German Expressionism

By far the biggest influence on the look of noir was German Expressionism. Mostly because of the emigrating directors from Germany who came to find a base in the Holywood studio system and would go on to become some of the most successful directors in Holywood's golden era.

Few pics then a nice fun gateway to the world of German Expressionism, with loads of films.

http://www.mookychick.co.uk/reviews/events-arts-reviews/german-expressionism.php

Lighting and Style influences: Poetic Realism

Emerging in France around the same time as Black Mask was getting its act together, Poetic Realism was both a stylistic and political movement. It was concerned with the everyday stories of the poor and working class and used light and dark, here, its put much better at this link:

http://www.criterion.com/explore/15-poetic-realism

Main point was, it wasn't realism, it was realism with a large dose of style. In fact noir was anti-realism in many regards, and this should be the beating conceptual heart of our design.

Femme Fatal

One of the most distinguishing conceptual underpinnings of noir is the role of a transgressive or 'spider' woman who leads the hero/anti-hero to his doom, through a series of doors, all of which she controls by her alluring sexuality.

Her sexuality is linked with death and ultimately with the male character's own internal, deep rooted self-destructiveness which rises to the surface, much as his cock does, by the beauty, mystery and must-have-ness of this almost mythical godness figure.

Her placing, in the early golden period of noir, reflects many things about the society of the day and could be seen as an excuse for woman bashing since during that period, post war, women where to be encouraged out of work and back into the home: to know their place as such.

Plus, with the growing position of women, noir could be percieved at a loss to what the future held and this codifiying of them as fatalles was a last gasp attempt to put the cat back in the box.

I'm not satisfied with this role of fatalle, and its the cornerstone of the whole enterprise to have understood what role women are to play in Dangerous Days. Such categorisation could also disenfrancise a whole slew of potential audiences. It's a bit dated.

My own feeling is somewhere closer to Blade Runner where both the man and woman can 'kill' each other or kill themselves by their own actions and conversely, both can rescue one another as well. In fact, one of the most interesting films of the early cycle, Secret Beyond the Door positions the man as the fatalle drive (the Thantos) and the woman (Eros) whose love gives her the grace to see beyond the boundaries of her somewhat sadistic and tortured partner and ultimately save him.

Although he too, of course, gets to save her. This osscilation of deceit and redemption going backwards and forewards between the genders is interesting.

All characters dealing honestly with their grit and being understood because of this be still being prone to their own deadly drives is very interesting.

That said. The women have to be interesting looking. Here's some thoughts on what might turn out to be our two female leads. Carla Bruni's face is in there somewhere. Those thin lips. But I'm interested in real women, not stick waifs, or fantasy perfect projections.

Black Mask

Regarded as the spiritual home of the stable of writers whose work would be adapted into screenplays and form some of the classic 300 golden cycle of noir.

Black Mask's history is an interesting one. The publishers, obviously trying to make a few quid, used to publish soft core porn (nice link indeed) before launching what was a taudry story magainze, Black Mask. Under the direction of a new editor, Black Mask became the home of hard boiled stories where criminals on the street got their cumuppence and morality was upheld.

Editorials in Black Mask discussed such things as gun crime and police corruption (the police weren't to be trusted, hence why the lead was a Private Detective).

What is Horatio? I don't see him as a Private Detective, its too cliche. I see him as someone who gets involved in other people's business.

Anyhoo, less though more bubbling. All you need to know about Black Mask is here: http://www.blackmaskmagazine.com/history.html

The first hard boiled story was Three Gun Terry by Carrol John Daly.

Illustrations for 1935 Edition of Les Fleur de Mal

Interesting drawings. Some essence of surrealism at work. Politically charged too.

 

And the man himself.

Literary Sources: Edgar Allen Poe, Baudelaire

Noir traces its roots to the hard boiled thrillers of Dashiell Hammet and Cornell Woolrich in Black Mask in the thirties, but its roots are deeper than that.

The first detective 'mysteries' are accorded to the great gothic writer Edgar Allen Poe and the artwork his body of work has inspired is similarly inspiring for our enterprise.

Get past the fandom, and some of Poe's short stories can be found here: http://www.poestories.com/


CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: TEXTURES OF THE CITY

Certainly an interesting character both creatively, socially and politically, Baudelaire was influenced by Poe and become a translator of his work into French because he felt a resonance with Poe's themes and line of thought. Baudelaire was sick of romanticism and his body of work was influential in changing the direction of French literature.

He wrote about the darkness inside all men, the fleeting nature of the city in a tight sharp prose (something echoed in some ways by writers like Chandler and other noir and hard boiled writers).

He was scandulous. He smoked opium and was interesting in mind opening experiences. He loved raves. Or the 19th Century equivalent.

On Pleasure: "Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."

On Marriage: "Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage."

His seminal work of poetry: the Flowers of Evil: http://fleursdumal.org/1857-table-of-contents

Nice echo to the famous noir, Touch of Evil.

Baudelaire continues to influence not because of his flowery madness and excess of love and sex but of his descriptions of the city, especially at night, and the coming of 'modernity'.

His poetry is modern because it rejects that which there is no evidence for.
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/VoyageToModernitypage.htm

What else does Baudelaire take from Dante? His vision of Hell, yes: but more importantly his moral centre. No vision of the Inferno, such as Dante and Baudelaire possess, is meaningful without extreme sensitivity to pain, to harm, to deathliness, to betrayal, to personal failing, pride, lust, to all the sins and vices, anxieties and fevers. Baudelaire’s hell lacks the feeling of divine retribution and punishment that Dante’s expresses, it is a hell of reality, a hell of the human condition, imposed perhaps, or accidental perhaps, but not infused with divine meaning. If Baudelaire too is a Catholic, he is an immensely strange one. Yet the moral centre is clear. All Baudelaire’s Satanism, his flowers of evil, his toying with vice, sin, the consciousness of the infamous, are trappings, never his essence. His essence is always the search for incorruptible love, for true meaning, for an endless ecstasy of feeling and sensation, for a world of delight that does not exist for us except momentarily, for solace and consolation, for a defence against time, mortality, betrayal, and disappointment.

This next quote is interesting from the point of view of how characters in noir are often punishing themselves, knowingly, as a rejection of a boring life, the crushing 'ennui' of modern life. Look at the list of vices too; obsession, infatuation, his charting of the dark labrinyths people wander in their lives is actually charitable, because it is real, and therefore illuminating.

Look at all that effing writing. Prize to anyone who has read down to here.

Baudelaire’s sinners are caught in the meshes of obsession and infatuation, their vices are repetitions, almost a definition of sin for Baudelaire as it was for Goethe ‘that which we cannot stop doing’, that which we cannot evade. His sinners are gamblers, petty criminals, faithless whores, self-tormenters, sexual deviants, religious flagellants those who are always trying to satisfy a deeper restlessness through the mechanisms of a surface anxiety or addiction. And they are those with whom we have empathy, because they are, as we are, says Baudelaire, in search of an artificial paradise, a haven, a harbour, blessed by Venus, or Fortuna, by ‘Madonna, Muse or Guardian Angel.’

This guy is a great writer. Bit highfautin for some, but his understanding of why a character becomes a character and how the time can sometimes make the man is revelatory for understanding Horatio's character. Or any great character.

There are reasons for Baudelaire’s alienation from his world, and his search for other worlds, that are attributable to his private life, his childhood, his sensibility. But they are only the pre-dispositions that enable his art and thought: they do not in any way determine or exhaust them. When a world-shattering change takes place in society, intellectual life, and spirituality, a fracturing of old values and old relationships, then it should be no surprise if it is those individuals whose temperament, intellect and early life mirrors aspects of that change, and sensitises them to it, who are most likely to take up the task of understanding and confronting it.

The city as Baudelaire saw it:

What more does Baudelaire take from Dante? He takes his vision of hell as a city, the city as hell. For Baudelaire that involves its varied aspects of humanity crammed into a tiny space, its panoply of human behaviour, its existence almost as a living being in its own right, a seething ant-heap, its potential callousness, indifference, insanity, its juxtaposition of human states, its conflict of extremes, wealth with poverty, beauty with ugliness, truth with deceit, kindness with crime, love with hatred. 

The city is humanity objectified, made the instrument of the market, all the markets where we buy and sell things and ourselves. The city is an ogre, a monster, but also a thing of veils and enchantments, a seductive whore, a theatre, a landscape of arcades and canals, buildings and streets, vehicles and passers-by. Because there is no Mount of Purgatory and no Paradise for Baudelaire except the artificial paradises of his imagination, then the city is, more potently, Hell. There is no City of the Church, no City of God, only the city of Mankind, of Reality. Those relationships that do exist he views within its context. Escape from the city, to search for new possibilities, hopes of relationship, can only be by a voyage of mind or body, even though all voyages disappoint, except perhaps (a vague and unreal one perhaps) the last voyage with Captain Death. The city of hell is Paris in reality, as for Dante it was Florence transposed. But not only are all the sins and vices of hell there, so is the flattened purgatory, the collapsed mountain, because after all in purgatory Dante says that we re-visit the sins of hell in expiation, and what difference is there in Baudelaire’s essentially godless world between suffering the sin, and suffering it again in repetition, in thought, in remorse, in purgation? 

Man's position within an 'intention-less' universe is the reason for the scientific method and the basis in some ways for the popularity of a detective, who has an honest appreciation of the depths of the human mind, using facts and knowledge to pick a way through the labrinyth rather than waiting for movement from some creator spirit to make all things right with a sweep of a mighty hand.

Secondly, the new, though often chilling, comprehension of our biological and social selves within the context of an intention-less universe devoid of gods and demons, open to exploration through the scientific method, a universe which, while still ultimately mysterious to us in its being and its organisation, is no longer some artefact of a strange deity, or the whim of a blind creator.   

It sounds gloomy, but really Baudeliare was a moralist too. He challenged and reflected the times because he felt, acutely, a relationship with nature, and wider still, the possibilities of what man could be to himself, with one another and with the earth around, what he saw instead though was a wasteland of broken dreams, cheap vulgarity and desperation.

Enter Horatio Wells. The optimist's pesimist.