I’ve been reading Borde and Chameton’s foundational book on film noir, and something in James Naremore’s otherwise good introduction stuck in my craw:
In their introduction, they try to solve the problem of definition by announcing that their book refers to “productions the critics have most often deemed to be ‘film noirs.’” This is probably as good a solution as any…. In fact, people never form complex categories in positivist fashion, by rounding up objects with identical characteristics and putting them in boxes.
Um, that’s not positivism. Positivism is the belief that measurement itself and alone constitutes science. What Naremore seems to object to is a) conceptual clarity of a genre like noir; and b) measuring the concept of noir against empirical reality. Now, it’s fine to acknowledge that genres - either as understood popularly or as used by critics - don’t have the kind of categorical rigor we might hope in studying them. And it’s fine to allow that unrigorous categories still allow productive scholarship, though at this point in the game we’ve had plenty of critical work on film noir and maybe it’s time to rebuild our conceptual tools from the ground up. But surely, it’s not a narrow, misguided endeavor to come up with complex categories that do, among other things, separate out objects/events/phenomena by exclusive characterists - that’s the nature of using intellectual models after all.
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