05/02/2019

Why do the French Love American Noir? And Where does the French Film Noir come from?





French readers appreciate superb writing, especially superb noir, especially when that noir is from the US. This has been proven time and again in the post-war period, but it first came to my attention in 2008 when I started reading New Jersey-based author, Mark SaFranko. I became a fan of his work and was surprised he wasn’t more popular in his home country. Then I learned he had a huge following in France. That story repeated itself a few times in the following years, and eventually I accepted a blanket truth: the French have great taste in books. Now, after years of being an author and a reviewer, I know more about publishing than I did back when I first read SaFranko or learned the extent to which the French love Harry Crews. I also know many more American writers with thriving careers in France. So I thought, why not ask them what they think this French love of American noir is all about?

The perfect example of this cultural phenomenon may be Benjamin Whitmer and his latest novel, Evasion, published by Gallmeister, a French publisher specializing in American noir and nature literature. Evasion has been nominated for awards and recently became a bestseller in France; it hasn’t been published in the US. Let that sink in. Whitmer, author of Pike and Cry Father, is one of the finest purveyors of noir in this country, and francophones are enjoying his latest while American publishers are sleeping on it.

Whitmer was the starting point in my quest to find out the main differences between American and French publishing and, perhaps more importantly, book culture. I asked him why he thought American noir appeals to French readers.
“To be honest, I’m not sure it’s especially a French thing. I think people all over the world read noir, read tragedy,” said Whitmer. “The only place where there is no place for noir or tragedy is America. As David Vann said, ‘We have the idea in America that a book should have likable characters and make us feel good by the end. This is a new and idiotic idea and erases 2,500 years of literary culture.’ No other culture is dumb enough to believe that. That takes a specifically pathological self-concept and denial of reality.”

Laura Lippman, the New York Times bestselling author of Sunburn, After I’m Gone, and many others, thinks the French obsession with American writers stems from their love of stories that depict the country as they imagine it, and not because of American noir’s gloomy, violent nature.
“I think other countries like fiction that presents the US as they think it is,” said Lippman. “And while noir is a big part of that, so is what I’ll call suburban suspense, the kind of novels that won Harlan Coben such a huge following in France.”
While I don’t disagree with Lippman and Whitmer, I think there is a special place in the heart of French readers for noir. Even the term comes from them. While there are rumors that the term had been used since 1939, the most commonly accepted origin narrative traces it back to French film critic Nino Frank, who started using it in 1946 to refer to black and white Hollywood films influenced by American hardboiled fiction.

Jake Hinkson, author of The Blind Alley, No Tomorrow, and The Big Ugly, has had his work translated to French and has won the Grand Prix des Littératures Policières and the Prix Mystère de la Critique. Like Whitmer, Hinkson has been traveling to Europe as he cultivates success there. He agrees with Whitmer on one thing: the French love American noir because it illuminates the soul of the country, the real America.
“I think the French are fascinated with American noir because they’re fascinated by America,” said Hinkson. “They view noir as a body of literature that is critical and revealing of American culture. I don’t think the French have much respect for things that Americans think are classy (your average Oscar-bait movie, for instance), and they tend to be a little weary of all the stuff that is NYC-centric or overly LA. But they’ve always had a fascination with other parts of the country, the ‘real America’ if you will. That’s why the French were the first ones to the recognize the artistic merits of things like jazz and gospel. It’s why they embraced regional artists like Faulkner. And it’s why they were the first ones to recognize that guys like Thompson and Goodis weren’t just failed pulp writers but rather authentic and unique literary talents.”

William Boyle, author of Death Don’t Have No Mercy, A Lonely Witness and Gravesend, has also had his work translated into French and published by Gallmeister. He has been nominated to the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and has traveled to France recently to participate in readings and festivals. He echoed Hinkson’s thoughts.
“They know that American noir presents a true portrait of this country, that it doesn’t hold back or hide things, that it isn’t afraid to search the dark corners,” said Boyle. “I think they know that noir has always told the truth about America—they were the ones who first sensed that. Also, they’re not turned off by unlikeable characters or unhappy endings.”

Unhappy endings. I love them. In fact, noir works best for me when there is no space for the bland, cliched happy endings that have become sine qua non elements of Hollywood movies and most formulaic crime and horror fiction nowadays. Perhaps the best explanation of this love for unflinching truth the French have comes from David Joy, author of The Line That Held Us and The Weight of This World, both of which have been translated to French and published by Sonatine Éditions.




“In my experience, French readers tend to be a braver lot,” said Joy. “I think the thing about good noir that’s hard for some folks is that it forces you to go to uncomfortable places and to confront uncomfortable things and a lot of readers just aren’t willing to do that. I think that’s particularly true of American readers. I say this because of the books that sell well in the States. I say this because of the criticisms I hear about books time and time again. For the most part, what moves in this country are airplane books—something I can pick up in a terminal, read on a flight, and toss in the trash before I catch a cab. It’s something to fill time more than it is something to challenge beliefs. I hear people say, ‘Well, I didn’t relate to the characters.’ I’m sorry, but I don’t believe relatability is a requirement of good literature. In fact, I believe the opposite. I believe good literature allows us to walk in the shoes of someone we might otherwise dismiss. For me, that statement about not relating to characters boils down to a refusal to venture into uncomfortable ground. That’s not something I’ve experienced with French readers. They tend to still want books that are challenging. They seem to still view literature as an instrument of critical thinking and change.”

So what is the main difference between France’s literary culture and our own? This was not something I had thought about from the beginning. Instead, this was a question that developed over time. The more I learned about French literary culture, the more I liked what they do and how they do it. When two French publishers started showing interest in my novels, I became really curious. The fact that publishers so far from here are aware of what’s happening in indie publishing in the US is a testament to how much they care about good books. Joy thinks French book culture is great because it’s part of their fabric as a society.
“Books just matter more,” said Whitmer. “Somebody over there once told me that the difference between their politics and ours is that we could never elect a politician who didn’t profess to believe in God, and they could never elect a politician who didn’t read. It’s baked into every part of their life. Reading and books are afforded an entirely different weight in France. They don’t have creative classes in France, because their conception of it is that it’s something too special to be taught. It can be a little unnerving as an author, but it means that they’ve gone to great lengths to protect their book culture, and not allowed it to become the almost entirely corporate entity ours has via Big 5 publishing and Amazon.”

Meanwhile, Hinkson said that both cultures are vastly different in terms of what reading means and how it’s perceived. “Reading in France is a national obsession,” said Hinkson. “It’s a wholly different culture than the States. I mean, people go to college to be booksellers. It’s not just seen as a part-time job like it is here. It’s a profession. At book events, writers don’t read their work, they just discuss it with the audience. And the questions aren’t ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ or ‘What time of day do you like to write?’ It’s graduate-school level discussions of character and theme. It’s probing and personal. And, I mean, these questions are coming from regular people. Americans have always been suspicious of intellectuals. The French just…aren’t. They respect intelligence and expertise. They don’t have that ‘You think you’re better than me ‘cause you think you’re so smart’ chip-on-the-shoulder thing that we have here. For a writer, it’s extremely exciting.”
What Hinkson’s comments illuminate is that French readers, publishers, and booksellers love and respect books and the people who write them. They also take bookselling seriously and support bookstores. This was also something Lippman (“Books really matter in France”) and Boyle (“They value independent bookstores and booksellers in a way that just knocks me out”) both noted in their responses. Furthermore, the French also value literary festivals and treat authors like celebrities when they go over for an event.

That said, there are other elements at play that are part of the business side and that further separate both reading cultures. According to Joy, economics and reading practices play a huge part of it.
“For starters, the French consume more books,” said Joy. “You look at the statistics and the French are always in the top ten well-read countries in the world. They’re typically somewhere around number seven. The U.S., on the other hand, we’re lucky to make the top 30. People just don’t read here. In this country, one third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Forty-two percent of college graduates never read another book after college. Eighty percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year. Seventy percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years. That’s staggering. What I love most about book culture in France, though, as opposed to the States, is the fixed pricing model. Retailers have to sell books for the listed cover price. What that’s done is stripped the privilege and advantages of bulk retailers like Amazon who are able to sell books for a fraction of the list price, and it has given that power back to the small independent booksellers who serve communities all over the country. Here in the U.S. it takes a deliberate choice to say, I’m willing to pay full retail so that my dollars stay within my community, and the fact is most Americans aren’t willing or are unable to make that choice. As a result, our independent bookstore culture has struggled to survive.”

The reason why French readers love American noir is not simple. In fact, there are multiple elements at play. Reading is engrained in French culture. Intellectualism is celebrated instead of made fun of and feared. Unhappy endings are accepted and even encouraged because they are understood to be part of life.
Noir shows the US in a negative light that reveals a lot of brutality, and that’s part of how the French imagine the underbelly of the country (and they are not wrong). French readers are fearless about bad things and crave fiction that shows the States as the hyper-violent place it is, especially for minorities, immigrants, and poor people—American noir delivers that. Every author interviewed for this piece writes superb, dark fiction, and they should be treated like celebrities here. Unfortunately, we need to change a few things about our book culture, starting with the tendency to dislike a narrative solely because it doesn’t have a happy ending.
I suggest we start working on those changes because, as it stands now, my response has morphed slightly: “Why do the French love American noir? It’s complicated, but to put it simply, they have better taste than us when it comes to books and treat writers the way they deserve.” Yeah, I know that’s a problematic answer, but maybe it gets the conversation going in the right direction. The first step? Go read these wonderful authors and let their darkness, which is our collective darkness, into you heart.

Why do the French love American Noir? By Gabino Iglesias. Crimereads, January 30,  2019. 













Any discussion of French film noir must begin by challenging a few myths.

Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s seminal A Panorama of American Film Noir, first published in 1955, sees film noir – despite the French name – as an American phenomenon. French attempts are dismissed as imitation and confined to the post-war period. In a remarkable case of cultural amnesia that overlooks France’s contribution to the genre, the French critic Nino Frank is credited with coining the phrase in 1946, in the excitement of discovering a batch of Hollywood noir movies banned during the war. Another legend sees the expression ‘film noir’ originating in the Gallimard Série noire imprint of crime novels, founded by Marcel Duhamel in 1945

Yet, as the film critic and theorist André Bazin noted, “In French pre-war cinema, even if there wasn’t exactly a genre, there was a style, the realist film noir,” referring to films that critics such as Frank had named as such before the war. For instance, a review of Pierre Chenal’s Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Turn, 1939) – the first adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice – states: “Here is another film noir, which belongs to the sinister series which starts with Les Bas-fonds and Crime et châtiment and continues with Pépé le Moko and Le Quai des brumes, La Bête humaine and Hôtel du Nord. No doubt this series has produced the most significant French films of the last few years.”
The importance and impact of American film noir are of course not in question. Nevertheless, as the above suggests, and scholarship now amply demonstrates, a powerful current that merits the adjective ‘noir’ runs through French cinema. Many of the films are famous in their own right. Some are regarded as part of a movement known as poetic realism: dark, melodramatic films that fuse two apparent opposites – a ‘realistic’ description of working-class lives with a poetic, or lyrical, style. (Pierre Chenal’s 1934 La Rue sans nom is the first film to be called as such, and the movement’s greatest classics are probably Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes in 1938 and Le Jour se lève in 1939.) Other titles are famous as the work of filmmakers known for their proclivity for dark subjects and style (Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean-Pierre Melville). But longer and deeper continuities sustain the persistence of noir in French film, which will be examined here in its heyday, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s.

Although the phenomenon was not confined to France, French writers showed a strong attraction to the underbelly of society, the ‘bas-fonds’ (‘lower depths’), from the early modern period onwards and in particular in the 18th-century roman noir, examining those living on the margins of the big cities, the poor and the criminals. This first culminated in the 19th century in the aftermath of the French Revolution and against the background of urbanisation and capitalism, with a particular focus on Paris. A supreme early expression was Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), soon followed by many novelists (Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue), journalists and campaigners, and even a criminal turned chief of police, Eugène François Vidocq. It is no accident that Edgar Allan Poe located his short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841, credited as the first detective story) in Paris; in turn, it gave rise to a long tradition of international crime literature to which all film noir is directly or indirectly indebted.
Meanwhile, the late 19th century saw a fundamental shift in attitudes to the bas-fonds from revulsion to fascination. This was in part due to the Romantics and their love of bohemia. They continued to be fascinated by the poverty, vice and crime that defined representations of the urban lower depths, but they observed it with a greater poetic – and increasingly, nostalgic – sensibility. Such attitudes are in evidence in the work of a number of 20th-century French-language writers who produced key texts for French film noir, among them Pierre Mac Orlan, the author of Le Quai des brumes, who coined the phrase ‘social fantastic’, a precursor of ‘poetic realism’.


Mac Orlan and others, such as Francis Carco and Eugène Dabit, were close to the so-called populist literature of the 1920s that focused on the working classes, but which were not untouched by crime. Concurrently, crime literature thrived; particularly influential were two Belgian writers, Stanislas-André Steeman and, especially, Georges Simenon. Their novels explored all backgrounds, with a predilection for the teeming faubourgs of Paris and low dives in the port towns of Le Havre or Marseille. For decades to come, Simenon would prove one of the richest single sources of noir stories, both for his ‘hard novels’ in which crime is located in the everyday, and for his policiers featuring the solid, pipe-smoking Inspector Maigret. Two early Maigret adaptations, Jean Renoir’s La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads, 1932) and Julien Duvivier’s La Tête d’un homme (1933) set the tone for a certain social voyeurism and the ambiguous intermingling of criminals and law-abiding citizens against picturesque mean streets.


From different corners of high and low literature, this interest in the dark corners of French society proved highly successful (extending also to popular song) and provides part of the cultural background that eventually led to French film noir. But the migration of these motifs to French cinema only came about through developments in photography and cinematography that converged in the French capital between the two world wars. Although dark melodramas and crime cinema existed in the silent period, French film noir proper began with the coming of sound around 1930.
The review of Le Dernier Tournant quoted above laments the “special atmosphere” of “characters led to destitution and death by an implacable destiny”, concluding, “It seems unfortunate that the French film ‘school’ is represented by films which… are long poems to discouragement.” While this atmosphere was indeed predicated on narratives of doom and despair, it also owed a lot to trends in visual arts that were not confined to the ‘French film school’.

Paris in the 1930s was a magnet for photographers, particularly Central and Eastern European émigrés, and the attraction of the city was reinforced by the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany: André Kertész, Brassaï, Germaine Krull and François Kollar, to name the most famous, documented French society, often relishing the city’s less salubrious corners. Particularly famous is Brassaï’s collection The Secret Paris of the 30s, with its nocturnal sewage workers, barmen, pimps and prostitutes, in a dense, inky idiom. His combination of glamorous chiaroscuro, louche subjects and poetic tone was extreme. Yet its shadowy iconography and mingling of working and criminal classes found echoes in the flourishing sensationalist press of the time (eg, Détective, a popular weekly magazine published by Gallimard from 1928, which specialised in sensational murder enquiries and mysteries), and had clear parallels in film, notably Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), La Nuit du carrefour and La Bête humaine (1938); Anatole Litvak’s Coeur de Lilas (1932); Jacques Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu (1934); Duvivier’s La Tête d’un homme, La Bandera (1935) and Pépé le Moko (1937); Jean Grémillon’s Gueule d’amour (1937); Carné’s Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève; and Chenal’s La Rue sans nom and indeed Le Dernier Tournant.
It is a cliché to point to the impact of German expressionism on film noir, yet like all clichés it contains some truth. Many German émigrés transited via France en route to Hollywood and left an indelible mark. Some filmmakers (Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, G.W. Pabst) stayed only briefly, but others, such as Robert Siodmak, had a greater impact (Mister Flow, 1936; Mollenard, 1938; and Pièges, 1939, all contain noir thriller elements).

German directors of photography such as Curt Courant and Eugen Schüfftan worked extensively on French films, importing expressionist imagery. They also directly trained, or indirectly influenced, French colleagues such as Jules Kruger, Marc Fossard, Claude Renoir and Nicolas Hayer. Some of the most memorable noir images in the 1930s and beyond can be traced to German-inspired cinematography: Courant’s glittering work on the murder scene in La Bête humaine, Schüfftan’s dramatic lighting effects in Le Quai des brumes, and Hayer’s brooding shadows from Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943) to Melville’s Le Doulos (1962). As critic Emile Vuillermoz put it in 1939, “Noir is currently the colour of fashion in our studios.”
The precision and beauty of this type of lighting, both contrasted and diffuse, in conjunction with the remarkable sets of Lazare Meerson and Alexandre Trauner (and their disciples) defined French film noir by marrying an international visual style to minutely observed French decors. In the process, they imbued sordid lower-depths locations, such as the bars in Le Grand Jeu and Le Quai des brumes or the workhouse in Renoir’s Les Bas-fonds (1936), with a poetic grandeur. In respect of this visual style, as well as in terms of subject matter and literary origins, French film noir in the 1930s overlaps more or less with poetic realism, even though a few poetic realist films are less easily identified as noir, largely because of the absence of a criminal element within them – such as Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) – or because of their comic slant, such as Carné’s Hôtel du Nord (1938).






The noir visual aesthetic continued, often in even darker mood, in post-war classical French cinema that looked back towards the pre-war films, such as Carné’s Les Portes de la nuit (1946), Clouzot’s Quai des orfèvres (1947) and Yves Allégret’s Une si jolie petite plage (Such a Pretty Little Beach, 1948). But noir left poetic realism behind in gangster films, such as Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), and the resistance drama Marie-Octobre (Duvivier, 1959) and many others. The arrival of the New Wave and its taste for location shooting inevitably had an impact, yet it did not banish the glamour of night-time urban scenes – far from it, as we can see in precursors such as Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1956) and Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold (1958), but also in the New Wave’s own noir pastiches, such as François Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist (Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965). Made just before colour became the norm, these noir tributes may be seen as the last outposts of stylish black-and-white cinematography.

French film noir thus has long antecedents in written and visual representations of the bas-fonds, and visual characteristics informed by contemporary professional practice and geopolitical developments. Equally significant was the immediate French social background, including the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the left-wing Popular Front alliance of 1936-38, the war and German occupation of 1940-44, and the post-war advent of American-inflected modernity. As products of popular culture, French film noirs neither adopt an explicitly political stance nor simply ‘reflect’ contemporary events. But they undoubtedly bear the traces of their respective traumatic social contexts. In the late 1930s, for instance, some can be read as meditations on Popular Front hopes and then disillusionment, and in the post-war period, they explicitly engage with American culture, providing a cultural framework for shifting definitions of national identity. But the area in which they most visibly echo changing social parameters is in their delineation of gender relations.

Just like its American counterpart, French film noir is the genre par excellence of masculinity in crisis, brimming with vulnerable men drawn to crime, ‘victims’ of alluring females, or preys to a cruel fate. Building on the charisma of glamorous stars, the films side with these maladjusted figures. In the 1930s Jean Gabin epitomised the tragic proletarian hero haunted by the past, lured by a scheming – or even innocent – woman, defeated by evil patriarchs or just circumstances (Pépé le Moko, Gueule d’amour, La Bête humaine, Le Quai des brumes, Le Jour se lève).
As we have seen, these overtly pessimistic scenarios drew critical disapproval in some quarters, yet their murderous and/or suicidal heroes did not trouble the censors (unlike in Hollywood, where various remakes saw their endings modified) and they continued to draw audiences. During and immediately after the war, the more weary masculinity of central male figures, in Le Corbeau, Les Portes de la nuit, Quai des orfèvres, Une si jolie petite plage and Manon (Clouzot, 1949) can easily be mapped against the traumatic defeat of France, the humiliations of the German occupation and the retributions that followed.

While some scholars see the godfather-like protagonists of the post-war gangster films as a symbolic restoration of patriarchal power, equally striking is these characters’ ultimate powerlessness and penchant for nostalgia, despite the films’ surface modernity. In Touchez pas au grisbi and Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955) and many others, a stint in jail is a coded reference to the war years, and regret for the passing of the pre-war ‘good old days’ is pervasive. This is also striking in the self-conscious tributes to Hollywood noir towards the end of the period, as seen in Melville’s anachronistic gangsters in Le Doulos and Le Samouraï (1967), respectively played by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon.
Against this panorama of flawed, yet glamorous and charismatic male figures, the women of French film noir are less exalted, presented as marginalised and often degraded figures. Here too historical patterns emerge. Notable women in pre-war noir include the hapless prostitute of La Chienne (Janie Marèse), the kept women of Pépé le Moko and Gueule d’amour (Mireille Balin in both cases), the capricious child-woman of La Bête humaine (Simone Simon) – charming yet clichéd products of populist literature. One exception is the idealised romantic ‘waif’ of poetic realism, the archetype being Michèle Morgan in Le Quai des brumes. But across the decade, none of these women is endowed with much narrative agency or erotic power. In the 1940s, Le Corbeau testifies to stronger female figures emerging in the war years, in noir as well as other genres.


But with some exceptions, such as Les Portes de la nuit, in which the standard poetic realist woman is made to look like a Hollywood icon (initially to be played by Marlene Dietrich, replaced by the inexperienced Nathalie Nattier), post-war noir takes a striking misogynist turn. Extreme noir melodramas such as Manon, Manèges (Yves Allégret, 1950) and Voici le temps des assassins (Deadlier than the Male, Duvivier, 1956) showcase women as evil or perverse creatures bent on destroying men. Only in the rare instances when the noir women are embodied by major stars such as Simone Signoret in Les Diaboliques (Clouzot, 1955) and Brigitte Bardot in La Vérité (Clouzot, 1960) do they attain real glamour and a degree of complexity. Meanwhile, the policiers infantilise gangsters’ molls, symbolised by the slaps they frequently receive; Melville’s films relegate them further to the role of alibi, whether treated cruelly (Le Doulos) or kindly (Le Deuxième Souffle, 1966; Le Samouraï).


The sense of the popularity of French noir being used to mete out a symbolic backlash against the growing post-war emancipation of women in real life is hard to escape. Nor is this trend contradicted by auteur cinema adaptations of US noir fiction, such as Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist, The Bride Wore Black (La Mariée était en noir, 1968) and The Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississipi, 1969). With very few exceptions, women in French film noir are denied both the transgressive power of the femme fatale and the affirmative role of the ‘good girl’ of their American counterparts. The real drama is always that of the young homme fatal or of the ageing patriarch.

Throughout the period evoked above, there were other successful genres in French cinema besides film noir, including comedy and costume film. Yet, as in Hollywood, it is noir that caught the cultural imagination. Like 19th-century readers of Hugo and Balzac and 20th-century fans of Simenon, we are endlessly drawn to the dark universe of crime, failure and melodrama, almost always ending in death. It is indicative that the best filmmakers in the period (Renoir, Duvivier, Clouzot, Melville among them) all worked in this idiom, producing a string of beautiful, sombre films. Like the literature of the bas-fonds, film noir projects a fantasy that may not be factually accurate but nevertheless gets to the heart of the darkest corners of society and human nature.


How the French birthed film noir. By Ginette Vincendeau. Sight & Sound, November 15,  2016



















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