| Critics of film noir, the cycle of crime melodramas produced by Hollywood in the 1940s, consistently point to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane as the genre's most important cinematic ancestor. But the extent to which Kane influenced, and the degree to which Kane differs from, film noir have never been fully appreciated. Moving beyond the requisite nods to the structural and stylistic similarities between Kane and film noir, my dissertation uncovers the manner in which Hollywood studios, in inaugurating a genre, ignored Kane's political and historical emphases---even as noir filmmakers exploited Welles's work by borrowing its more general treatment of the social anxieties elicited by a new era of image-based, mechanically-reproduced culture. My study begins with a lengthy analysis of Welles's text, read in part through theorists from the 1930s---Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Bertolt Brecht---whose work engaged the relationships among cinema, politics, and modernity. I then turn to four exemplary noirs from the mid1940s---Double Indemnity, Dour, Laura , and The Killers---and, through close readings of the pies and the reviews they elicited, demonstrate how the films' implicit criticism of modern technological and bureaucratic machinery is weakened by their insistence on visualizing the world expressionistically. Since film noir almost always presents its dark ambiance as a result of the weak and twisted psychology of its central character, the audience feels free to affix blame: the noir protagonist is thus a usable sacrifice, a scapegoat for our own anxieties. Kane, on the other hand, never relied on easy processes of identification, and therefore never offered its audience any escape from its historically-based, politically-charged allusions to the social and psychological disturbances of its time. I conclude my study with an examination of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, a picture which, while its politics are desperately nostalgic, still manages to frame noir (as represented in the film's Pottersville sequence) within a larger social context; it thereby provides a wider argument than the one suggested by the darker noirs, those movies than never seem to leave the safety of their insular shadows. |
