What Film Noir Looked Like Before It Had a Name

Film noir is usually described as a mood before it is described as a genre, and the visual vocabulary is part of why. A dark domestic interior suffused with an insidious pall; a world aghast at the horrors of an existentialism fashioned by disenchantment and pessimism. That is the recognisable iconography of noir, in which the moral ambivalence and psychic dislocations of postwar modernity congeal upon the cinematic image. Senses of Cinema frames Marcel Carné's Thérèse Raquin (1953) inside exactly that tradition — which is the interesting wrinkle, because Carné's film sits in a French lineage that predates the American label Hollywood critics later applied. The gloom isn't decoration. It is the argument: a postwar world where the interior matches the psyche, and the shadows are doing the moral work the plot won't.