Conditions for the Reception of a Style

Given the rather indeterminate nature and vague definition of film noir as a genre by scholars, even in its native country of the United States, there is always a question about which elements of its visual grammar, or parts of its thematic lines, or mise en scène, could have been adopted by a peripheral and, at that time, still unorganised film industry like that of Greece in the 1950s. Furthermore, film noir was not a genre whose theoretical or critical principles were formed or addressed in the concrete manner that we find in movements such as German Expressionism and Soviet montage cinematography before the Second World War, or Italian neorealism afterwards. It was a diffuse visual style, an emotional atmosphere more than a generic form, which eventually was transformed into an existential mood, defined by emotions generated in an unfriendly, alienated and horizonless urban world, a world of moral ambiguities in which everything was beyond human control. As Thomas Schatz (1981: 113) pointed out, film noir ‘documented the growing disillusionment with certain traditional American values in the face of complex and often contradictory social, political, scientific and economic developments’.

Such an atmosphere of disillusionment, bordering on deep pessimism and, occasionally, nihilism, can be detected in the work of many popular directors since the beginning of cinema, reflecting or indeed refracting the various sociopolitical vicissitudes and aesthetic concerns of the post-war era. It also suggested the deep existential traumas, social panics, as well as psychological conflicts that dominated the visual imaginary, explored through the most advanced form of technological modernity, the cinema. In a way, it expressed cinematic versions of the ‘problematic hero’, whose emergence in the beginning of modernity defined the literary genre of the novel as experiencing ‘transcendental homelessness’ in an era of ‘absolute sinfulness’ (Lukács [1920] 1971: 18, 41). Such a homeless, indeed centreless, character without redemption in a sinful world is also the main thematic reference of most films noirs at least during the peak moment of the early 1950s.

The movies we call noir today were also veritable by-products of the film industry and its distribution system, in its promotional practice of selling blocks of films which was related to the structural need of the big studios to develop and test the emerging stars of the industry (see Kerr [1979] 1996; Maltby [1995] 2003).