By Imogen Sara Smith/Criterion (August 14, 2016)
Proofreading: Issac
The translation was first published in "Iris"
If you want to spark a debate among the film noir fans, there's no easier way than to propose adding or omitting a classic. All of these debates point to an eternally thorny question: what is film noir? Film noir is notoriously cunning, often pointing to a multitude of narratively confusing and morally ambiguous works.
Is it a genre, a collection, or a style? Too often, it's in danger of becoming some sort of label, defined by a list of themes with at-a-glance themes. There must have been some men in trench coats with granite chins and fedora brim drawn down over their eyes. There must also be a femme fatale, her lipsticked lips gleaming like wet asphalt and her heels crunching. Guns have to be drawn at a particular moment, cigarette smoke has to linger in the light of shutters, and beatings have to happen in a dead end behind a neon-lit cocktail bar. There's bound to be crime, light-hearted banter, and a dorky protagonist who stumbles upon fate.
Don't get me wrong: I love these iconic elements as much as any other film noir fan, but I also see the essence of film noir and they are unique. This essence is hidden beneath the surface of crime and violence, in an inner world of alienation, anxiety, obsession, and disillusionment. Or as crime writer David Goodes summed it up in his novel Nightfall: "Some level of confusion mixed with some depression, loneliness, bitterness, and finally a touch of despair."
These elements are found in many films and are not exclusive to classic film noir. Some fans like to patrol these boundaries, rejecting films that don't qualify. I believe that boundaries are permeable and that film noir has a mode of transmission like a contagion or a miasma. There are exceptions to this rule - brightly colored film noir ("Heavenly Love" or "Desert Fury"), country noir ("The Hitchhiker", "The Hitchhiker" or "Hard Rice"), noir age Movies ("The Most Repeated Offender" or "The Infatuation") - they don't disprove the rules, but prove that, like so many other film noirs, the rules are meant to be bent until they snap with tension.
For the record, I don't think film noir is a genre.
Film genres are defined by genre or setting—westerns, war films, gangster or heist films, romantic comedies—while film noir is a flexible set of plot elements, themes, visuals, and narrative conventions, all of which It was formed during a certain period in Hollywood, roughly from 1940 to 1960. Film noir has a melting pot pedigree with sources including American pulp fiction, German expressionism and poetic realism, and it ranges from semi-documentary cop crime dramas to flashy psychodramas, from witty living room murder mysteries to Brutal prison movie. That's not to say that defining film noir or tracing the origins and trajectories of classic sequences isn't worth it. But this discussion goes deeper only when considering the origins, congeners or offshoots of film noir - i.e. film noir series in other countries, silent film noir, pre-Hays Code noir, noir westerns, noir melodrama...
Melodrama is where some people hesitate. As a much-maligned form, it's often seen as film noir's embarrassing, fuss-free half-sister, and the popularity of the grim style, along with its dry, manly stoicism, often overshadows the relationship between them close relationship. (Before the term "film noir" was widely adopted, the films we now call film noir were often referred to as "criminal melodramas" - James Agee's 1946 essay on "The Masked Pirate." wrote in a review of The Black Angels and Dead End.) Noir stories are always fueled by strong, violent emotions — paranoid love or hate, vengeful greed, fear or desire. Film noir and melodrama are both stories about people trapped or haunted by forces beyond their control. The deadpan demeanor of the tough guy, like the operatic excesses of a melodrama, is a stylized reaction. Is a conflict that culminates in an emotional outburst really more incredible than a conflict that culminates in a gunfight?
"Bitter Rain and Spring Breeze" (1956) opens with a gunshot, followed by the sound of fallen leaves and broken whiskey bottles, and the story unfolds in flashbacks, tracing the path to the night of death. Yet Seck's noir melodrama is rarely mentioned in the context of film noir; his style is unique, at once frenetic and solemn, flamboyant and grim. But his work, like so many film noirs, is about the lies and loss lurking in the American dream of self-transformation, about the longing and obsessive self-destruction fueled by abundance and complacency. In "Bitter Rain and Spring Breeze," the emotionally flawed children of oil millionaires are caught in a tangle of frustrated desires and long-standing grudges: Son is a weak playboy who treats his ailments with cheap corn wine Insecure, and his sister is a hedonistic swinger who soothes her unrequited love with cheap sex. In the end, she wrote a sad epitaph for her brother: "He was sad. The saddest among us. He needed too much and got too little."
Many noir films contain cautionary fables or dark fairy tales: the perfect heist ends with everyone dead and the money blown away, but an angelic beauty hides a black cold heart, a dream of freedom Chopped out a few feet from the border. Desire is deadly, ambition is a mirage in a desert of barrenness and failure. Andersen's fairy tales are cruel about the punishment for asking for what you don't get; they spring from a deep understanding of what needs so much and gets so little. The little mermaid was in love with a man, she gave up her life in the sea for her legs, but every step she took made her feel like a knife, and when he married someone else, the little mermaid died of a broken heart. The little girl who sells matches, caught in a warm and beautiful fantasy, keeps burning the matches and eventually freezes to death, like a drug addict addicted to a deadly substance.
The climax of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberg's "The Red Lady" (1948) is a 17-minute ballet based on Andersen's eponymous story about a girl who longs for a pair of red dancers shoes, but once they were on, she had to dance to death. In this virtuoso masterpiece, the doomed girl spins in an increasingly dark world: an ominous carnival, newspapers floating in a desolate city square, and prostitutes crowding streetlights in a horrific nightscape Beside, the nightmarish revelry of the masked and savage crowd culminates in a funeral where the ragged girl falls to her death. The ballet was choreographed by Robert Hepman, who also starred opposite the radiant Moira Shearer and Leonid Massein, who portrayed the villainous shoemaker:
In Andersen's story, the girl eventually asks a woodcutter to cut off her feet. Nothing so horrific happens in the film (though the image of Lermontov caressing the sculpture with a severed foot tied up in a pointed shoe may be a sly suggestion), but its psychological violence is as well. Equally cruel. This cruelty lurks in a splendid and enchanting world of resplendent theatres and Rococo lounges, the vibrant hustle and bustle of Covent Garden, the deep, mournful blue of the Mediterranean, and a building in Monte Carlo. Broken, sun-drenched stones on the villa. But beauty comes at a high price, as Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) tells ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) that to become an artist she must Endure "great physical and mental suffering". Powell writes that the film's real conflict is not between art and love, but "a conflict between romance and reality, between drama and life." Lermontov, like Mephistopheles, offers Vicky an immortal promise, but asks her to choose between dancing and living.
So is "Hong Lingyan" a noir movie? It doesn't look like much, and it lacks a lot of the rhetoric we've come to expect. But Vicky's fiery lust explodes in the images—such as the shocking close-up, where black, white and red shift across her face with a diabolical ferocity—inspired directly by The expressionism of film noir, the conflict that nearly broke her down, unfolds with the harrowing psychological insight that is the very essence of film noir.
When Powell and Pressberg's masterpiece was featured in the San Francisco Black City Film Festival in January, some took issue; even Eddie, founder of the Film Noir Foundation, which hosts the festival each year Mueller also admitted that the 2016 curation was "beyond the intended scope". His choices, ranging from the plays of tortured artists ("Two Phoenix", "The Great Sword") to the exploration of the blurred boundary between art and madness ("Soul of the Rose", "Voyeur"), convey this A message: Art, like money and sex, can be a deadly obsession. We all know that crime has no good end, but the purest ideal can also destroy us, and that is a bitter fruit that is hard to swallow. Why should we swallow the bitter fruit of film noir with insatiable joy? This is an endlessly interesting question.
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