ABSTRACT
Some of the most salient textual characteristics of 1940s film noir (for example, the displacement of sexuality into dialogue, the moody mise-en-scène, the enigmatic femme fatale, the convoluted plots, even the coded use of cigarette smoking) resulted from restrictions imposed by the Production Code Administration (PCA), which regulated what films could and could not represent. Annette Kuhn's analysis of institutional as well as ideological censorship in Howard Hawks' 1946 version of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep shows how the PCA functioned, in effect if not in intention, as a productive rather than repressive force upon the representation of sexual difference infilm noir. 'Censorship', Kuhn explains, 'may be seen both as an unconscious operation which structures the film text, and also as the textual effect or residue of a set of institutions and practices operating at the level of the film's material production. ... It is evident that at both levels censorship is a productive operation, rather than, as it is commonly conceived, a process of excision, of cutting things out.' 1 In the case of The Big Sleep, she demonstrates, both institutional and ideological interventions resulted in protracted censorship of the narrative; consequently what the narrative itself can no longer specify exactly — 'the menacing riddle of female sexuality' — is directed elsewhere, into the film's mise-en-scène, which 'bears the traces of the unrepresentable' . 2
