Film Noir: The Politics of the Maladjusted Text

How are we to situate a movie in history? By now there must be few practitioners of American Studies who would not acknowledge that the products of Hollywood provide a rich seam waiting to be mined by social and cultural historians. As in most mining projects, the difficulty lies in developing the equipment needed to extract the ore. To treat film as a source of cultural history is by no means as simple as that old-fashioned literary approach by which an author's biography could be interwoven with a summary political or social history. The cinema has no author whose individuality can be used to gloss over the absence of method in such a procedure. Or rather, any movie has such a plethora of authors that the attempt to establish evidence of authorial intent is bound to fail, as auteurist criticism has repeatedly demonstrated. The “authors” of an entertainment commodity are not simply its director, writer, producer and studio head of production. They include front office personnel, New York executives and the advertising staff, distributors and theatre managers who “author” the product at the point of its sale to the public. In any case, the historian concerned with popular rather than elite culture is at least as interested in reception as in production, and his or her sphere of interest must extend beyond the limits of the text and its intended meaning to a concern with context and with how the movie was received and understood by its primary audience.