Re: Re: RARA-AVIS: noir vs hardboiled/Serie Noire

Etienne Borgers (freeweb@rocketmail.com)
Tue, 8 Dec 1998 04:48:44 -0800 (PST) As Bill called for my opinion, I may say that you
both are on the good track.=20
=20
Baxdeal for the mood of the content that will
certainly decide if the work may be qualified as
Noir. It definitely has to carry highly pessimistic
or nihilistic views of the world (or of the human
social behavior) as one of its major components.

On the other hand, Bill is right by comparing the
word Noir to similar French expressions. It is
obvious that Noir (coined during the early fifties
by some French critics, mainly for films...)=20
certainly echoes the name of Serie Noire (in which
Noire is the word with impact and related to existing
French literary expressions).
This name was an expression in French to describe
catastrophic situations (in French, "une s=E9rie noire"
means a succession of bad events...- literally
translated into English : a black series).=20

As said, Noire was the important word as it was
reminiscent of "litterature noire" as well.
Litterature noire was the older French expression
used to qualify the Gothic literature (of English
origin, and its successors).

With such a title, it was evident for the French
public that there was no place for very conventional
literature in this Serie Noire, new collection by
Gallimard in 1945. The series published in fact both
hard-boiled and Noir novels.

Bill is right when he recalls that the literary
novels published by Gallimard in France were (and
still are) all with white covers in their original
edition.
Contrasting with the mainly black covers of Serie
Noire...

Later, due to the popular success of Noir mysteries
and Noir films, the word gained a larger meaning, not
anymore restricted to the Gothic genre when somebody
refers now to "litterature noire" in French.

Also to remember: "humour noir", black humor-
expression coined by the French surrealists after WW1
for a special type of humor: acid, desperate and
macabre.
Noir was used by them to evoke some gruesome aspect,=20
as a recall of Gothic ambiances.

[To be observed that in French, adjectives varies
with the gender of the subject; so, noir (m) or noire
(f)is the same word when translated into English.
"Litterature" is feminine and cinema (or film) is
masculine. Serie is feminine.]

There was no good French expression to carry the
impact of the words "hard-boiled" applied to novels.
So we could say that very quickly, for the French
public and critics, both genres were qualified as Noir.

I'm convinced that today the amalgam in French is
complete and easily maintained by novels being a mix
of the genres, and popular French series publishing
both in the same collections.

Hope this will help to clarify some aspects of the
magic Noir word.

E. Borgers
PS: in my website you will find some illustrations of
the black covers of novels published by Serie Noire
in France.
Hard-Boiled Mysteries
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6384

---William Denton <buff@vex.net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 7 Dec 1998 BaxDeal@aol.com wrote:
>=20
> : and while noir certainly reflects a visual style
in film, the French
> : refered to the genre as "black" more for its
nihilistic philosophy
> : rather than because most of works of the original
era were filmed in
> : black and white.
>=20
> I thought the critics coined the term film noir to
go with Serie Noir,
> the series of books which was the place, IIRC,
where Woolrich's Black
> books were all printed. Etienne can no doubt clear
this up, if no-one
> else can.
>=20
> French books, like those from Gallimard, all had
white covers, didn't
> they? If Serie Noir books had black covers they
must have really
> stood out.
>=20
>=20
> Bill
> --=20
> William Denton=20
> =20
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