Film historians and theoreticians have long recognized that there's something wrong with the term "film noir." This hasn't kept them, of course, from writing books and articles about Film Noir, or from calling certain films "films noirs" without acknowledging the problems in such a move. It's time for a moratorium--even though we would then risk depriving ourselves of another book as excellent as More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (1998) by James Naremore, a writer who is acutely conscious of the difficulties with the term and who adroitly traces its functioning in a variety of cultural, commercial, theoretical, and aesthetic contexts. Few film writers have the intelligence and scope of Naremore, and most uses of "film noir" in the print medium result merely in overfamiliar picture books, jokey calendars, and the rest of the tedious paraphernalia of the world of film buffdom.

The problem with Film Noir is that it's impossible to extricate it from this world. Usually, when people talk about Films Noirs, they're not talking about particular films, or even a group of films; they're referring to the imaginary universe of a certain kind of film lover. This person, typically male, having been born no earlier than 1940 and not much later than 1960, reached the ideally impressionable age of early adolescence in a period when black-and-white American films of the 1940s and '50s were widely shown on TV. He was thus ideally poised to receive the full, delayed cultural impact--both barrels, in the face--of such films as Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946) and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947). Perhaps he took to wearing fedoras and trench coats, like Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum as the private detectives in those films, and he probably took up smoking (let's hope he's quit by now). His relationships with women were spoiled by that mixture of romanticism and cynicism so compellingly delineated in these films and in the novels they were based on.

The category of Film Noir originated in Europe. The term was first applied to American films in articles appearing in French film magazines in 1946, the year when The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Woman in the Window (1944) were released in France. French critics recognized these dark, urban, morally ambivalent films as cousins of French prewar poetic-realist films like La Bête humaine (1938), Quai des brumes (1938), and Le Jour se lève (1939), which they also called "noir." The first Film Noir book, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's Panorama du Film Noir Américain (1955), sought to define the American cycle in terms of the anguish and disorientation such films produced on the viewer and of their implied critique of capitalist society. Borde and Chaumeton's view remains current in the more popular examples of Film Noir exegesis, although the French writers' Surrealism has been watered down to fetishistic admiration of "dreamlike" (or "nightmarish") camera angles, lighting schemes, and plot developments, while social analysis of Film Noir typically begins and ends with the received idea that it expressed the "disillusionment" felt by American men returning from the war.

The makers of the American films Borde and Chaumeton called "noir" didn't think of them as "films noir;" they thought they were making crime films, thrillers, mysteries, and romantic melodramas. The nonexistence of "noir" as a production category during the supposed heyday of Noir obviously problematizes the history of the genre. For one thing there is clearly something arbitrary in the assigning of start and end dates for the cycle (the most widely accepted dates are 1941 and 1958, the years of The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil, respectively, although the start is sometimes pushed back to 1940, the year of Boris Ingster's paranoid B-movie Stranger on the Third Floor). In addition, commentators regularly ascribe a "noir" visual style or "noir" themes to films from other genres made during the same period, including horror films, westerns, musical comedies, and It's a Wonderful Life (1946), whose anxiety-stricken, suicidal hero confronts a vision of a small American city as dismal as any depicted in a thriller of the period. And certain video hawkers on eBay have no scruples against describing any movie with a crime theme as "noir."

If the first interpreters of Hollywood Film Noir were European, so were many of its greatest creators, including Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Max Ophüls, Jacques Tourneur, Edgar G. Ulmer, Billy Wilder, and Robert Siodmak. These directors all came to American film genres as outsiders, from a cultural background that had made them familiar with modernist, high-art uses of these genres. They also shared a certain mode or philosophy of cinema that had found its most profound and far-reaching articulation in the silent films of Lang and F.W. Murnau. Lang and Murnau used the film frame to represent states of consciousness--not necessarily or even primarily paranoia (as in Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), but, more generally and more significantly, subjectivity as a structuring of experience. In Lang's Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and Spies (1928) and in Murnau's Sunrise (1927), lighting, set design, camera movement, the positioning and movement of actors, and, in short, all the visual elements of cinema help create a moving image of thought, emotion, and duration.

This phenomenological cinema is the matrix for Film Noir. The traplike narrative of Lang's You Only Live Once (1937), the baleful and crystalline eroticism of his The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street (1945), the relentless camera movements of Preminger's Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945), the urgent, compassionate camera movements of Ophüls's Caught (1949) and The Reckless Moment (1949), the tenderness and mystery of Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Out of the Past, and the awesome conviction of Ulmer's poverty-stricken Detour (1945; Ulmer was an assistant to Murnau) all take off from the precise mapping of mental time onto visual space in silent Lang and Murnau. When we've added the American energy, vulgarity, and nihilism of Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and Orson Welles Touch of Evil, we've pretty much exhausted the major stylistic options of Film Noir.

Yet Noir has had a significant afterlife. Just as Europeans produced the first Noir cycle and first identified Noir as a genre, they made the first films that could be called neo-Noir. Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), Pierrot le fou (1965), and Made in U.S.A. (1966), François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The American Soldier (1970) are among the most notable examples of European cineastes expressing their love for the American crime film. In the cases of Godard and Fassbinder, at least, this love is complicated by fear and hatred of America and by a deep ambivalence about the values and promises of popular culture.

This complexity is largely absent from the wave of American films of the 1980s and '90s that imitated the plots, values, character conventions, and sometimes the look and the sounds that had become identified as "noir:" Body Heat (1981), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981; a remake of a James M. Cain novel previously filmed by Tay Garnett in 1946), Blue Velvet (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), a group of films based on Jim Thompson novels, John Dahl's Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994), and L.A. Confidential (1997). The cultural zenith of the neo-Noir movement is undoubtedly Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), with its blizzard of pop references. The commercial and critical triumph of Pulp Fiction seems, fortunately, to have discouraged further efforts in this vein, and subsequent neo-Noir films have been increasingly timid and pointless (e.g., the 1999 Mel Gibson film Payback, directed by Brian Helgeland, one of the cowriters of L.A. Confidential).

The current decline of neo-Noir may mean that we've reached a cultural moment when we can get rid of the concept of Film Noir or, at minimum, revitalize the terms in which it's discussed. Instead of prating nostalgically about rainy streets, hard-boiled detectives, and femmes fatales, we should talk about Lang and Murnau and how the distinctive styles and themes of the directors in their school, applied to the dark, violent American genres during the peak years of Hollywood filmmaking, produced a group of masterworks. Which is to say that if Film Noir exists as anything more than a loose, approximate convenience of classification, or as the code name for a fetish, it exists only as the flourishing of a certain faith in film style.