He was staying at the Hotel Montecarlo, about ten blocks from the Hotel Ritz, a great shabby building that looked like the former residence of a military general. One entered it through a wide carriage drive, paved in black and white tile like a bathroom floor. This gave into a huge dark lobby, also tile floored. There was a grotto-like bar-room and a restaurant that was always empty. Stained marble stairs wound around the patio, and going up behind the bellhop yesterday, Guy had seen, through open doorways and windows, a Japanese couple playing cards, a woman kneeling at prayer, people writing letters at tables or merely standing with a strange air of captivity. A masculine gloom and an untraceable promise of the supernatural oppressed the whole place, and Guy had liked it instantly, though the Faulkners, including Anne, chaffed him about his choice.

His cheap little room in a back corner was crammed with pink and brown painted furniture, had a bed like a fallen cake, and a bath down the hall. Somewhere down in the patio, water dripped continuously, and the sporadic flush of toilets sounded torrential.

When he got back from the Ritz, Guy deposited his wristwatch, a present from Anne, on the pink bed table, and his billfold and keys on the scratched brown bureau, as he might have done at home. He felt very content as he got into bed with his Mexican newspaper and a book on English architecture that he had found at the Alameda book-store that afternoon. After a second plunge at the Spanish, he leaned his head back against the pillow and gazed at the offensive room, listened to the little ratlike sounds of human activity from all parts of the building. What was it that he liked, he wondered. To immerse himself in ugly, uncomfortable, undignified living so that he gained new power to fight it in his work? Or was it a sense of hiding from Miriam? He would be harder to find here than at the Ritz.

—Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950, pp. 50-1)

As un adhérent du Nouveau Roman who has decentred characters from his narratives and made architecture their star, I was delighted when I read the passage above in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950) last year.

Though a little purple round their edges—(as stained, perhaps, as the place they describe)—I nevertheless felt, for three paragraphs, almost as if I were reading one of my own ficciones intercalated into Highsmith’s literary crime novel.

In those three paragraphs, Patricia Highsmith imagines—fully a dozen years before Resnais and Robbe-Grillet—Marienbad, albeit she sites that labyrinthine hôtel onirique en Mexique, the land loved by the surrealists.

Strangers on a Train is a young novelist’s book: the brushwork is a little loose, the colour a little too chromatic. Highsmith is not yet in possession of the tight, Jamesian command of character and moral situation she will evince but half a decade later in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Yet more so than in that book (which the Library of America chose to include as a representative example in its collection Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s), Strangers on a Train is definitely a roman noir.

And, as a mere slip of a girl at thirty, Highsmith had at least written a novel which could command the attention of Hitchcock.

A couple of months ago in Melbourne, I saw Hitchcock’s 1951 adaptation of Strangers on a Train in what I’m sure must have been the first time in over twenty years. It was the second half in a double-bill that included North by Northwest (1959)—(can you believe seeing those two together on the big screen in one night?)—and whereas I knew every line and shot of the first film by heart, Strangers on a Train had slumbered so long in my memory that it was virtually like seeing it fresh.

Like Highsmith’s novel, technically I was surprised to find the film a little slipshod for Hitch: he has a matte photograph of Washington’s Capitol that manages to jump three times in a single setup; he relies a little too heavily on ill-matching stock footage for the tennis match, and the pro doubling for Farley Granger can’t possibly be mistaken for him at a distance.

But I walked out of that double feature into a dark, rainy, prematurely chill midnight in Carlton pulling my trenchcoat more tightly about me and thinking that, if a legitimate case can be made for any of Alfred Hitchcock’s films as being ‘noir’, then surely Strangers on a Train is at least as viable a contender as the oft-proposed Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

The Highsmith/Hitchcock intersection points to something fundamental about this vaporous thing called ‘noir’: both the novelist and the cinéaste are moralists in the domain of crime fiction, tellers of ‘moral tales’, though the telling of such contes moraux comes more naturally to the writer than to the filmmaker, who must principally convey his moral tone visually rather than by means of language.

There’s a whole tedious chapter (if memory serves) of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) in which Victor Hugo bangs on with his usual exhausting gusto about the architecture of the eponymous Parisian cathedral, sententiously arguing for it as a veritable ‘bible in stone’ whose every arch and capital is a letter in its visual language.

Film noir is primarily a ‘tonal’ quality of the cinematic treatment of those things in actuality which must serve the filmmaker as his alphabet—the streets, the buildings, the people, their fashions and conveyances, of modernity.

As an historical phenomenon, film noir was an æsthetic movement in the visual treatment of actuality, a distinctly expressionistic inflection of cinema’s native tendency towards realism.

As a stylistic movement proper to the artistic medium of film rather than a literary genre, film noir was, therefore, a set of ‘visual strategies’ for treating urban modernity that encompass all aspects of the cinematic apparatus but principally those native to the medium—lighting, camerawork, mise-en-scène and montage.

Film noir was an æsthetic portfolio of techniques for subjectively inflecting the image of built space, and as such, it produces an impression of ‘hyper-reality’, and thus a mood of ‘dis-ease’ in the viewer as he encounters a form of the ‘uncanny valley’ in the anthropocentric environment of the modern city.

The image of the city, this social environment built by humans ostensibly for humans—but which actually serves to alienate human beings precisely because of its ‘over-humanness’, its continual reference to anthropocentric concerns—becomes unsettlingly ambiguous in film noir.

As a tonal mood to depictions of the city, the affective character of film noir suggests an uncanny ‘doubleness’ to the faces which the spaces of modern actuality present to us when they are reduced to pure, geometric, architectonic forms by black-and-white cinematography.

… [O]blique and vertical lines are preferred to horizontal. Obliquity adheres to the choreography of the city, and is in direct opposition to the horizontal American tradition…. Oblique lines tend to splinter a screen, making it restless and unstable. Light enters the dingy rooms of film noir in such odd shapes—jagged trapezoids, obtuse triangles, vertical slits—that one suspects the windows were cut out with a pen-knife. No character can speak authoritatively from a space which is being continually cut into ribbons of light.

—Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir”, Film Comment, (Spring, 1972, p. 11)

Richard W. Allen, drawing on the thinking of André Bazin, states in his article “The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Benjamin, Adorno, and Contemporary Film Theory” (1987) that ‘film is essentially a non-intentional medium’ (my emphasis);—that, all things being equal, if the filmed image is not too heavily inflected, its reproduction of actuality produces in the viewer an impression of realism.

I say ‘realism’ because a totally uninflected image—one that is Newtonianly objective, which does not assume the position of a limited, subjective observer—is presently impossible to us. That’s still one of the charming limits of the artistic medium of cinema: a filmed image partakes of the ‘genre’ of realism without ever attaining the objective reality of which it gives the viewer a convincing impression.

In this sense, at its least inflected, even a documentary film may be as much a work of ‘realism’ as a novel by Zola—and fall as far short of a purely scientific description of actuality as his pretenses to ‘objectivity’ through the literary medium of long-form fiction.

But what forcibly struck the French-Italian critic Nino Frank in the article where he coined the term ‘film noir’ to describe a certain genre of American policier was precisely this vigorous impression of a ‘new realism’—a ‘neorealismo’, if you will—in these wartime thrillers, detective stories for the most part, but also reverse-engineered stories—like Double Indemnity (1944)—in which ordinary men and women lured into committing crime played the starring rôles rather than the sleuth uncovering their guilt.

Ainsi ces films « noirs » n’ont-ils plus rien de commun avec les bandes policières du type habituel. Récits nettement psychologiques, l’action, violente ou mouvementée, y importe moins que les visages, les comportements, les paroles – donc la vérité des personnages, cette « troisième dimension » …. Et c’est un gros progrès : après les films comme ceux-ci, les personnages des bandes policières usuelles ont l’air de fantoches. Or il n’est rien à quoi le spectateur d’aujourd’hui soit plus sensible qu’à cette empreinte de la vie, du « vécu », et, pourquoi pas, à certaines atrocités qui existent effectivement et qu’il n’a jamais servi à rien d’occulter ; la lutte pour la vie n’est pas une invention actuelle.

Thus these ‘dark’ movies have nothing in common with the usual kind of detective yarns. Distinctly psychological stories, action, in these films, whether violent or frenetic, is less important than the faces, behaviours, words—hence, the truth of these characters, that ‘third dimension’…. And this is a major step forward: after movies like these, characters in the usual detective stories appear insubstantial. Now, there is nothing towards which today’s filmgoer might be more sensitive than this trace of life, of ‘life as it is lived’, and—why not?—towards certain atrocities that actually exist, and which it has never done any good at all to hide: The struggle for life is not a current invention.

—Nino Frank, “Un nouveau genre policier : l’aventure criminelle”, L’Écran français (August 1946 [my translation])

Frank was writing two years to the month after the Liberation of Paris, and ‘life as it is lived’ during what the French call ‘les années noires’ of the Nazi Occupation had certainly been dark and full of ‘certain atrocities’.

Just as, for the Italians, the dying months of Nazi Occupation give fruitful birth to a ‘new realism’ in cinema that trenchantly refuses to hide those ‘certain atrocities’ which actually exist in the struggle for life, so for the French, more keyed to the existential implications of the crime genre, film noir, as a stylistic inflection of generic thriller material, adds a ‘third dimension’ to cinema—that of the moral psychology of crime.

By German Expressionism out of French Poetic Realism, film noir is a set of visual strategies that forcibly inflect with psychological subjectivity the ‘objective’ image photographed by this non-intentional artistic medium: the architectonic shapes and spaces of urban modernity become effective ‘crime scenes’, freighted with desire, rage, melancholy and dread.

As Paul Schrader outlines in “Notes on Film Noir”, how the spaces of urban modernity are lit, the time of day at which they are photographed, whether the setting is given as much compositional emphasis as the actors, and how active a rôle the cinematic apparatus plays in advancing the narrative determines to what extent the image of actuality photographed is inflected with a moral character we call, after the French wartime experience of doubleness and ambiguity in the places of modernity, ‘noir’.

Carl Plantinga goes a great distance towards staking out the conceptual terrain of what constitutes a tonal ‘mood’, or what he calls an ‘affective character’, in film, art, and literature, taking Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) as his particular example in “Art Moods and Human Moods in Narrative Cinema” (2012).

Building on the work of Greg M. Smith, Plantinga argues that the plot-based ‘events’ in both literary and cinematic narratives (as, for instance, in both Highsmith’s and Hitchcock’s respective versions of Strangers on a Train) are clothed and cloaked in ‘an affective experience that permeates the fictional world of the work.’

Plantinga argues that this enveloping ‘mood’ of a given film ‘is something like its affective “character”,’ and that, to use his example, ‘[i]n Touch of Evil we could describe this [mood] as dark, foreboding, anxious, and unbalanced.’

As per Schrader’s iconographic summary of film noir stylistics, a preponderant percentage of scenes in Touch of Evil are shot in low light, at nighttime or in sombre interiors, with light sources stabbing stark rays into the frame from outré angles. Certainly, the baroque emphasis on the built environment of the Mexican border-town is given as much visual prominence as the actors. And, from the very first and famous shot crossing the frontier, Welles actively employs the cinematic apparatus to drive the moral tale he has to tell forward.

As Plantinga puts it, in a film noir like Touch of Evil (which he says is particularly effective at conveying its global mood of dread, anxiety and unbalance), the form of the film as much as its visual content is charged with an affective character whose essential qualia we might call ‘noir’.

… [T]he film noir may set the scene in a city late at night, the empty streets deserted and the rain falling, a few figures huddled in isolated doorways—all suggestive of darkness, wetness, coldness, and loneliness. On the soundtrack are the strains of melancholy music, together with the faint sounds of a quarreling couple in some nearby apartment.

—Carl Plantinga, “Art Moods and Narrative Moods in Narrative Cinema” (2012, p. 465)

In film noir, the visual ‘content’ of urban architectural forms—buildings, streets, doorways, apartments—undergo an epiphanic formal treatment. The qualities of darkness, emptiness, wetness, coldness and loneliness described by Plantinga in this imaginary example—not to mention the muted sound of anger—cloak the city in a shroud—but it’s a glamorous shroud.

In this epiphanic formal treatment, this intentional subjective inflection of visual content that carries no affective character in itself, the images of cities and the typical structures within them are glamorized by the cinematic apparatus, bringing out a supposed ‘poetic realism’ immanent in these objective structures, their implicit ‘photogénie’, their ‘sexy’ appeal to the camera’s non-intentional eye.

It’s arguable that what Frank was responding to in 1946 as a new realism in Hollywood crime dramas was in fact a ‘hyper-reality’ that the cinematic apparatus, with glamorizing intentionality, was painting on the banal visual content of actuality.

As I demonstrate in the video essay at the top of this post, somehow the hour of the day, the tightness of the aperture, the least inflection one can give to a photographed image of actuality in what was simply intended as a background for a Mexico City driving shot;—somehow all this plus the intrinsic, reductive beauty of black-and-white as an æsthetic limitation and inflection of reality works together to make even the most banal image of city streets and buildings ‘noir’.

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On a personal note, your Melbourne Flâneur joined the new social medium AirChat this week and he’s loving it. Here’s a link to my feed:

https://www.air.chat/themelbflaneur

I’ve been very resistant to social media and I’m typically glacial in the speed of my take-up when it comes to new technologies, but when I heard about AirChat, I jumped on it. After twenty years of standing on the sidelines watching the other kids play, I think this is social medium I’ve been waiting for.

So far, AirChat gives evidence of being the perfect social medium for a writer to rehearse his ideas in public. I’ve been putting the voice-to-text AI through its paces by reading aloud daily drafts of a new short story I’m working on, and as you can see in the quick and dirty video below, the AI accurately renders complex sentences featuring a technical vocabulary of architectural and mathematical terms which (according to the OED) are typically not among the most frequently used words in English.

I also find that it copes with my slippages into French and Italian pretty well, often correcting itself when it mistakes a foreign word for one that sounds similar in English. It seems to search the Internet for self-corrections: in an exchange with Naval Ravikant where I invoked the name of Carlo Gozzi, the AI subsequently fixed up its initial misrendering of ‘gotsy’ based on the context of my voice note—what is called a ‘chit’ on AirChat.

In addition to giving the good folk on AirChat a daily earful of what I have been writing in the mornings, I’ve also posted a few random thoughts throughout the day based on the notes I’ve taken from my readings in researching this article.

So if you would like to interact with your Melbourne Flâneur, take vicarious, asynchronous part in my flâneries, or perhaps listen in or contribute yourself to some of the generative intellectual conversations that are happening on AirChat, I invite you to follow me @themelbflaneur.