The Cartographic journal Vol. 46 No. 1 pp.

1623 Cinematic Cartography Special Issue, February 2009

# The British Cartographic Society 2009

REFEREED PAPER

Locations of Film Noir

Tom Conley
Departments of Romance Languages & Visual/Environmental Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138,
USA
Email:tconley@fas.harvard.edu

Maps and mapping are evident almost everywhere in post-war cinema. The end of the Second World War and the advent
of the Cold War had caused many of the worlds borders to be redrawn. Cinema played a vital role in bringing forward the
dilemmas that came with these shifts. Film noir offers a singular cartography of cinema: it dislocates its viewers through
its mental maps that call into question the specific times and places of their settings. Its force owes much to two
conflicting cartographies: one, that is psychic, is at odds with another, which is geographic. Two films (The Killers and
The Crooked Way) are studied to show how the mapping agency that prevails as of the end of the Second World War
finds its most precocious and enduring formulas in the conventions of this cinema.

Keywords: cartographic cinema, film noir, amnesia, World War II

INTRODUCTION brute or magic) of the image is at the same time underscored

A conundrum of film noir in its classical years is that where
it portrays dubious protagonists lost in mazes of intrigue, in
frightening imbroglios of double-dealing and double
crossing, it invariably specifies where they take place.
Characters and spectators find themselves pigeonholed in
bleak designs of destiny. As a general hypothesis it can be
said that while it reaches into the deeper swells of psychic
conflict, film noir is built upon geographies of uncommon
clarity. It underscores, perhaps better than other genres or
conventions, what makes cinema a medium that builds
upon physical and mental cartographies. The films carefully
tell us where they take place at the same time their visual
rhetoric causes us to wonder where we are both
historically and psychically in relation to them.
In an earlier study (2007), I sought to estimate to what
degree cinema is a cartographic medium. It was argued that
the shot itself, especially in long takes in deep focus and of
extended duration, conveys landscapes in which characters and
viewers roam and often get lost. When set as establishing shots
for given sequences they carry an authentifying effect simply by
locating the milieus in which those sequences take place. If we
recall Andre Bazins reflections on the ontology of the
photographic image (1998), the state of being of the image,
indeed reality itself, would attest to the fact that for the
spectator space within the frame is always in dialogue with
what surrounds it. By comparing the one to the other, space in
and space off, spectators constantly plot or locate their
relations with the areas the film is mapping. Likewise, wherever
a film fashions a sense of place or location by inserting maps
into its image-field, the veracity or realism (no matter whether
and called into question. The intimate rapport of cinemato-
graphy and mapping becomes a site of critical reflection, not
only about film and place but also of cognition and the delicate
and vital aspects of subjectivity in general.1
Without further rehearsing these arguments I should like
to extend them to film noir in its resonant phase in the
aftermath of the Second World War.2 Many films of that
moment inherit and refashion familiar aesthetic styles that
include deep-focus photography of confined spaces shot
from high and low angles; emphasis on chiaroscuro through
effects of low key and back lighting; and often, a tendency
to protract the duration of shots as if to encourage the
viewer to gaze upon the complexities of their composition.
Personages find themselves caught in spatio-luminous
configurations that leave no room for agency or action.
Insofar as Venetian blinds are an emblem of the
convention their alignment of horizontal shutters causes
bars and strips of light and dark literally to cut across the
path of object in the visual field, to cue on what it means to
see the world through obtruding apertures. Time and again
innocuous objects whether pairs of telephones equipped
with rotary dials, faces peering from under visors of wide-
brimmed hats casting long shadows, coffee cups in uncanny
close-up, windshields of cars framing drivers and their
companions are rife with similar optical charge. Which is
stated in a terse and pathfinding study of the noir
convention: as the narratives drift headlong into confusion
and irrelevance, each characters precarious relationship to
the world, the people who inhabit it, and to himself and his
own emotions, becomes a function of visual style (Place

DOI: 10.1179/000870409X430960
Locations of Film Noir
and Peterson 1974/1996: 69; Vernet 1998). On another
level, and in accord with the locational effects of the
medium, the insertion of maps within the visual field tends
to be as frequent as in genres of the same moment the war
movie and the western affiliated with cartography. In noir
maps draw careful attention to the time and place of the
stories being told. They are often city-views that stand in
counterpoint to the labyrinthine aspect of the urban milieu.
Now and again a globe or a world map in an office or a
police station yields the irony of telling he viewer that the
space is defined entirely by cartographic icons, or that it
might be the tag indicating that the site is a non-space or a
space that could be located at will and according to the
vagaries of narrative context.
A BACKGROUND: RENOIR
Two highly cartographic films signal how wars impending
and wars past bring perspective to the plastic style of the
genre. Renoirs La Chienne (1930) and the same directors
La Bete humaine (1938) establish paradigms against which
the American post-war films can be measured. The
Depression and the Second World War become incon-
testably the historical elements to which many later films
make direct or indirect reference. La Chienne establishes a
standard of chiaroscuro for which the later features will be
known, and takes a literal and even flattened treatment of
the frame using visual caricature and a narrative of
incarceration to draw a painterly frame around a context
of blackmail and illicit circulation of artistic signatures
(taken up in Leutrat 1994: 23 and passim). Its cartography
is Parisian, set between an impoverished zone (the eight-
eenth arrondissement and the chic galleries on the other
side of the Seine), and it shoots in the maze of the sloped
streets of Montmartre. The economic world that it portrays
is more unremitting than its new world counterpart, Fritz
Langs Scarlet Street (1944), taking place in New York City,
that puts the city into an ambiance of Depression and
plunges its players into nightmarish world of an unspecified
Holocaust. While La Bete humaine, unlike La Chienne
(based on pulp fiction by Georges de la Fouchardiere),
owes superficial allegiance to Emile Zolas enduring novel
of the same name, it founds the conventions of a classic noir
plot (Damico 1996), with which the earlier film is also
associated and that to which, by way of Renoir as auteur, it
cleverly refers. Here, and perhaps also in view of the
geography of Fritz Langs pre-war M (1931) in respect to
the same directors post-war American features, The Big
Heat (1954) and While the City Sleeps (1955) that Ranciere
(2001: 6592) studies through the Weimar feature
associated less perhaps with noir than with crime drama.
In Renoirs first feature (and one of his first two sound
films) a pair of bums, two survivors of cruel fate and
economic collapse, shuffle happily across a sunlit street of
Paris after having found an errant bank note. In the
euphoria of weightless destitution, they tell each other of
the events that led them to become the twin ruffians they
are. One guffaws after hearing that other had been a
murder, il faut tout pour faire un monde ([sic.]you need
everything to make a world). The irony is multiple. It
17
rehearses, first, the relation of parts to wholes in a social and
physical geography. A totality is needed to yield a milieu in
a world-theater the Depression in which the characters
are immobilized. In most appreciations of the film the wry
remark would smack of Aesopian humanism, but in the
unnamed context of a moribund economy it connotes that,
like the two hobos of En attendant Godot, the only whole
or tout that would assure the presence of a world the
world in which they are placed, but not the world as such
is the film itself. The self-reflexive underside of the remark
underlines the political aesthetic of the feature in its most
graphic terms. The slice-of-life that the film claims to be
cutting from the real world is its own illusion or inner play
upon its own form. Now, second, in The Southerner (1945),
a film Renoir shoots on location in the Dust Bowl of
America, a displaced family tries to push fresh and frail roots
into the impoverished soil of a homestead. Everything goes
wrong. At one instant, in attempting to wax philosophically
about the condition in which they find themselves, the
young father (Zachary Scott) quips, wiping his brow, It
takes everything to make a world. Renoirs minor classic of
American life in the depression, though not noir, shows
that its elements are mobile and fungible, and that they
move from one generic and national location to another.
In Renoirs second feature of noir trappings [also a film
that Fritz Lang remade as Human Desire (1954) in the noir
mode in his last years in Hollywood] the geography extends
to and from the city and the countryside. Because the
turning points of the plot take place in a high-speed train
that runs between Paris and Le Havre the theme of
inherited and inherent human bestiality soon a hallmark
of American film noir is complicated where animality is
affiliated with machinery. Very much a film about la
machine humaine after the demise of the Popular Front, it
ties the infernal contraption of Oedipal fate to anticipation
of the Second World War. The premonition of a world that
is racing to its end is found less in the expectation,
following Zolas novel, that it will conclude with a runaway
train en route to a crash (because the engineers mate brings
the locomotive to a stop after the protagonist jumped to his
death), than in the mesh of classical tragedy and imminent
history. The events take place in spaces between Norman
countryside (that brings forward allusive memories of
Flauberts ironic takes on pastoral life in Madame Bovary,
a novel on which Renoir had based his feature of 1933) and
the grime and soot of the city around and about the rail
yards of the appropriately named Gare Saint-Lazare. At the
outset the camera, placed at the front of the speeding
locomotive, registers relentless movement into a space
whose vanishing point is always receding. Applied to the
geography of the feature, the category of determined or
striated space (Deleuze and Guattari 1980) shows that La
Bete humaine is a map so riddled with lines, matching
borders and destiny that a space of play, agency, or even
illusion is fleeting. Its most effective cartography, however,
is found not in the notable places shown along the edges of
the frame or the Norman landscape outside of the windows
of the passengers compartments but either within or along
the adjacent narrow corridors. At several junctures the
protagonists confer intimately while resting their heads
against the doilies adorning the seats in the first-class
18
cabins. Sewn into them is the name-of-the-train, Etat
(State), connoting the nation itself France in 1938 in
connection with maps at the entrance of the wagons which
generally describe the national network of railways next to
photographs conveying the countrys physical beauty. But
here they are elided in favour of emphasis on the contiguity
of the etat to the troubled faces of the personages (Conley
1991/2006: 144). The uncertain state of the nation is
correlated with the troubled condition of their beings.
Recurrence in two milieus of the remark that a whole is a
needed to convey a world indicates that anticipation of
disaster and war in the pre-war films stands in contrast to
the post-war counterpart where, quite possibly effects of
trauma, amnesia, or confused and conflicted memory
prevail. It almost goes without saying that American film
noir is constructed around a similar unnamable absence,
War past and present, to which allusive reference is
frequent. The historical cartography locates the war more
often than not as what it cannot specify because, in psychic
terms, the events been traumatically elided or incorpo-
rated (Abraham, 1987) into the narratives. Two films, The
Killers (1946, d. Robert Siodmak) and The Crooked Way
(1949, d. Robert Florey) are especially apt to qualify as
both physical and mental maps (Jacob 2006: 344348 and
Harley 2001: 195) Each develops a cinematic cartography
around an absence directly or indirectly attributed to the
trauma of the War. Both films bear the hallmark of
displacement or translatio insofar as their directors, like
Lang and Renoir, were both trained in Europe before
emigrating to North America. Both films have a keen visual
character that bears on amnesia, trauma, and geographical
confusion. Each uses maps and mapping to underscore
similar dilemmas in which subjectivity or consciousness is
yoked to issues of location.
The killers
The Killers opens with the globe of the Universal logo. Its
front credits follow a tracking shot, taken from a space
behind a driver and a rider in the front seat of a car speeding
into the night along a two-lane road. The painted lines
extend outward, it seems, dividing the image as does the
bar where each pane of the windshield is met. Along the
way the headlights pass by a sign that locates the action:
Brentwood, New Jersey, below which is printed Please
Drive Carefully. The headlights literally scan the billboard
to suggest that it might be a geographical emblem. The
credits that follow quickly dissolve in and out of the frame
in which a gasoline station, to the left, faces a diner on the
other side of the street to the right. High contrast of blades
of light cutting into dark shadows turns the scene into an
uncanny painting. Yet by this time, only seconds into the
film, we wonder exactly where we are. Clearly Brentwood
does not figure in any gazetteer of the state of New Jersey.
Could it be Brentwood, California, the name of a town
contiguous to Hollywood, not far from the Universal
studio? If so, does the displacement of one place into
another to establish an oneiric or mental map in which
triangulation and topography are of a similar psychic and
physical measure?
The answer is affirmative: the first sequence begins as two
menacing figures they will be killers cross the street from
The Cartographic Journal
the gasoline station. Its name Tri-State Station, cuts into
the image anamorphically to read Tri-St. The men cross
the street and enter a diner whose bright interior
illuminates the space outside. The film cuts to the interior
where the entirety of The Killers, Ernest Hemingways
short story (noted in the credits), is staged almost verbatim.
We soon learn that Brentwood is in an area near the
Delaware River Gap, ostensibly at the intersection of
the borders of Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey.
The storyline does not stray far from Brentwood.
Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Pittsburgh and Hackensack
are configured in the imbroglio at different times. From the
beginning the Tri-State Station and diner are part of an
allegorical cartography that rhymes with the tryst on which
the plot is based. And, in turn, from the credits onward the
film inserts triangles of one kind or another into the field of
view so as to saturate the image with the geometrical figure
that ciphers the tension of the plot.
A complex layering (or, in the idiolect of Gilles Deleuze,
the stratigraphy) of flashbacks reveals how the film plots a
cinematic and geographical relation with trauma. The
narrative begins after Hemingways story ends, with the
murder of the Swede, the moniker for Pete Lund (Burt
Lancaster), that becomes the occasion for Riordon
(Edmund OBrien), an insurance adjustor, to solve the
enigma about why it ever took place where it did. A garish
green scarf (shown in black-and-white) leads him into the
history of the tryst in which the victim, hopelessly in love
with a thugs treacherous wife, had been murdered in order
to muffle any evidence about the robbery of a payroll from
the Prentiss Hat Factory in Hackensack (New Jersey), that
had taken place some years earlier. The episode of the robbery
is told in a flashback one of thirty-three in the film in an
extraordinary tracking shot of 2 minutes and 2 seconds
duration, taken from a moving crane, that anticipates and
rivals its celebrated counterpart in Touch of Evil (d. Orson
Welles, 1959), and that, because it is bathed in silence, bears
uncanny resemblance to the style of silent flashbacks for
which Joseph Mankiewicz was famous in the same years. The
sandpaper voice-over of Kenyon (Donald MacBride),
Riordans boss, reads aloud a newspaper account of what
happened. The account tells the viewer what to look for in the
field of the image, and in doing so it causes our gaze to centre
on stated details and not on others or on the overall
composition of the single plan-sequence.
The shot follows an almost classical itinerary by being
dissolved-in from a medium close-up of Kenyon who reads
the old newspaper clipping. In counter-tilt set over a fence
and gateway to enhance the effects of angularity (Figure 1),
the camera records, first, the sign on which Prentiss Hat
Co. Inc is shown on a support of cyclone fencing in a frame
erected over the entrance to a factory. Nine employees
(almost all are wearing one kind of hat or another) pass
beneath. The camera drops down to register a queue of
men sporting badges who file into the workplace. They
routinely insert their time-cards and move ahead. The
voice-over indicates that four men enter with the other
employees (thus we look for the familiar villains and the
scarf on Burt Lancasters neck). The camera slowly turns
left, emphasizing the angularity of the fence and gateway,
then tilts up to find a perspective in deep focus that follows
Locations of Film Noir
Figure 1. Flashback (1), The Killers
men walking down a wet street en route to their duties
(Figure 2). The voice-over indicates that the four thieves
make their way to the payroll office and vault on to the
second floor of an adjacent building. The camera arches up,
in synchrony with the aural description, passes along a
cement wall, and then holds its view of the inside of the
paymasters office as it can be seen through a series of large
windows in front of an arched lamppost and the budding
branches of a tree (Figure 3).
The shot stops to catch the actions of the men who tie
and bind the workers, enter the open safe, empty its
drawers and stash the cash into bags. The actions are shown
behind a glass, as if in a diorama within the very diorama of
the flashback itself. The camera arches down again, to the
right, to meet the men who will exit from the doorway at
street level. Before they emerge a panel truck, its broad
windshield reflecting the sky above, drives toward the
camera. The voice-over notes that the men fell in behind a
truck that was just leaving the factory. With the gates open
to permit the truck to exit into the street the men dashed
into the clearand made their way to three cars that had
been planted earlier for the escape. The camera pulls back,
moves upward, and turns left as the truck passes through
Figure 2. Flashback (2), The Killers
19
Figure 3. Flashback (3), The Killers
the gate (Figure 4). As turns and tilts up to find another
perspective in deep focus it records the four thieves running
to two of the cars (the third eventually drives off in the
opposite direction, which the voice-over never acknowl-
edges). When the shoot-out and botched escape are shown
the camera has returned to a site disengaged from the
gateway and entry, seen to the right, exactly where it began
its career (Figure 5).
The flashback of the holdup and exchange of gunfire is
shown as if in a silent film inserted into the sound medium.
The boss reads the clipping while Riordan stands over and
behind him with malicious delight. The camera describes a
space in the mode of a route-enhancing map (Woodward
1990) by which its unforeseen itinerary draws attention to
the path (and even, as in a carefully plotted 360u panoramic
shot in which the site of the camera is designated) it is
tracing. A crucial element appears either by chance or, more
likely, by consummate design: the windshield of the truck
that passes under the signboard shown at the beginning of
the shot mirrors the reversed characters of the companys
name (Figure 6). For an instant the doubly reflected
writing is clear and legible. On the glass we witness
(although the voice-over takes pains not to make any
Figure 4. Flashback (4), The Killers
20
Figure 5. Flashback (5), The Killers
indication) the cameraman cranking the film and his
assistant at his immediate right who guides the action. In
this instant the mode of production of the flashback is made
visible within the film. The detail that would be otherwise
erased from Hollywood cinema, known for its invisible
editing style, indicates how the tour de force is being
constructed and where the illusion is embedded in the
feature. The composition and careful synchronism of
movement throughout the sequence confirms that the
editors, contrary to the myth of the low-budget B feature
(Naremore 1998: 140), have taken pain to craft a shot that
melds aesthetic and political designs. Further still, the shot
locates the viewer in the field because the camera is aimed
directly forward, as if also to film the spectator, by way of
the double mirroring.
The detail in the shot tells how and why the film can be
appreciated as a historical map of its own kind.3 At the
beginning of the sequence the close-up of the newspaper
article, subtitled Hackensack, N.J. Victim of Daring
Holdup that Riordan hands to Kenyon is dated 21st July
1940. The top sheet on tear-off calendar on the wall in the
paymasters office displays 20, as if to confirm that the
article indeed appeared the following day. Meticulous
attention paid to time (with which sleuth Riordan solves
the case) bears on a greater historical and visual frame. In
the dialogue following the tracking shot Kenyon plots the
chronology both of the sequence and the making of The
Killers. Riordan notes the date of the robbery. Six years
later [after the heist], we find the Swede [Lancaster] in
Brentwood, as far as anyone knows, a filling station
attendantexcept hes waiting for some killers to come and
get him. In response to Riordans cocksure belief that he has
cracked the case, Kenyon, rising from his chair and sauntering
around his desk, then pointing his finger, says (in accord with
the theme of amnesia), Forget itRiordan, you know the
insurance business. The losses in any one year determine the
premium to be paid the following. We pay out in 1940, as we
did with Prentiss Hat, and thats adjusted in our rates for
1941. This is 1946. Our job is to keep our rates at a minimum,
so that the rates dont have to go up in 1947. Thats how we
set the public. The unspoken fact is that nothing is said to
have taken place between 1941 and 1946, and that the
The Cartographic Journal
Figure 6. Flashback (6), The Killers
machinations of the insurance firm are, like the film, aiming at
dividends in 1947, the date of the release of the feature to the
general public. The events are plotted around six years of
muted or unspoken violence that fall between 1940 and
1945. The film has plotted its imaginary geography over an
abyss of recent history.
The crooked way
By a wry irony the only significant map in The Killers is the
turning globe of the logo shown prior to the front credits.
It cannot be said that the design fosters the claim that what
the film purveys is of universal consequence [as it had in
Fritz Langs Scarlet Street (1945), when the film brings
itself to gripping closure in the name of a Universal
Release (Conley 2006: 45)], or total social fact, but that
nonetheless something unnamable figures in the design.
Other films of the convention underscore this absence by
using different means: in Robert Floreys The Crooked Way
maps of Los Angeles paper the walls of the police
inspectors office. He and his men shadow the movements
of a former small-time thug who had been known as Eddie
Ricardo (John Payne). The maps are purely decorative in
the sense that they offer realistic effects but on another
they locate trauma in a way that anticipates Memento
(2000). A minor noir film noir, possibly because its
narrative was originally conceived for radio (Silver and
Ward 1992: 73), from the outset it brings the war years
directly into the scenario. Presented as a sort of memento
mori, a radiograph of a skull, seen in profile to draw
attention to a piece of shrapnel embedded in its cranium,
the first picture of the hero (John Payne) is a virtual map
of his condition (Figure 7). Heard both in and off, are the
words of a doctor, the usual herald of truth (the grain of
whose voice like that of newscasters in the mode of The
March of Time), who informs his patient, a soldier
grievously injured during the War, that his memory is
shattered. Reconstructing his life and now wearing the
name Eddie Rice, he decides to return to Los Angeles, the
city he had known before his experience of combat, to find
himself. When seen both as they are and from an amnesiacs
point of view the buildings and streets, shot on-location,
Locations of Film Noir
Figure 7. Radiograph in The Crooked Way
require a double scrutiny, both as familiar points of
reference and, if the spectator is to identify with the
protagonists point of view, the elements of an utterly
depressing landscape (see Dimendberg 2004: 17).
Everywhere the diurnal shots of the city are mixed with
expressionistic portrayal of inner spaces hotel rooms, an
army surplus store filled with junk and bric-a-brac, and the
police station itself. One world is bathed in light, the other
in chiaroscuro. We are compelled to read the images of
the one through the other. Innuendo of the war percolates
through the space so as to consign the world of the
gangsters who seek to kill Ricardo, what might be one of
the foundations of the noir genre, to anachronism. The
trauma of a recent past, it is implied, causes the viewer to
look at inherited images and their commonplaces from a
different perspective, much as in Renoirs two features
noted above.
The casual insertion of maps in the film indicates why.
They are seen obliquely, in the beginning, in both the
police station and the gang leaders quarters, suggesting
that the agents on either side of the law use the same
tactical mechanisms in their battles with each other. But at
one point, when the police order a dragnet to be made over
Figure 8. Map and globe at police station in The Crooked Way
21
Figure 9. Map in surplus store in The Crooked Way
and around the city in order to catch the hero, the camera
holds on two maps. The chief of police stands before a wall
map of Los Angeles (Figure 8). With the arc of bright light
amidst the darkness a globe is shown to the left in order, as
it were, to locate the location of the event in a broader
theater of operations. The film appeals directly to the oldest
of comparisons from the opening sentences of Ptolemys
Geographia, in which geography is juxtaposed with
topography to underscore the relation of parts to wholes.
Here the cops-n-robbers motif that would be affiliated with
the wall map is juxtaposed with the globe, which forces
recall of the European and Pacific theaters of operations of
the American war effort. The map and globe shown in the
police station find their counterpart in the army surplus
store, the site where the narrative soon explodes into
outright warfare. The hero has been advised to take refuge
inside. Petey (Percy Helton), a diminutive go-between who
lives in its mess with a feline pet, nervously welcomes Eddie
into the sanctuary. Petey no sooner tips him off when he
makes a telephone call to the boss (Figure 9). A world map
of Baroque vintage cues the contrast. While Petey both
helps and double crosses his old acquaintance a source of
light (shaped like a flying saucer) floats over a Mercator
projection that, upon close view, displays a black line
depicting the shipping routes between American and
Europe that had been followed during the war. But
shipping routes of what kind? Reference is made not only
to the risky itineraries that supply ships followed on the
Murmansk Run, that had been depicted in Action in the
North Atlantic (d. Lloyd Bacon, 1943), but also the
movement of the noir auteur, such as Florey, Lang or
Siodmak, from Europe to North America.
Unlike the map of Los Angeles in the police station, the
map stands against a wall of cinderblocks stained by
dripping liquid or paint. When seen adjacent to each other
the two map-shots would seem to set two traditionally
opposed worlds in juxtaposition, as had the spaces in Fritz
Langs M (1931) in which the chief of police (Lohmann)
and the head of the underworld (Schreker) were both at
odds and in cahoots with each other. In The Crooked Way
the lighting and the setting, thanks to photographer John
Alton known for painting with light (1995) evince
22
Figure 10. Army surplus store in The Crooked Way
other effects. The two maps indicate that one type of war is
folded into another. The gangsters and the police find
themselves in a context of whose implications they seem to
be unaware. The war surplus store, the site where the
gangsters converge to kill the hero prior to the arrival of the
police, brings two worlds together. It had been seen by day,
fleetingly, when the camera, like Eddie himself, in his con-
dition of total alienation, grazes about areas that amount to
nothing more than anyplaces whatsoever (Deleuze 1983:
280), transitional zones or terrains vagues, found at the
edge or the rotten core of the modern city.
It is first seen in daylight, after Petey and a henchman exit
what seems to be labyrinthine interior or underground
bunker near a harbour (a foghorn is heard). An exterior shot
records the store from which the characters exit (Figure 10).
Seen for the first time, it seems merely there but is so
prominent and so evidently a piece of surplus that it clouds
the fact that in the narrative it is the front for the gangsters
bureau of operations. The windows display pyramids of paint
cans under signs advertising heavy machinery, aircraft
equipment, and camping equipment. The store becomes a
backdrop of the pyrotechnic finale where the police converge
to find the would-have-been villain and the head of the mob
in battle with each other. Facing its windows, they open fire.
Cops aiming sub-machine guns (and not, as in gangster
movies, spool-loaded tommy guns) trash the windows and
walls with such vehement delight that the fate of the store
supersedes that of the warring players (Figure 11). We ask
ourselves if the film is riddling recent memories of World
War II through reenacted scenarios of the pre-war gangster
milieu. Is The Crooked Way calling recent history a surplus
that needs to be shattered in a cinematic potlatch? Have the
remainders of the war become fetish-objects that arouse
mixed emotions on the part of those who see them? Or,
perhaps, in relation to a brief sequence in which the hero had
passed by a shooting gallery a miniature icon of war itself
where two sailors were shooting at clay ducks in the
background, the war surplus store itself becomes the target
of a vaguely destructive impulse? The site, itself of
importance greater than the players like the best of fetishes
does not yield an answer. But it does situate much of the
The Cartographic Journal
Figure 11. War enacted on the surplus store in The Crooked Way
ambivalence and the trauma of war that the cartographies of
film noir locate relentlessly.
CONCLUSION
In 1955, French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne
Chaumeton were responsible for exhuming American film
noir from a very recent past. But past it was, they admitted,
for reason that by the time their book was published the
genre was a bout de souffle, out of breath, already, out of
the past, and in their eyes an object of history. Film noir
nonetheless needed to be exported to France in order to
become what it now is. Borde and Chaumetons panorama
sets forward what might be called a planisphere of film noir,
a diagram of corresponding tendencies and issues that mark
its historical typology. The many manuals and readers that
have since defined and eternized the genre hold to the
conviction that it belongs to a longer and more complex
cinematic form. Whatever its fate since the years extending
from 1941 to 1953, its relation with location and locational
imaging bears strongly on its fortunes. Film noir at its best
interrogates what it means to be located through formal
means that include mapping and cartography. Maps seen in
two features, shown (at two points in The Crooked Way) or
drawn (in a tracking shot in The Killers) cause us to take
issue with our own sense of location and our rapport with
traumatic and traumatizing events: such are the unsettling
cartographies of noir in its post-war moment.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Tom Conley, Lowell
Professor in Romance
Languages and Visual and
Environmental Studies at
Harvard University, is
author of The Self-Made
Map: Cartographic Writing
in Early Modern France
(1996) and, lately, of
Locations of Film Noir
Cartographic Cinema (2007). His Errant Eye: Poetry and
Topography in Renaissance France is forthcoming (2010) at
the University of Minnesota Press. He has contributed to
David Woodward, ed., The History of Cartography (2007) and
translated works of Gilles Deleuze, Marc Auge, Michel de
Certeau and others.
NOTES
1
In The Tense of the Shot, a paper on Daniel Stern read
at a conference titled Opening Andre Bazin (Yale
University, 5th December 2008) Raymond Bellour studies
the folding process of subjectivation and objectivation in
our experience of cinema. The experience becomes a
significant event when viewers become conscious of
simultaneously locating and displacing themselves in view
of the images they see. See Certeau (1990: 17075) for
tensious of space, place and narrative.
2 Minuit, Paris.
In a celebrated thumbnail treatment of the genre in
1972 Paul Schrader noted how film noir is marked by war
and post-war disillusionment, Notes on Film Noir in:
Silver and Orsini 1996: 64. I have insisted more on the
evidence of trauma in that historical moment in a study of
The Big Heat and Dead Reckoning, in Stages of Film Noir,
Theater Journal 1987, 39(3): 347363.
3
The reading that follows supplements Robert G.
Porfirios arresting study of the sequence in which he
rightly notes that it merits comparison with similar tours de
force in Orson Welles and Max Ophuls (in Silver and Ursini
1996: 7882). What he notes, without heeding the
presence of the camera within the shot itself, underscores
the slight gaps between what is said and what is seen, thus
the manipulation of diegetic space (182). Initially the
camera does no more than to reaffirm the narration
establishing the site of the robberybefore descending in
a rightward arc to reveal the geang entering the factory, a
ploy which the narrator has already informed the audience
was woefully easy for them to effect (179). At the point a
signboard that would signal employees only is cut to read
ployees only. In view of the doubly reflected quality of the
shot the ployees would be those ployed by the effects,
including viewers of cinema in 1947.
23
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