Alfredo <
garciagg@adinet.com.uy> writ:
> When Gallimard was founded, around 1949, one of it´s
first collections was
> hard boiled, but they preferred to *translate* the
genre´s name. Jacques
> Prevert was the one who created the *noir*
name.
The term _film noir_ was coined by French film critic Nino
Frank, in 'A New Kind of Detective Story', _L'ɣrᮠFran硩s_
(August 1946).
An English translation of Frank's article can be found in
William Luhr, ed., _The Maltese Falcon: John Huston,
director_ (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ,
1995).
ED
*****
Here's another extract from that Woolrich article:
Woolrich's 'black series' and La S鲩e Noir
One of the key terms used to describe certain types of crime
fiction, and briefly discussed above, is the word 'noir', the
French for
'black'---as in black mood, dark atmosphere; dark and
doom-laden. The reason the French term 'noir' is used to
describe this style is probably because of the series of
crime books published in France from the mid-1940s under the
series title S鲩e Noir, or 'Black Series'.
The French had been deprived of access to American popular
culture during the Second World War. Immediately after the
war however, in 1945, French publisher Gallimard established
the S鲩e Noir imprint, edited by Marcel Duhamel (who had, at
one time, been Ernest Hemingway's secretary). Among the crime
titles published under the S鲩e Noir imprint were the works of
a number of American 'pulp' writers, including the
'second-wave' noir writers, David Goodis, Jim Thompson and
Cornell Woolrich.
This French series is important to crime writing because the
critical attention its titles received was quite different
from the reception the same works enjoyed in America. While
in their native America the works of these 'noir writers'
were afforded the status of cultural ephemera---merely cheap,
disposable, Lion and Gold Medal paperbacks, packaged in
lurid-covers to attract readers to their hopefully equally
lurid contents---for French literary critics they were
masterful expressions of existential angst. Lee Server notes,
for example, that Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't
They? was 'acclaimed by Sartre and Gide' yet remained
virtually unknown in America; while Albert Camus acknowledged
the influence of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings
Twice on his own L'Etranger (The Stranger).
The same American titles that were being translated into
French for publication under the S鲩e Noir imprint were also
providing a body of raw material for the Hollywood film
studios. When the American films based on these novels became
available in France after the war, the direct connection
between the American novels published under the S鲩e Noir
imprint and their adaptation for the American cinema---often
by European emigre directors---led French cinema critic Nino
Frank to coin the term films noirs---literally, 'black
films'---in 1946.
Woolrich's biographer, Francis M. Nevins Jr., suggests that
the name of Gallimard's S鲩e Noir imprint may have been
inspired by Woolrich's own series of 'black' novels.
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