Abstract

Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind or a kind of anamorphic distortion affecting different genres? From the very beginning, noir was not limited to hard-boiled detective stories: reverberations of noir motifs are easily discernible in comedies, in westerns, in political and social dramas, etc. Do we have here a secondary impact of something that originally constitutes a genre of its own, or is the crime film only one of the possible fields of application of the noir logic? That is, is noir a predicate that entertains toward the crime universe the same relationship as toward comedy or western, a kind of logical operator introducing the same anamorphic distortion in every genre to which it is applied, so that finding its strongest application in the crime film turns on nothing but historical contingency?