the Defeat of the Popular Front

Abstract

French film noir is generally understood to be derived from, commenting upon, and rewriting the American movement, with the major works coming in the late 1950s and 1960s, at precisely the moment when American noir was declining.1 ‘To be authentic roman noir [the crime novel] — and consequently film noir — had to be American’ is the way Robin Buss (1994, p. 13) presents the impulse in post-war France in the most comprehensive study of the form. This chapter, though, will instead claim that ‘authentic film noir’ is French; that the end of what is generally referred to as poetic realism constituted the beginning of film noir as it was subsequently developed in post-war Hollywood. Both moments were leftist formations that registered first, the defeat of the French Popular Front, and then in the United States the defeat of both the New Deal (the American Popular Front) and, more crucially, of the post-war strike wave, which, like the earlier French wave of strikes from 1936–38, erupted in all corners of life, including very dramatically in the film industry.