DARK YEARS, DARK FILMS, LONG SHADOWS: THE OCCUPATION, NOIR, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN FRENCH FILM AND CRITICISM A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Zachary Kendell Gooch January 2014 © 2014 Zachary Kendell Gooch DARK YEARS, DARK FILMS, LONG SHADOWS: THE OCCUPATION, NOIR, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN FRENCH FILM AND CRITICISM Zachary Kendell Gooch, Ph.D. Cornell University 2014 Although the term arises in French film criticism, “noir” has long been associated with American cinema and a certain, recognizable type of visual and thematic style. Through a return to the French critics of the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s this dissertation defamiliarizes and redefines noir’s value to film and French studies by demonstrating its negatively constitutive role in the negotiation of French national identity and the central place of the Occupation in any discussion of French noir. By locating noir within criticism and performing close readings of the critical archive, which includes figures as diverse as Georges Sadoul and André Bazin, Lucien Rebatet and François Truffaut, I argue that noir critical discourse is defined by a tension between the category’s ever-changing value and the efforts of those who deploy it to fix the meaning of the nation before, during, and after the Occupation through careful omissions of the historical, collective memory. Because noir is central to debates on how the nation should and, more precisely, should not be represented, I also resist conventional, generic approaches to advance that individual films noirs are secondary to noir critical discourse. Particular films, such as those by Julien Duvivier, Jean-Pierre Melville, and also Henri Decoin’s lesser-known Non coupable (Not Guilty [1947]) may thus only be viewed as “noir” insofar as they bring into frame aspects of recent French history and sociocultural identity left out of dominant narratives of the national imaginary. Ultimately, through a focus on the critical and filmic archives and the dynamic value of noir during an era marked by the Occupation, I wrest noir scholarship from the hegemony of Hollywood and the rigidity of conventionally generic readings to restage it as the beginning of a new conversation. Film noir, that is to say, French film noir as I articulate it here brings together questions of not only national cinema, but of the larger obstacles facing any articulation of national identity related to the era that shares noir’s name: the Occupation, the dark years, les années noires. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Zachary Gooch earned his Bachelor of Arts in French, with Honors and Distinction, and his Bachelor of Arts in English, with Honors, from The Ohio State University in 2005. He was admitted to the doctoral program in French in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University in 2006, where he earned his Master of Arts in Romance Studies in 2010. Dr. Gooch received a Graduate Student Humanities Travel Grant in 2010 from the Society for the Humanities, which aided the development of this dissertation, and he presented an early version of the second chapter at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in New Orleans. While working toward the degree, Dr. Gooch worked as a graduate teaching assistant at Cornell University in the Department of Romance Studies and the Department of Performing and Media Arts. He also spent one year working at the University of Paris VIII as a Lecteur de langue while performing research for this dissertation at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque du film at the Cinémathèque française in Paris. Dr. Gooch’s dissertation, Dark Years, Dark Films, Long Shadows: The Occupation, Noir, and National Identity in French Film and Criticism, was supervised by Dr. Timothy Murray, with Drs. Tracy McNulty and Amy Villarejo also on his dissertation committee. iii To my family, friends, mentors, and of course to Yoon iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee chair, Professor Timothy Murray, and the other members of my committee, Professors Tracy McNulty and Amy Villarejo for their helpful comments, professional guidance, moral encouragement, and especially their extreme patience. The endless love and strength of my wife, family, and friends have been equally invaluable. I am also grateful to the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, the Society for the Humanities, and Cornell’s Graduate School for their support, as well as to the staff at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque du film for their help during my year of research in Paris. Thanks also to the students of my film courses for the refreshing enthusiasm they bring to French cinema. Finally, I must thank Professor Judith Mayne, who introduced me to French film studies when I was an undergraduate at The Ohio State University and whose influence will not be forgotten. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction - What is French Film Noir? Criticism, Occupation, National Cinema 1 Breaking Away from the “Cinematic Ready-Made” 1 Darkness Never Looked So Refreshing: Shades of Noir in French Film Criticism 9 Noir, National Cinema, and Genre 15 Chapter 1 - Noir and the Nation 22 Prewar French Noir and (Inter)National Anxieties: Projected Positions of Spectatorship 24 A Franco-German Cinema: The Scandal of Le Corbeau 40 Divided Against Itself: Postwar Perspectives on Prewar Cinema 55 Images of Postwar France through American Cinema: The Reception of American Noir 62 Chapter 2 - A Certain Paradox of Postwar French Noir Criticism 75 Resistances of Postwar Criticism 78 A Certain Paradox of “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” 90 Noir and Critical Shifts: The Case of Julien Duvivier 106 Chapter 3 - Myth and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Cinema of Process: Narratives of Resistance 125 Toward a Cinema of Process 128 The Cinema of Process and Myth 134 Répétition 135 Mise-en-scène 138 Melville’s Cinema of Process and Les Années noires 142 Le Silence de la mer (1949) 146 vi L’Armée des ombres (1969) 151 Cinemas of Process and Jean-Pierre Melville 157 Chapter 4 - From Postwar National Imaginaries to Narrative Form and the Offscreen: Henri Decoin, Marcel Petiot, and Non coupable (Decoin 1947) 160 The Reach of Postwar Manichaeism and National Identity: Henri Decoin, Marcel Petiot 165 From Popular Imaginaries to Narrative Imaginaries: Non coupable 173 At the Limits if the Diegetic and Historical 184 Conclusion - Noir and the “Long Occupation” 196 Bibliography 210 Filmography 222 vii LIST OF TABLES 1. Table of Onscreen and Offscreen Events in Non coupable 194 viii INTRODUCTION WHAT IS FRENCH FILM NOIR? CRITICISM, OCCUPATION, NATIONAL CINEMA At the beginning of the first monograph on noir cinema, Panoramique du film noir américain (Panorama of American Film Noir [1955]), Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton contend that “Le film noir est noir pour nous, c’est-à-dire pour le public occidental et américain des années 50” ‘Film noir is noir for us, that is to say, for the Western and American audience of the 1950s’ (5).1 Their opening statement should be accompanied by a couple qualifications. “Film noir” has been a category in French film criticism since at least the late 1930s and was unknown or unrecognized as such in the United States until the late 1960s. In other words, these films may have been “dark” for Western audiences on either side of the Atlantic, but just as the Occupation is only known as “les années noires,” or the dark years, in France, film noir was first “noir” only for the French. Taking this fact as its starting point, this study sets out to discover what film noir meant for a specific audience, in a specific space, and at specific times: spectators and critics in France immediately before, during, and after les années noires. It will show that noir is central to mid- twentieth century French national identity and collective memory because noir in film and criticism points to what the nation is by indicating what one does not want the nation to be. From the eve of war to the long shadow of the Occupation, film noir is negatively integral to how an entire nation represents itself to itself. Breaking Away from the Cinematic “Readymade ” 1 All translations are my own unless otherwise documented. 1 The official story of noir, which can be read in the first pages of any book on the subject published since Borde and Chaumeton’s Panorama, consists in a series of lists and goes something like this. Noir emerges in America in the early 1940s, influenced by American hard- boiled fiction (e.g. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich); American horror and gangster films of the 1930s; German film expressionism of the 1920s; and European directors and technicians working in Hollywood after having fled political strife and the war abroad (e.g. Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, to name a few). Noir films feature high contrast lighting and off-center compositions; labyrinthine and unpredictable narratives that unfold in urban settings and are punctuated by sex and violence; tough guys (read: anti-heroes) and even tougher dames (read: femmes fatales), both with ambiguous morals, motivations, relationships to law, and psychological profiles; and finally themes of alienation, paranoia, desire, sadism, perversion, and revenge (Spicer 1-18).2 Although noir, the story continues, reflects the cumulative American experience of the Prohibition, Great Depression, and World War Two, the term was first coined and applied to Hollywood films in articles by French film critics. The three most frequently and often exclusively cited are Nino Frank’s “Un nouveau genre ‘policier’” ‘A New “Detective” Genre,’ Jean-Pierre Chartier’s “Les Américains font aussi des films ‘noirs’” ‘Americans also make films “noirs,”’ both published in 1946, with Borde and Chaumeton’s text following a decade later in 1955.