Monday 19 October 2009

Noir Note





It is a big subject with big literature, the general lines of which are established to the point of cliché, particularly the role of the femme fatale, but also its themes of transgression, fatalism, lack of character certainty, violence and moral ambiguity. I don't want to discuss these things all over again in either a political or historical context. I am however interested in why film noir still thrills.

What fascinates me is the sheer poetry of it. In what way?

Story
The narrative to begin with. The narrative is nearly always complex, often unclear. Some evil has been done, is being done, or is about to be done. The precise mechanism of the action is of secondary importance. It is our apprehension of events that is being courted, not our reason. Film noir is never really a whodunnit. Detectives appear in the films, are often the central characters in films, but it is not detective work, not deductive reasoning that is the point. Film noir pits image against syntax, or, to put it another way, the point of syntax is image, the apparitional image. It is the figure looking in a lit doorway, at the end of the drive, throwing his or shadow on the wall behind the desk. It is the femme fatale's sexual presence not her agency. She is undoubtedly up to something but it hardly matters what. It is simply not the story. The story is secondary. It can be as minimal as narrative in a lyric poem, which does have a narrative but not one of the what-happens-next variety. It is the sensation of possibility, the apprehension of something pending that matters.

Figure
So the narrative is poetry narrative rather than novel narrative. Thats what the stock characters are about. They are the genius loci of the backyard and the mean street. The weight they carry is beyond rational or instrumental. The femme fatale is not merely a device to embody the struggle of (and with) female independence or sexuality, though it could be that as well, but, more importantly, a figure that has always been there in both male and female imagination as a dream power, a latency. A shape that is the precise dimensions of desire but never quite still, entering, looming, disappearing. Never quite to be focused.

Form
The language of film noir is pretty formal. Its devices are rhythmical and expected, like metre and rhyme: staircase, wall, lamppost, hand, drifting light, vertigo, swing of hair, great pool of shadow, glimpse, a look away, the broad shoulder with the jacket thrown over it, swing of hip, the half-open door, desk, back of chair, desklight, cigarette, a hulking back, a craggy face, car fin and car door. These images and others like them form the stanza, the rhyme scheme, the chorus.

The lyric I as a loner
Everyone in a film noir is on the outside. If there is an insider view, the insider is already isolated. There is no real communal life. It is the world of the poet as melancholiac, as romantic outcast, as voyeur. However the central characters resolve their situations their natural state is helplessness. They are being drugged or slugged or imprisoned or puzzled. They are troubled partly because there is only ever an outside. The inside, should there be such a place, is already corrupt. 'I wouldn't join any club that would have me as its member,' quipped Groucho Marx. And that is precisely the point.

The spectral
The characters are ghostlike or are in the process of becoming ghosts. Ghosts, wrote Peter Scupham, a good poet friend, are a poet's working capital. That's as true as it gets. Ghosts don't do things, they are just there, drifting about. Everyone in film noir is either being shot or about to get shot. They may not be shot finally but being on the edge of being shot is their very essence. They are all, in their way, uncanny, unheimlich. That, I think, is often the poet's sense of his own being in his or her own skin. It's all just a bit uncanny. What an odd place for consciousness to have lodged in, this Plato's cave of shadows!

*

Form, apprehension, sense of story rather than story, unfixed desire, isolation, haunting. Art is a house that tries to be haunted said Emily Dickinson. Yes, but the haunting takes place in a real world, a hard, mean, dollar-down kind of world, not in a ghost story.

If I like film noir It is for reasons like this.



1 comment:

Desmond Swords said...

The hard down dollar slick world where slieght-of-hand, hint and whisp conspiring to invoke symbolic ghost-trails that loom hard-lined, in precisely designed and plumb-perfect modernist, angular syntax that's entirely planned visual. For the first time, the contemporary was birthed within a new and (then) exciting medium, part realism-more gothic rendering of the inner disquiet flowering in East European emigre minds, deacanted into the safety of a (then) benevolent America almost squeaky clean, its global gestalt being untainted by any of the false-flag bully-calls of recent history that time future may cast; the underbelly yet to become rotten in rats' alley of continual war in the US knockers, conspiracy johnnies for whom Noir flips from entertainment, to Frankensteinian force of the most paranoic protaganist air, bleak as the 'US' machine and citadel inflated, us the wickedness and we who engender poetically, as the cultural 'we' of here who stand firm and measure now what shadows meet and cross, to lull that inward ghost at works as our machine, that spoken spiritual object there, just beyond our ken: it sounds as anything we dare to utter in the
Weialala leia / Wallala leialala of the Eliotic muse Leman, summoning down arts alley where two eyes meet 'I' who read, much of the night and go south in the winter / What are the roots that clutch what branches / Grow / Out of this stony rubbish.

?


The one behind the mind of Tom the tick tock ghost-coaxer, conjuring with a heap of stoney images, the one-eyed merchant, and this card / Which is blank, is something he carries on his back / Which I am forbidden to see

..unless Odysseus and Ulysses meet as one without emnity, their sly cunning sucked out by an etymological intelligence of the continual experiment:

laxble the word verification, as manos of an eternity handed to a two eyed US of 'I' - eyed into a Socratic defence, of your writing when you are challenged, and...make the argument that your writing is of little worth.

It's all terribly Noir, poetic heat and dust of a Muse who'll make us think: lead us to the water, over stone-dry rock,

'round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.'

bepadivi
bepadivi

shtum
shtum

the word verification
again it is

bepadivi
bepadivi

Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata

bepadivi
bepadivi

Shantih shantih shantih