ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we track noir’s relationship to the idea of national culture in three broad historical moments. First, we discuss noir’s internationalism in the interwar period that followed the world-wide depression. We begin here because this era was marked by intense debate about the fate of Western democracies and individual freedom itself in a climate of radical politics, rising fascisms, and restrictive, often violent versions of national community in the US, France, and Italy. Second, we examine noir’s global currency in the wartime and immediate postwar period, when American films noir became forcibly linked to a culture of political occupation in France, Germany, and Japan, and to an ambiguous critique of the new, postwar global order dominated by America and its linked midcentury promises of democratic and economic freedoms. Third, we discuss the longer postwar period (from midcentury to the present) in which so-called “historical” film noir was made new as it circulated globally – as both a commercial product and a beloved critical object – in a range of countries (Mexico, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, India, Iran, and Hong Kong) that were becoming “modern” at different speeds, and under the pressure of the monolithic American example.
