Film noir has always been a mutating, elusive, even fugitive category, at once a central body of films from American cinema that includes Double Indemnity (dir. Wilder, 1944), Out of the Past (dir. Tourneur, 1947), Kiss Me Deadly (dir. Aldrich, 1955) and Touch of Evil (dir. Welles, 1958), and a shaping discourse that constantly redefines the meaning of those films and the mode of filmmaking of which they form part. Film noir can be quite tightly defined and periodised, or understood as a much more diffuse phenomenon that stretches across different art forms (encompassing advertising, comics, graphic novels, short stories and novels, painting, photography, radio drama, television and music), different periods and different countries. If we abandon attempts to define (and thereby delimit) its essential characteristics and accept noir as a mode of attention, a sensibility, a particular approach to understanding the world, then I think we are open to understanding the full range of its seductive appeal and its pervasiveness.

When the label film noir first emerged – conventionally attributed to Nino Frank in an article published in L’Écran français in August 1946 – it served to designate a group of American crime films that had both an arresting visual style and a sombre, bleak view of American life. During the six-year absence of American films during the Occupation, it seemed to French critics that American cinema had come of age, and was capable of engaging with ‘difficult’ subjects: sexuality, corruption, betrayal, trauma, psychological breakdown – a raft of social, political and historical problems that had rarely found their way into films in the pre-war period. Of course, as always, it was a case of which films were given attention rather than an objective categorisation (the films discussed were not the ones that were most popular at the box office) but that attention served to identify films noirs as a critical, oppositional mode of filmmaking, films that were ‘autopsies’ of society, to invoke the term used by director Mike Hodges to describe his British neo-noir Get Carter (1971).

That founding moment confined how film noir was understood as a seemingly uniquely American form of cinema for the next forty years. Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir américain (1955) delineated ‘a group of nationally identifiable films’ whose common features of style, subject matter and ‘atmosphere’ gave them ‘an inimitable quality’ ([1955] 2002: 1), and dismissed other European claimants.