Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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Phantom Bodies: The Missing People and Empty

Streets of Film Noir

Tina Wasserman

To cite this article: Tina Wasserman (2014) Phantom Bodies: The Missing People and
Empty Streets of Film Noir, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 31:7, 611-620, DOI:
10.1080/10509208.2012.710520

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2012.710520

Published online: 24 Jul 2014.

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 Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 31: 611620, 2014
Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1050-9208 print / 1543-5326 online
DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2012.710520

Phantom Bodies: The Missing People and Empty

Streets of Film Noir

TINA WASSERMAN

Many places and settings that were depicted in wartime and postwar America film noir were
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often framed within darkly menacing and desolate urban topographies. We might think of
Walter Neff in Billy Wilders Double Indemnity (1944), arriving alone to his Los Angeles
office on a dark night, wounded, rapping on the glass doors to attract the attention of a lone
watchman, then hobbling through the vacant building toward his office to record his last
confession of deceit and murder. Or we might conjure Alice Moore in Jacques Tourneurs
The Cat People (1942), walking alone at night, through the dark, depeopled streets of New
York City. Sensing that she is being followed she quickens her pace to a nearby bus stop
where a newly arrived bus opens its doors. Seeing her pale, ashen expression, the bus driver
says to her, You look as if youd seen a ghost to which she responds, looking over her
shoulder to the rustling leaves in a tree, Did you see it? What is striking in both scenes
is the haunting emptiness that pervades in each film: as the protagonists move through the
dark vacant streets, they encounter only a few nocturnal souls. We might ask here: why are
these images of urban topography in wartime and postwar American film noir so empty, so
seemingly abandoned? Where are the people?
Initially identified by the French after the Second World War, critics and historians
have since then speculated on what would have made the group of American films we
now know as historic film noir to be perceived as so starkly different from their prewar
predecessors.1 To the postwar French critics the noir world seemed to be a place where
dangerous, seductive women, criminal, deviant men and loner detectives had replaced
Hollywoods prewar scenarios of productive, well-meaning citizens, or, at the very least,
cautionary tales where crime did not pay. Earlier Hollywood films, with their evenly lit
interiors and balanced exteriors, seemed to give way to those with dark, deserted streets and
deeply shadowed rooms in a world permeated by loneliness, fear and distrust. The moral
certainties of good and bad, right and wrong so present in prewar Hollywood films seemed
to have transformed into wartime and postwar scenarios of pessimism, moral ambiguity and
unease. Raymond Chandler, whose own pulp fiction novels often served as narratives for
many film noir, seemed to sum up the noir sensibility in 1950 when he wrote that it depicted
a world that had gone wrong; a world, where the streets were dark with something more
than night.2 Film noir seemed to narrate both seen and unseen threats; it was a world,

Tina Wasserman has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University. She is a full-time
faculty member in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at Tufts University/The School of the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her published essays include Constructing the Image of Postmemory,
in The Image and the Witness (Wallflower Press, 2007), and Intersecting Traumas: the Holocaust,
the Palestinian Occupation and the Work of Israeli Journalist Amira Hass in Culture and Conflict:
Contemporary Perspectives on War (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), as well as contributions to the
journals Screen, Afterimage, and Senses of Cinema.

611
 612 Tina Wasserman

writes film historian Robert Porfirio plagued by a pervasive fear of something hauntingly
indeterminate.3
Some historians have suggested that this darker depiction of the mid-twentieth century
American city in film noir likely points to a shift in the American self-image as its Jef-
fersonian and pastoral ideals began to crumble under the reality of rapidly growing cities.
Clearly urbanizationwhich reached a peak in the United States in the 1940sas well as
those elements closely aligned with the urban environment such as diversity, ethnicity, im-
migrant populations and industrialization, threatened a more homogeneous and traditional
self-image; one that celebrated the small town as the centerpiece of the American ideal.
The city, as it was imagined in film noir, symbolically seemed to register this seismic shift
and the modern metropoliscomplex and heterogeneous as it wasbecame a marker for
modernity itself.
But many historians have countered that film noir also expressed the appeal of American
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modernity; that while noir reveled in a cast of criminal men and loose, emancipated women
adrift in urban settings rife with corruption and danger, their transgressions against the
staid status quo of the era, while ultimately punished by the end of the film, remained,
nevertheless, glamorous and seductively appealing. Ironically, although much contrasted
and often pitted against one another in the noir world, small towns could offer no real respite
to the ever-growing influence of the city. The American metropolis was depicted as a place
whose corrosive force was so strong and pervasive that it could taint, bleed and permeate
its way into the most idyllic of settings. Even for those characters that had retreated from
their urban life of crime to small town and rural sanctuariesas do Ole Andreson in Robert
Siodmaks The Killers (1946) and Jeff Bailey in Jacque Tourneurs Out of the Past (1947),
for examplethere was no escape. Both are eventually ferreted out by their urban nemeses;
the opening scene in each film depicts their respective havens infiltrated by hoodlum thugs
stumbling upon, or purposely looking for these ill-fated protagonists.
The city as a menacing, threatening and corrupting force was also wedded to a sense
of its unavoidable decay; in film noir, the city is projected as a site of withering vice and
points toward its inevitable abandonment. Perhaps some of the starkest and most desolate
examples of the bleak urban landscapes depicted in film noir can be found in German
emigre Robert Siodmaks Phantom Lady (1944). The film depicts the investigative journey
of a woman determined to prove the innocence of a man who has been accused of murder;
it takes her deep into the noir city where we encounter those images that are now so
closely aligned with the noir sensibility: dark, deserted streets, dimly-lit rooms, seedy dives,
lonely subway platforms, derelict skid-row sidewalks, abandoned rain-soaked alleys, and
more.
Film historians David Reid and Jayne Walker have argued that the noir sensibility of
Cornell Woolrichthe author of the original pulp novel Phantom Lady, written in 1942,
upon which the film was basedwas, in fact, much derived from the Great Depression of
the 1930s. Woolrichs work, as Reid and Walker write, was:
. . .very much rooted in the experience of the Depression, when fear (or in other
quarters, hope) arose that capitalism and its incarnation the modern metropolis
had entered some permanent crisis. In Woolrichs fiction, the Depression has
become a sort of eternal, unrelieved dark night of body and soul.4
Along with registering the shockwaves of the Great Depressionwhere seediness and
the despair seemingly seep unto blighted and decrepit city streets, its inhabitants desperate
with schemes to avoid the pitfalls of poverty and to get rich quickReid and Walker
 The Missing People and Empty Streets of Film Noir 613

argue that Woolrich and wartime film noir also began to record the very decline of the
great mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century American cities on the eve of the middle
class flight to the suburbs; a postwar phenomenon identified by sociologists and cultural
historians as white flight. To Reid and Walker, the thematics of the abandoned city
pervaded wartime film noir.5 Many iconic scenes and images in film noir seem to evoke
an abandoned sensibility as city centers, once teeming with business, street life and people,
now appear evacuated and empty.
However, while images of desolation might point to the eventual abandonment of
the city in the postwar period by the white middle class, in Phantom Lady there are two
scenes that narrate a different, more complicated scenario. In one, owners of a neighborhood
delicatessenpresumably a Jewish immigrant couple, a fact that is implied by their heavily
accented English and the business they runrescue the protagonist from an attack.6 In
another, a middle-aged African-American womanostensibly going to, or coming home
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from a night shiftappears on a deserted, late-night subway platform just in time to avert
the protagonist from being attacked again. Both incidences point to the city as a place that
supports the ongoing presence of diverse urban constituenciespopulations of working
class people, immigrants and African-Americans, among others. In this sense it could
be argued that the trope of abandonment, so prevalent in film noir, as Reid and Walker
argue, can be seen as a registration of anxiety, as a predominantly white urban populace
is replaced by new groups and ethnicities. Even as the city may have been scaring some
of its population away, these scenes demonstrate the city to continue to be a place for a
hard-working, aspirational immigrant or minority groups.
In any case, while Phantom Lady suggests in these two scenes the more complex
composition and demographics of mid-twentieth American cities, the film does indeed
have the pervasive sense of abandonment that is identified by Reid and Walker as one of
the signposts of wartime film noir. Additionally, the film has many other iconic themes
and sensibilities of film noira murder, a detective, a femme fatale, enigmatic clues, a
confusing plot and more. Thus, with its prototypical noir features and its overall sense of
abandonment, we can turn to Phantom Lady to further evaluate the questions posed at the
outset of this essay: why does so much activity within the noir world take place in such
darkly desolate settings?
Phantom Lady begins one evening with Scott Henderson, a successful engineer living
in New York City, sitting by himself in a bar recovering from an argument he had with his
wife, Marcella. Finding himself alone with two tickets to a musical revue, Henderson asks
the only other patron of the bara woman with an unusual hatto join him. She agrees
and after a short taxi ride to the theatre they settle in to watch the show. Henderson returns
home late that night to find three police installed in his apartment, there to question him
about the death of his wife who had been found murdered there earlier that evening. He is
able to retrace his steps for the police but he cannot produce the name of the hatted lady
with whom he spent the evening, nor will any of the witnessesthe bartender, the taxi
driver or the musicians in the musical revueadmit to having seen him (we later learn they
were bribed to keep quiet by the real murderer). Unable to produce an alibi for the time
of the crime, Henderson is arrested for the murder of his wife. Distressed by the outcome
of events, Hendersons assistant and love interest, Carol Richman, begins to investigate the
crime and ultimately proves him innocent by the end of the film.
Richman is a sensible and reliable worker originally from a small Midwestern town.
Nicknamed Kansas, she embodies the sensible, common sense values of small town
America. After Henderson is arrested, he suggests, more than once, for her to return to the
safety and comfort of her hometown: When are you going back to Wichita? he asks her
 614 Tina Wasserman

from his jailed cell. With her even-tempered and pleasant personality, she is depicted as a
truth-seeking and fair-minded innocent from Americas heartland and comes to personify
its presumed goodness. When Kansas ventures through the city, assuming false identities
or pursuing leads through the dark, menacing streets, she confronts the dangerous and
threatening features of the urban landscape. New York City becomes the archetypal noir
city situated in opposition to wholesome middle America; the city is a place that is so sordid
and dirty, one character contemptuously describes its squalid dwellings as places where
you can feel the rats in the walls.
As typical the plot and format are to film noir, Phantom Lady has, nevertheless some
significant differences. First, the most obvious dissimilarity is that there is no central male
character that solves the crimetypically in film noir, the loner detective, often hard-
boiled, sometimes even at odds with the law. Instead, a woman independently seeks the
truth in Phantom Lady, at first at odds with the police, and then later joined by them.
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Second, Phantom Lady excludes one of the most notorious characters associated with film
noirthat is, the femme fatale. Although she is murdered at the very beginning of the
film, Marcella comes to represent that iconic figure in absentia. She is described as spoiled,
beautiful, and duplicitous, and, as it turns out, is having an adulterous affair with one
of Hendersons friendsindeed the very person who kills her. The very presence of the
femme fatale then is suggested only through Marcellas absence and the investigation that
her death inaugurates. The only visual manifestation of Marcella occurs solely through a
substitute image: a looming portrait of her fills the center space of the living room when the
police question Henderson in his apartment the night of the murder. The presence of her
surrogate image significantly underscores the proliferation of absent, doubled, performed
and phantom identities throughout the film.7 Indeed while the title of Siodmaks film might
point toward the phantom hatted woman Henderson must find to secure his alibi, Marcella
is, undoubtedly another phantom presence within the film.
The only recognizable incarnation of a living femme fatale we do encounter in
Phantom Lady, is presented with some irony in the figure of Kansas. Dressed incognito,
in tight-fitting clothing and seductively made-up, she attempts to seduce a musician into
giving her information about the evening Henderson and his hatted companion showed
up in the theatre audience at the musical revue. Hendersons nameless companion for the
eveningthough absent through much of the filmcan also be seen as an elusive variation
on the role of the femme fatale: if the she is not found, Henderson could be executed
for a murder he did not commit, thus his contact with her can be seen as potentially
lethal.
The sought after hatted stranger in the film, the missing, unidentified woman around
which the narrative swirls, personifies the phantasmagoric sense of individual identity in the
noir world. Indeed, she is not just absent, she, herself, had insisted upon remaining nameless
when Henderson first encountered her. Interrupting him when he invites her to join him
at the musical revue, she says to him, No names, no addresses, just companions for the
evening thats the only condition in which I will go. In his study on film noir and modernity
Edward Dimendberg writes of Phantom Lady: In a curious way the two remain strangers
despite contact with each other.8 This seems to suggest that even when contact occurs
between people, the city, nevertheless, remains a locale of strangers. The film underscores
anonymity Dimendberg continues, as the general condition of the metropolis.9
When later questioned if he remembered Hendersons companion, one of the witnesses,
the bartender, shrugs and says, a face is a face. The film depicts a world where people
are both insignificant and invisible to each other. A world in which calculated indifference
prevails and the stranger evades notice, Dimendberg writes, is proposed as an anomalous
 The Missing People and Empty Streets of Film Noir 615

horror.10 As such, conditions in the modern metropolis do not merely challenge notions
of the self in relation to more traditional ideas of communitythose ideals of family,
familiarity and neighborliness as represented by the American small townit suggests a
condition of alienation.
Following the theatre scene, the hatted, nameless woman virtually disappears from the
film. Though aggressively sought out by a number of people, she eludes being found until
the very end of the film. Indeed, her very existence is challenged throughout the film. At
Hendersons trial, the prosecutor says to him, Witnesses can recall seeing you, but not
her. Where is this woman? Has anyone seen her? No. Because there is no such woman,
there never was. By the end of his trial Henderson questions his own memory saying,
Maybe there never was such a woman. Maybe she doesnt exist. As the film progresses,
her identity seems to become all the more phantasmagoric as the search for her appears to
lead nowhere and to no one.
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To find this elusive woman Kansas must follow all possible clues. After an ineffective
pursuit of all possible witnessesthe bartender, the taxi driver, and musicians from the
musical revueshe moves past her search for a physical person and toward an investigation
of her personal effects. Turning her attention to the source of the womans unusual hat,
Kansas tracks down its milliner and, upon discovering it was made for a woman in
Long Island named Ann Terry, immediately embarks to her residence. At the Terry home,
Kansas is directed to the womans bedroom, where she has been sequestered, recovering
from the shock of her fiancees sudden death. After a disappointing attempt to speak with
her, Kansas leaves, only to quietly reopen the door and step back in. And there, framed
between two heavily draped curtainsas if upon a theatrical stageTerry is sitting on her
closet floor gazing down at a box, inside of which is the coveted object: the hat itself.
The fragile state of individual identity is underscored in this scene as the questions of
whether the phantom lady does indeed exist and Hendersons fate are inextricably linked
to the appearance of one particular hat. The film depicts the long journey through various
portals Kansas must traversefrom the city to country home, toward a bedroom, then a
closet and finally to the inside of a boxin order to find an object so that she can prove the
very existence of one person and so that another person can be proved to be innocent of a
crime he did not commit.
But there is something else that registers in her journey. Indeed, as Kansas moves
toward the truth, she must first encounter those depeopled, darkly menacing and desolate
urban topographies so imprinted onto the noir world. It is in her journey through the
city where such sensibilities are most profoundly registered. As she ventures into its dark
underbelly, across shadowy, vacant streets that are void of people and into lonely damp
corners the film archives a profound sense of emptiness. Certainly the entire film resounds
with these indicators, but it is when Kansas pursues the first witness, the bartender, over
a period of three separate nights, where we most encounter them most.
On the first night Kansas enters the bar where Henderson had encountered his
nameless companion the night his wife was murdered. Situated a number of steps below
street level, its subterranean, dank attributes are accentuated. Ordering a drink, she positions
herself on a stool at the far end of a long, vacant bar. A lone, solitary figure, she sits with
an unblinking expression on her face silently staring at the bartender with the hope of
intimidating him to change his story and admit to seeing Henderson on the night of the
murder. There is then an abrupt cut to the same bar, but another night. This time it is
congested with late-night revelers, a desperate nocturnal throng, crowded together in an
underground haunt; it is a cramped, claustrophobic scene that is underscored by low-key
 616 Tina Wasserman

expressionist lighting. Sitting on the same bar stool, Kansas remains impervious to the
distracting crush of people as she continues to watch the bartender, her face still set with a
steadfast, accusing stare.
This scene is immediately followed by a cut to the bar on another night, though now
it is raining outside, while inside it is empty and quiet. Kansas is once again seated upon
the very same bar stool, once again she has leveled her persistent stare upon the bartender,
who is clearly suffering under the pressure of her hostile scrutiny. Nervously the bartender
takes the manager aside and says to him, Shes there again, staring at me, but when he
goes back to look, she is gone, her barstool empty, with the moving blades of a solitary fan
making the only detectable motion in the bar.
After Kansas appears to have vanished from the bar on that third night, the bartender
nervously closes up and steps out in to the dark, rain-soaked street. He sees her once
again at the far end of the street, shrouded under the pale light of a solitary street lamp.
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The street appears gloomy and sinister. He hesitantly walks toward her then pushes his
way past her. As she proceeds to follow him, we encounter the images and sounds that
combine so seamlessly to produce the bleak nocturnal landscapes so iconic to film noir.
The camera pitches downward, following the stride of each character as they walk down
the deserted streets, their footsteps echoing against the pavement. Damp steam rises from
the dreary wet pavement. Solitary streetlights throw uneven pools of light, creating dense
areas of darkness and shadow. The streets appear evacuated except for Kansas and the
bartenderthe pursuer and pursued.
The pursuit continues up the stairway to the elevated subway train. On the empty
platform, their positions are exchanged as the bartender moves behind Kansas and for a
moment it appears he may be positioning himself to push her on to the train tracks below.
Tension mounts only to be interrupted by the middle-aged African-American woman com-
ing on to the platform. Her pleasantly distracted face and demeanor seem to momentarily
avert the tension of the scene. The bartender backs away as flashing lights begin to streak
across the platform and the rush of air signals the approach of the train. When the bartender
disembarks from the train, Kansas continues to follow him down more dimly lit streets
until he finally turns to confront her. There is a tense exchange between them after which
the bartender flees into the street and is killed by an approaching car.
The terse precision of these three night scenes is visually noteworthy, in part, because
they were produced solely within the confines of the studio. While postwar productions
often combined studio with location settings, wartime productions tended toward sparse,
pared down studio shooting, principally due to the economic restrictions imposed by the
war. Because of these restrictions, and perhaps also because of Siodmaks early background
in expressionist German film, the dark, deserted qualities of the noir city in Phantom Lady
are dramatically evident. While everything from the subway turnstile to the heat rising from
the wet pavement has been reconstructed through studio artifice, Siodmak was nevertheless
able to recreate New York City with an uncanny likeness while minimally reducing it to its
most menacing traits: the desolation of the sets works powerfully to enhance the sense of
lonely and dark city streets.
It is also an unusual sequence of scenes: a young woman relentlessly intimidating and
pursuing an older man is an unlikely, and certainly unfamiliar, scenario in an American film
from the 1940s. Moreover, because this nocturnal pursuit results in a death, this sequence
further underscores the doomed sensibility that pervades the film, one that pessimistically
suggests that any kind of contact between people in the city has the potential for lethal
consequences. Most importantly, it is an aesthetically masterful sequence of shots: in this
condensed, eerie sequence of nights Siodmak has established a haunting, almost abstract,
 The Missing People and Empty Streets of Film Noir 617

pattern of action and stasis, motion and emptiness that is complemented by the characters
display of confrontation and avoidance, distrust and paranoia.
While Phantom Lady has significant aesthetic qualities and a number of plot variations
to standard Hollywood film noirmost notably with the central detective role occupied by
a female characterit was nevertheless a product of a studio system that catered to populist
taste and entertainment values. Yet because it so powerfully evokes this sense of ominous
desolation, there are other, more deeply embedded meanings we might trace there as well.
Indeed, if we lift up these barren images of dark, depeopled streets of the noir city, we
might map out a message about disaster itself.
The director of Phantom Lady, Robert Siodmak was not just a German emigre, he
was also of Jewish descent. Helike many Northern European and German filmmakers
who were part of a large emigre community arriving in the United States throughout the
1930shad left Europe as a refugee, escaping the deadly threat posed by Hitlers rise to
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power. Like many other German filmmakers among the emigre community, Siodmak had
worked in silent and early sound era German cinema during the interwar years in a period
when avant-garde movements in cinema and the other arts had thrived. Perhaps his most
notable film during that period, Menschen am Sonntag (1929), figured a group of young
Berliners in the summer of 1929 depicted across several Sundays. The film provided a
noteworthy depiction of a social milieu in Berlin before the rise of Hitler.
None of the participants were professional actors and the film can be compared to
other non-fiction city films of the era such as Dziga Vertovs masterful avant-garde
film, Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Other luminaries associated with early German
cinemamany of whom would also escape to the United Statesalso worked on Menschen
am Sonntag. This included Siodmaks brother Curt, who co-directed the film and worked
on the screenplay, Billy Wilder who wrote the film, Edgar Ulmer who produced the film
and Fred Zinnemann, who worked as the films cinematographer. All ended up working
in Hollywood, and most, including the Siodmaks, Wilder, and Zinnemann were Jewish.
Wilderwhose mother, step-father and grandmother would perish under the Nazi regime
in concentration camps and in ghettosleft Germany in 1933 for Paris and later arrived in
Hollywood in 1939 along with many other refugee artists and intellectuals.
In Tom Gunnings study of Fritz Lang, he details Langs memories of his panicked
meeting with Joseph Goebbels shortly before his escape from Germany. Gunning writes:

Goebbels explains to him [Lang] the need to ban The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
because of the films ending, but reassures Lang that the Fuhrer knows and
loves Langs films and has proclaimed, This is the man who will give us
the great Nazi films. Only in a few versions does Lang raise the issue of his
Jewish heritage, with Goebbels responding, We will decide who is a Jew.
Lang indicates his outwardly expressed delight to Goebbels while inwardly
thinking in panic, How do I get out of here? . . .

Indeed, so many film-related personnel had fled Germany, crossing the Atlantic and
reestablishing themselves in Hollywood, that it became then known, at the time, as little
Weimar. All would certainly bring with them the Germanic traditions of doomed ro-
manticism and expressionism, but many must have also brought with them the ominous
undercurrents of the Nazi threat, along with a haunted sense of displacement and exile.
Indeed it is no wonder many of these directors would go on to make work associated with
film noir, bringing with them a sense of threatened dislocation, unease and calamity. The
 618 Tina Wasserman

noir world, with its traces of paranoia and unease narrates a deeply distrustful view of the
world.
In his monumental study, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the
German Filmwritten in 1947, Siegfried Kracauer looked to the history of German cinema,
from its inception in the late nineteenth century through to the Weimar period, for potential
clues that would explain the rise of totalitarianism, Hitler and the Third Reich. Using such
films as the expressionist masterpiece, Robert Wienes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919),
Kracauer made the argument that the themes of madness, pervasive fear and hypnotic
obedience to a tyrannical figure, so evident in this and other German films of the silent
and Weimar era, provided a blueprint to the Nazi era tragedy that would unfold. If early
and Weimar era German cinema, with its indelible markers of chaos, fear and despotic
repression charted the rise of Hitler, as Kracauer argued, then one could equally argue that
the pessimism and dark undercurrents of film noira style of film that was created by many
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of those very filmmakers whose work originated in Germany and who had subsequently fled
the country because of the threat posed by Nazismcertainly charts allegories of darkness
and dread.
Although film noir does have a German connection, it is important to recognize that
it was, nevertheless, originally an American phenomenon. Several other social, political,
cultural and economic factors have been much speculated upon to explain why film noir
began to narrate such a negative view of American social and cultural life when the
ideological thrust of so much American cinema up to that point had basically promoted a
positive image of the country. Some theories suggest that noir detailed gender changes and
the anxiety such changes inaugurated. Did the dangerous figure of the femme fatale, for
example, likely narrate the threat posed by newly empowered women, enlisted and trained
during the war into more specialized and higher paying jobs traditionally held by men?
Or was it a crisis of masculinity, as veterans, returning home and shaken by the war, with
symptoms of battle fatigue and shell-shock, found it painfully difficult to readjust to
civilian life.11 Other theories have suggested film noir to be related to postwar economic
malaise, Cold War paranoia and more. Whatever the many reasons, film noir is populated
with scenarios of distrust between men and women, murderous couples, broken families,
and crime-ridden streets. So different were these images of American social and cultural
life than those before the war, that when first encountered after the war, shocked French
critics could only identify this group of films with one succinct word: noir.
Film noir is now widely confirmed as pessimistic counter tradition within Hollywoods
history and for all its dark stylistics and subjects, it is in its very imaging of emptiness-,
I believe, where film noir represents the most profound shift from the hopeful, optimistic
and triumphant themes found in prewar Hollywood films. This darker wartime and postwar
vision was precisely articulated by the absence of bodies. For Gilles Deleuze, it is the
spectral absence of people that best articulates the difference between classical and modern
cinema. For in classical cinema, he writes, the people are there, even though they are
oppressed, tricked, subject, even though blind or unconscious. Soviet Cinema is an example:
the people are already there is Eisenstein.12 The people are there in American cinema as
well, he continues, in Capra, Vidor, and Ford. He writes:

In American and in Soviet cinema, the people are already there, real before
actual, ideal without being abstract. Hence the idea that cinema, as an art of the
masses, could be the supreme revolutionary or democratic art, which makes
the masses a true subject.13
 The Missing People and Empty Streets of Film Noir 619

Revolutionary and democratic aspirations in classic cinema, as argued by Deleuzecinema

in which the populace is fully activated and decidedly dynamicare powerfully evident in
two films at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In Soviet filmmaker, Sergei Eisensteins
Strike (1925), factory workers are pitted against capitalist owners and repressive police
brigades during a bitter strike for fare wages and better working conditions. Eisensteins
film charts the fate of workers, not individually, but as a collective mass. When tensions
increase and the conflict intensifies, the revolutionary action of the workers is met with
brutal repressive force. In scene after scene we are presented with a mass of agitated bodies.
With fists raised in the air, the people march forward only to be ruthlessly pummeled back.
As bodies slip and limbs flail about, the panicked masses, caught in dead ends and pressed
together, push for a way out. In these very images we sense class conflict and revolutionary
aspirations: the film registers the desire of the people en masse.
So too are people expressively present in the classic American film, Frank Capras Mr.
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Smith Goes to Washington (1939) but from the other side of an ideological divide. Here it
is not Marxist revolutionary rhetoric that unites them, but rather populist common sense.
Capras Hollywood film celebrates homespun American democracy by way of the good
intentions of one nave, provincial man and his band of boy rangers as they fight deception
and graft in the American capital. The film celebrates ordinary, everyday individuals that
are united together in their fight against corruption. But the events around the Second
World War provide a fracture point for Deleuze: fascism, extermination camps, and atomic
annihilation now eliminate the hopeful trajectory of the people as a progressive political
body en masse. He writes:

a great many factors were to compromise this belief: the rise of Hitler. . .
Stalinism . . . the break-up of the American people, who could no longer believe
themselves to be the melting-pot of peoples past or the seed of a people to
come. . .14

Now, he theorizes, a politicized cinema had to imagine them missing: If there were a
modern political cinema, Deleuze writes, it would be on this basis: the people no longer
exist, or not yet. . .the people are missing.15
The images of emptiness, of depeopled and desolate topographies found in film noir, I
believe, underscore the theory Deleuze proposes. Expressing a more dystopian view taking
hold in wartime and postwar America, they narrate a knowing pessimism in relation to the
events of the Second World War. It is through these dark, unpopulated cityscapes that film
noir speaks to us through apocalyptic metaphor. Translated, via Hollywood, into a language
of popular culture and entertainment, film noir traces a haunted sentiment; its abandoned
and evacuated spaces coded as messages of displacement and fear. It is in its very imaging
of emptiness and absent bodies where film noir most represents a profound shift from the
hopeful, optimistic presence and plenitude of prewar Hollywood. Contrary to Hollywoods
hopeful dreaming and in its darkest imagination, film noir plays out the haunted sensibilities
inherited by a world that can imagine and know the catastrophic events of Auschwitz and
Hiroshima.

Notes
1. Most historians generally agree that historic or classic American film noir lasted roughly seven-
teen years, beginning with John Hustons The Maltese Falcon (1941)although some consider
this film to be proto-film noirand ending with Orson Welles Touch of Evil (1958).
 620 Tina Wasserman

2. Originally published in Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (1950), reprinted here in
Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991),
83.
3. Robert Porfirio, No Way Out: Existential Motifs in Film Noir, in Perspectives on Film Noir,
editor, R. Barton Palmer (New York: G.K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall International, 1996), 127.
4. David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, Strange Pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City
of the Forties, in Shades of Noir, editor, Joan Copjec, (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 74.
5. Ibid, 85.
6. We can surmise that the appearance of this kindly, seemingly Jewish immigrant couple must
resonate with Siodmaks own sense of identity.
7. The use of a portrait here as a visual trope to signify absence is echoed in other noir films, most
notably Otto Premingers Laura (1944).
8. Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: Harvard University Press, 2004), 31.
9. Ibid, 32.
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10. Ibid, 32.

11. We would now identify these symptoms as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the clinical
terminology for the mental disorder of an individual whose traumatic past continues to pierce
and disrupt their current experience of reality. The American Psychiatric Association only
acknowledged this disorder in1980, sometime after the Vietnam War had ended, after noting the
large number of veterans who were involuntarily re-experiencing events associated with the war,
even though the war had been over for some time. The unique element of this mental disorder is
that its symptoms are not produced through any kind of illness, but rather specifically in relation
to events themselves.
12. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 216.
13. Ibid, 216.
14. Ibid, 216.
15. Ibid, 216.