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or : Le film policier noir
by Yuri German
POLICIER AND POLAR
The term "polar" was coined in
France around 1970. It is a contraction of "policier", a genre in film
and literature, where the narrative centers on a criminal case or the world
of crime. Despite what its name suggests, the genre does not necessarily
imply the presence of the police or a detective puzzle as its central elements.
It had long ago progressed from the preoccupation with identification of
the perpetrator to the more important emphasis on the criminal and the
depiction of social malaise in France.
"Like any film, the film
policier reflects the society of its time. But by revealing what happens
behind the facade, by evoking taboos, by chronicling changes of the law,
in the nature of crime and its repression, it no doubt reflects that society
more faithfully than any other genre," wrote François
Guérif in his seminal study of the French polar. At present, the
label “policier” is used to cover a wide variety of films: mysteries, dealing
exclusively with an investigation of a crime by some kind of detective
figure; gangster films, centering on professional criminals; suspense films,
emphasizing the anxieties of a potential victim; and the film noir, depicting
a sordid urban world of crime and corruption, populated by tough private
detectives, treacherous women and anguished men. Some French sources argue
that the term "polar" should be only applied to the latter category, films
and novels in the "noir" or “hard-boiled” tradition. Other sources call
them “polar noir”.
FILM NOIR
The term "film noir" was created
by French critics after the end of World War II when they discovered a
large group of American films made in the 1940s that could not be seen
in France during the German occupation. Among them were The Maltese
Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura, Murder My Sweet and The Woman in the Window.
They were dubbed "film noir"
by analogy with "roman noir" , the label used to describe the
American "hard-boiled" detective fiction by the writers like Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain that provided source material for these
films and that was published in the "Série Noire", launched in 1945
by the Gallimard publishing house.
Initially the series was dominated
by translations of American and British authors and even the early French
contributors opted for English-sounding pseudonyms. But to present "noir"
as a purely American cultural phenomenon merely assimilated by the French
is to ignore the cinematic and cultural trends that already existed in
France in the 1930s and the early 1940s.
Note
For some description of what Série Noire is, and
its myth, see details about this astonishing series of HB/Noir books in
our chapter Série
Noire
