Jim,
As I see it, you narrowly define film noir as a group of
crime movies of a certain period that organically developed
and displayed a common visual style. So noir is a way of
telling a story and not the story itself. In addition, once
filmmakers became aware of that style as something distinct
and began consciously setting out to make films within that
style, they lost its essence and instead made hollow
imitations, aping the style, but without the substance. Some
of these post-noir (since you reject the term neo-noir) films
may even be very good films, but they are not noir.
As I've made clear in several previous posts, I do not agree
with this definition (for instance, I happen to think that
that last condition may be an argument that a film is poor
film noir, but not that it ceases to be film noir). However,
I do believe I've been fair in presenting your take. I hope
you agree.
So let me move on to your definitions of hardboiled and noir
literature: Hardboiled is tough and colloquial; noir is dark
and sinister. It strikes me that these are also ways of
telling stories, not the stories themselves. So if we follow
your reasoning on film noir, once writers became aware of
hardboiled and/or noir as a distinct way of telling a crime
story that they were also guilty of self-consciousness and
therefore could no longer be considered true hardboiled or
noir?
Adding your recent (very convincing) case that Hammett (as
evidenced by his book reviews) and other classic hardboiled
writers were very aware of themselves as presenting a new,
distinct way of telling crime stories very early on (even if
some, like Cain, did hate being grouped together), doesn't
that mean that the vast majority of what most of us consider
the canon of hardboiled and/or noir cannot possibly be such
because it was self-consciously tough, colloquial, dark
and/or sinister?
Finally, you say that any expansion of the definition of film
noir is not evolution, but error, that it is what it is and
is not what it is not and there is no room for greater
inclusiveness (except the "wiggle room" you reserve for
yourself). However, you have long maintained that the
usefulness of your definitions of hardboiled and noir is
exactly this kind of inclusiveness, that it allows a number
of different approaches, as long as these minimum
requirements are met.
So I guess what I'm asking is: why are film styles defined
narrowly with necessary conditions, while literature is
defined broadly with sufficient conditions? Why is film
exclusive while literature is inclusive?
Mark
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