In the wake of the massive success of The Big Sleep - first as a novel, then as a film - Raymond Chandler became the dean of American hardboiled fiction. In 1947, Robert Montgomery set about adapting another of Chandler’s Marlowe novels, The Lady in the Lake, and in doing so pursued a form that seemed, hypothetically, to suit the presentational mode of Chandler’s writing. As the Marlowe novels were written in the first-person, in a serpent’s tongue of cutting insight, Montgomery would use a subjective camera, such that the audience, like the reader, became a passenger in Marlowe’s consciousness. 

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer considers the subjective camera in Lady in the Lake in relation to naturalism and stylization, and the position of the audience (or passenger). The eyes of Philip Marlowe are imperfect vehicles for truth, for the world of Chandler’s novels is one of machined distrust and deception, straining the limits of the observable and the verifiable, a romantic vision that does not merely enter the eyes, but is projected back from them, casting shadows and doubt. There, even the pictures lie.

In the harsh and glorious sunlight of southern California, consider the romance and terror of the shadow in film noir: shadows, plural, cloak a scene in mystery, but true menace lies in the faintest of movements, the animation of a lone shadow, breaking the atmosphere with a hint of voyeurism or violence, an agitated movement on the periphery of strained vision. In film noir, the night has a thousand eyes, but the night is not a syndicate: each probing stare that emerges out of that blackness is individual, creatures of torment and desire. Like many noir films, Jennifer is about the failure of social connection; it is also a romantic mystery, told through characters—sirens, spinsters, and satyrs—trapped in a web of miscommunication. This mystery is signalled at the start, with the movement of a lone shadow stalking the threshold of an empty gothic Californian estate. To this solitary shadow the film will inevitably return.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer discusses Joel Newton's 1953 film Jennifer, a bridge between the Gothic melodrama and the Old Dark House film. Broomer addresses the film's themes of madness and loneliness, as well as its portrayal of male predation.

In “Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir,” Raymond Durgnat argues that film noir is not a genre but a style that exists at the centre of overlapping themes. This approach makes other genres susceptible to a noir influence: the gothic mystery, the horror movie, the romantic drama, all of these genres are present in the classic period of noir, a continuum they share with the gritty urban thrillers and detective stories that foreground the style. The world-weary voice of noir could modulate through these genres. The severity of noir, the deathly serious threats and warnings of hardboiled dialogue, the spectres of death and taboo desires that run through the style are vulnerable to parody. The adaptability of that hardboiled tone made it capable of absorbing, or being lampooned by, the light, fast-talkin’ escapism of the screwball comedy, a style that preceded it in the Hollywood dream factory.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses the 1947 Bernard Vorhaus noir-comedy Bury Me Dead in relation to the overlapping tropes of the screwball comedy and the film noir, a comparison that underscores the parallels and divergences of the genres.

When Gilbert Bowen and Roy Collins, old friends on a trip to Mexico, stop to help a stranded motorist, the hitch-hiker’s frightening appearance is a warning sign of the difference between the travellers and the hitch-hiker, of the impassable distance between them. Soon enough this hitch-hiker, Emmett Myers, has them at gunpoint, directing them to drive him into Mexico so he can escape from the law. He has killed many people, all of them, it's implied, like Bowen and Collins, good samaritans who made the mistake of offering him a ride. The Hitch-Hiker was made by Ida Lupino, then better known as an actress, though she had already directed four other films, a series of social-issue-oriented docudramas, films that balanced compassionate humanism with lurid curiosity. They were message films about polio, rape and bigamy. The Hitch-Hiker emerges naturally from this trajectory: like the earlier films, its story is torn-from-the-headlines.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer locates Lupino's film along two trajectories: a mythical, symbolic journey into the male psyche, and the issue-driven docudrama. The Hitch-Hiker is a film that places its protagonists in a situation that draws out their ordinary, everyday humanity to combat a devilish stranger.

John Parker’s Dementia is an unconventional, low-budget, independent film, made without synchronous sound by amateurs, a cruel adventure of symbols colliding in a web of nocturnal fantasy, classical allegory, chiaroscuro, and a menacing atmosphere. It exists at the midpoint between the film noir and the psychodrama, and the motives of its makers are caught somewhere between aspirations to join the film industry and the restless desire to expel from themselves some kind of evil that had crept up on them in their dreams. It is a haunted film, one that, through oppressive symbolism and illogical bridges, forms a portrait of damnation, here on skid row where devils are almost as terrifying as angels.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses Parker's film in relation to collaboration, the trance film, and the representation of dream-life in cinema through the ages.

It all begins with an idea.