Une histoire oubliée : la genèse française du terme « film noir » dans les années 1930 et ses implications transnationales

• Main Author: Thomas Pillard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Française d'Etudes Américaines 2012-12-01
• Series: Transatlantica : Revue d'Études Américaines
• Subjects: 1930s; Film criticism; Film noir; French cinema; Genre; Transnational cinema
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/5742

According to the established historiography, the generic label “film noir” was used in France in 1946 to refer to a series of Hollywood crime fictions produced in the 1940s and 1950s. Since then, the term has been exclusively associated with Hollywood pictures and “film noir” has been considered a specifically American form. In the 1990s, North American and British scholars started to re-evaluate film noir and show that this genre was not exclusive to American cinema: in fact, Charles O’Brien revealed that the label “film noir” had first been used in France before the war to describe a group of French films that are more or less the same ones we now identify as “poetic realism”; he then went on to refer to a new tendency in post-World-War-II Hollywood cinema. However, his work has, for the most part, gone unrecognized in France, where film noir is still seen as purely American. In the face of the persistence of this distorded vision and the progressive sinking into oblivion of the French “noir” tradition, it is necessary to replace the term in its original context, that of 1930s France. What did the term “film noir” mean for film reviewers of the time? To what extent was it used to describe a certain kind of transnational criminal fiction? Can the forgotten history of this famous term’s French origins enlighten us on film noir’s identity and international dimension?