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This chapter investigates the music of the artistic cabarets of Montmartre, especially the Chat Noir, and finds a contradictory character in its reception. Aristide Bruant's chansons, for example, have been regarded as a mouthpiece for the Parisian underclass, but evidence shows they also served as entertainment for the affluent who enjoyed “slumming” in Montmartre. The chapter argues for an interpretation of the chansons modernes that locates their meaning and value in the context of debates about the modern, the popular, and the avant-garde. They need to be understood as part of a new type of artistic cabaret that engaged with the contradictions and complexities of modernity, and spread quickly throughout Europe (to Barcelona, Munich, Berlin, and Vienna).

Chinatown, a landmark of the New Hollywood, successfully recreates and revises the classic film noir milieu. Setting the film in the Los Angeles of the late nineteen-thirties, the aptness of such a setting for the United States of the nineteen-seventies is intentionally suggested. But the film’s creation of such a noir tonality is so successful that it raises the question of whether the unambiguous and profound evil present in the film suggests a world gone wrong—so wrong that no “right” action in such a world is conceivable. This chapter will examine what it would mean to suggest the wrongness of an entire way of life, what is responsible for such wrongness, and what it suggests about the possibility (or impossibility) of any right action in such a world.

Most scholars and critics have generally seen film noir as an American genre, emphasizing the fact that noir films have hailed from the classic Hollywood industry, or in the case of neo-noir, from the post-classical Hollywood cinema. Essentially, the perspectives of these scholars focus on the American contexts surrounding the films. This chapter examines films noir produced by two major film industries in Asia, the Hong Kong and South Korean cinemas which have been the most prolific in fashioning and transforming the noir tendency for their respective Asian contexts. The chapter sets out to understand the contexts of these motion pictures including detective and gangster genre films produced over the last ten years or so. The chapter thus follows the imperative on contextuality established in American scholarship of noir. Film noir in the Asian contexts (a darker than dark sensibility and an overwhelming urge towards violence) may be seen as alternative reactions to the American contexts of noir criticism.

The term ‘Nordic noir’ has gained currency as the catchall term for crime fiction on page, screen, and television from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. While film noir is a minor tradition in Nordic cinema, neo-noir has come to figure prominently in Nordic cinema. All the Nordic cinemas (except Iceland) produced films during the 1940s and 1950, which scholars and critics would later come to see as films noir. Since the 1990s, neo-noir has figured prominently in Nordic cinema, often as part of films inspired by, or adapted from, Nordic crime fiction. Nordic crime fiction itself has come to be known as ‘Nordic noir,’ particularly in UK usage. In the Nordic noir universe, criminals tend to be humanized, and often childhood experience or a traumatic event is used to gloss their criminality. The doomed characters of Nordic noir thus have their fates shaped by social forces, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the characters in the French poetic realist films of the 1930s. Their fates are not a matter of chance, pathology, or pursuit of anti-social pleasure. Such a worldview also resonates with the social-democratic outlook, which dominated political life in the Nordic countries from in the 1930s to the 1980s – the war years, excepted. The noir legacy is also relevant for its impact on auteur filmmakers, notably Lars von Trier and Aki Kaurismäki, who draw on classical noir, as well as the poetic realist films, to give their films a sometimes overt, sometimes subtle, neo-noir quality.

Post-noir’ is, like all noir labels, heavily contested; even the need for it is open to question. Drawing on Fredric Jameson, Anne McClintock, Jean-François Lyotard and Kwame Anthony Appiah, this essay examines several specific – and contradictory – uses of the term/concept to identify its potential utility in distinguishing between and grouping together varieties of noir filmmaking at this current conjuncture. Following the example of Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland, this essay treats noir as a mode of exploring the effects of a global capitalism on local cultures. A transnational thriller such as The International (2009) depicts the kinds of corruption that have become ‘business as usual’. More localised conspiracy narratives – the Colombian Perder es cuestión de método/The Art of Losing (2004), the Indian Manorama Six Feet Under (2007) – incorporate a stronger sense of the lives impoverished by corporate globalisation. The US Frozen River (2008) and the Chinese Mang jing/Blind Shaft (2003) focus on the local but pointedly connect immiserated lives to the circulation of global capital. If ‘post-noir’ does have a use, perhaps it is this: to describe contemporary noir that, after all that gleeful pastiche, has gotten back to the business of critique.

In 1974 Alain Silver queried the Indiana University Press and was offered a contract to produce a volume on film noir for the Cinema One Series. When two collaborators dropped out of that project, the offer lost a lot of its lustre. Shortly thereafter, an excerpt from Alain's book-length study of the samurai film appeared in Film Comment. In retrospect, it should have been clear that such an undertaking at a time when very few of the titles of the classic period were available on demand--and then only via rentals of 16mm prints--would have to rely too heavily on the memories of the editors and contributors. When the deal was struck in the Santa Monica living room of Elizabeth Ward, who became the editor in charge of research, no one realized how monumental a task it would be. Before it was finished, the index cards that Elizabeth used to compile filmographic, bibliographic, and other details numbered 16,000. The typescript of the book's index alone was over 300 pages long. The main text was almost ten times as many pages, created by diverse hands, few of whom has access to IBM Selectrics, with a melange of Pica and Elite fonts and mostly triple-spaced to permit room for revisions and redactions that were so heavy in places, it was remarkable that a typesetter could decipher them.

In a globalised world, the notions of neatly defined, homogeneous ethnies or national identities are difficult to sustain, especially if they are construed as organic features of social organisation and historical development. Instead, the present moment is characterised by hybridisation, multiculturalism and all manners of transnational movement, flux and entanglement. It has even been argued that we are now situated in a postnational condition, where the construction of supranationals, such as the European Union, and the transnational, ‘deregulated’, cross-border movement of capital, cultures and people is indicative of a decline of nations and traditional concepts of the national as key factors. Although the relation between the ‘transnational’ and the ‘postnational’ is not absolutely clear in this line of argument, the terms can be understood as connoting progressive stages in the decline of the national in the face of the challenges of globalisation. In this chapter, I will discuss the Swedish/Danish television series Bron|Broen (The Bridge, 2011–) as a transnational media phenomenon, where conceptions of nation are thematised. I will argue, against the backdrop briefly introduced above, that the discourse of nation in Bron|Broen is a vital part of its adaptability.

British film noir is not a pale imitation of its Hollywood counterpart, as its critics have often claimed. The frequent casting of American actors did indeed feed into widespread concerns about the perceived Americanization of the national culture, as did the filmmakers’ resistance to the critical canon of ‘quality’ cinema in the late 1940s. The films’ vision of postwar Britain drew on discourses lamenting the political and moral decline of the nation, while later films placed these themes within the context of emergent youth culture and the consumer society. Anxieties about sexuality, crime and national identity were worked through in the figures of the spiv and the femme fatale. Several films also used the point-of-view of a child to bring out the strangeness of the adult world, reinforcing the nightmare quality of the noir vision. As in the case of Hollywood, the classic period of film noir, when the darkness was evoked by the shadowy black-and-white cinematography, ended with the shift to colour in the 1960s. However, many later British “neo-noir” films revived noir themes and style, with varying degrees of nostalgia and critique, to explore continuities and discontinuities with the nation’s past.

This essay focuses on what can be considered as French Film Noir in its purist form. Thus I am deliberately limiting the choice of films in terms of time-scale and their adherence to the definitions that, to my mind, embody the spirit of this generic typology. This means leaving réalisme noir films and most gangster films to one side (whilst acknowledging that a looser definition of noir might encompass them). I begin, therefore, in 1947 with Clouzot’s Quai des Orfèvres and end, in 1979, with Série noire. This has produced a selection of 17 films which offer an interesting arc when examined against the evolving economic climate of this thirty-year period as France moves from its post-war trauma through the so-called trente-glorieuses years of economic recovery.

As with American film noir, named retrospectively by French critics, so, too, Japanese noir was similarly imagined from a retrospective point of view. Criterion’s release of a group of films in their Eclipse series under the rubric “Nikkatsu Noir” marks a good place to start a conversation about Japanese Noir. This chapter traces Japanese noir from the late 1950s, when Nikkatsu Studios initiated a series of dark, violent, paranoid thrillers, through the turn of the new millennium. Along the way the chapter traces the recurrence of common character types, in particular the professional killer, or hit-man, and the private eye; particular narrative motifs, such as flight, vengeance and attempts to go straight; and defining images, including “borderlessness,” and, especially the gun. There is also examination of gender issues, highlighting the significant presence of women in the genre through examination of the career of Kaji Meiko, Natsume Rei, and Yonekura Ryoko. These films, often dubbed “girls with guns,” distinguishes Japanese neo-noir from much other international noir. And major directors are examined, including Nomura Takashi, Suzuki Norifumi, Miike Takashi, Hayashi Kaizo, Ikeda Toshiharu and Tsukamoto Shinya.

Any responsible claim for the existence of Indian film noir must waver with critical uncertainty. Nevertheless, while crime stories, as elsewhere, have been an unsurprisingly common component of Indian popular cinema, contemporary critics have, if only in passing, increasingly attributed a ‘darker’ aspect to a portion of India’s vast corpus of films, thereby affiliating these recently retrieved examples with Hollywood and other commercial national cinemas, in effect constructing a comparative perspective that retrospectively ‘corrects’ the absence of popular Indian cinema from most historical accounts of world cinema until the 1990s. A cycle of popular Hindi films, almost all set in (then) contemporary Bombay, regularly featured many of the characteristic elements of Hollywood film noir, including heroes (most consistently embodied throughout the period by the suave star Dev Anand) who skirt the border of legal and illegal activity; like their counterparts in American film noir, these are men who are streetwise but can confidentially negotiate swanky nightclubs featuring alluring femmes fatale (often explicitly Westernized through signifiers such as clothing, smoking, and the use of English) as well as the semi-illicit temptations of alcohol and gambling. Even somewhat earlier, since the mid-1970s, representations of Bombay’s criminal underworld and the glamorous if doomed lives of gangland ‘dons’ and ‘goondas’ (gangsters) had become staples of Hindi cinema. The latter half of the decade was especially dominated by a series of films featuring superstar Amitabh Bachchan in his wildly popular ‘angry young man’ persona.

This chapter examines Jean-Patrick Manchette, ‘father of the néo-polar,’ who is widely credited with bringing French crime fiction into step with the radical left politics of the 1970s. This chapter argues that an attention to questions of generic conventions and narrative shape allows us to reconsider the politics of noir as a literary form. This reconsideration of Manchette’s fictional politics begins with a close reading of Manchette’s essays on what he called the forme-polar or noir form. I then analyze two of Manchette’s late novels, Three to Kill (1976) and The Prone Gunman (1981), showing how issues of masculinity, gendered violence, and (post-)colonial violence are embedded in these fictions. Moving to questions of narrative shape and meta-aesthetic rhetoric, I show how Manchette’s work offers a radical and challenging view of the implications of working with and in cliché. Ultimately, this chapter lays out the case for a more expansive reading of Manchette’s work, one which goes beyond populist narratives about the noir novel in France, and which reads Manchette’s work as a politicized challenge to the ‘noir form’ itself.

In this chapter, I examine how Jean Echenoz transforms and repurposes popular genres—specifically crime fiction and the war novel--in subtly political manners. Through readings of Echenoz’s (anti-)mystery novel A Year (1997) and his short war novel 1914 (2012), I show how Echenoz smuggles biopolitical and spectral problematics into his works, enlarging the conceptual scope of popular story forms and genre fictions. My reading of Echenoz positions him not as a writer that brings us back to the pleasures of story, but rather as a writer who demonstrates how we can alter the generic conventions and narrative strategies of popular violent fiction in order to account for biopolitical exclusion and mediated phantom pain. Echenoz is thus a writer who shows us some ingenious strategies for rethinking the uses of forms and genres.