Dark art

FILM NOIR" is notoriously difficult to define. Once you move past the familiar images (trench coats, shadows), stock characters (the femme fatale, the private dick), standard moods (urban malaise, fatalism), and a core group of classic films (John Huston's ''The Maltese Falcon," for example, or Tay Garnett's ''The Postman Always Rings Twice"), there's wide disagreement among critics and scholars about what actually makes a movie ''noir." Does film noir belong to a specific historical time and place (Hollywood from 1941 to 1958, say) or can it be made anywhere, at any time?

Take ''The Ice Harvest," the recent film in which a lawyer played by John Cusack steals $2 million from a gangster in Wichita, Kan. The film was widely referred to in reviews as film noir, but few critics stopped to explain what earned the film that distinction. Is it noir because the characters are criminals and strippers? Because it takes place at night? Because there's a lot of drinking? Because John Cusack shoots Connie Nielsen while holding her in a clinch, the way Fred MacMurray shoots Barbara Stanwyck in ''Double Indemnity"? The difficulty of nailing down what makes ''The Ice Harvest" noir exposes the mysteriousness of a term that hangs like a fog over a vast assortment of films.

''The Philosophy of Film Noir," a new collection of essays from the University of Kentucky Press that explores the philosophical underpinnings of movies from the classic noir period and after, suggests that films aren't noir merely because they share a consistent tone, or certain storytelling and visual conventions, with the likes of ''Falcon," ''Postman," and ''Indemnity." According to various contributors, including editor Mark T. Conard, an assistant professor of philosophy at Marymount Manhattan College in New York, noir is also a deeply pessimistic attitude toward life that reflects the philosophies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus.

This kind of analysis isn't new, but it highlights something that isn't always discussed about noir: That the genre, which evokes such quintessentially American icons as Bogart and a shadow-filled Los Angeles, actually finds its roots in Europe.

When it emerged in the '40s, film noir reflected the desire of European critics to see their own aesthetic values-shaped by the artistic, philosophical, and social movements of the previous century and a half-affirmed in the American films they enjoyed. It also reflected the desire of American filmgoers (whose popular magazines had already stoked interest in such European developments as Surrealism and psychoanalysis) to get a new look at their own physical environment and way of life from a ''European" perspective. Considered closely, the history of film noir, and most of the definitions that have been proposed for it, all relate to the uneasy relationship between Europe and America.

. . .

The word ''noir" is itself, of course, a European import. When French critics first applied it to a few then-recent American films in 1946, the writers apparently used the term in the way it had been used by the Surrealists (André Breton edited a famous ''Anthology of Black Humor") and by the publishing house Gallimard, which launched the popular ''Série Noire" of crime novels in 1945. ''Black," for the French, connoted not just violent and disturbing subject matter but also a hostility to the values of the established order.

The first critics to attempt to codify the concept of film noir were also French. In 1955, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton published their exhaustive ''A Panorama of American Film Noir" (recently published in Paul Hammond's English translation by City Lights), which identifies a ''cycle" of American films whose ''moral ambivalence, criminal violence, and contradictory complexity... all combine to give the public a shared feeling of anguish or insecurity."

Many key directors of early noir films were European émigrés, including Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Jacques Tourneur, and Alfred Hitchcock. They brought to their work a familiarity with European art and culture and a skeptical view of the American ideals of pluralism, egalitarianism, and self-improvement. Wilder, for example, treats middle-class aspirations and lust with mordant wit in ''Double Indemnity" and ''Sunset Boulevard," and Hitchcock brings scathing irony to his portraits of small-town families (''Shadow of a Doubt"), Manhattan sophisticates (''Rope"), and patriotic intelligence agents (''Notorious").

The philosophy of noir has also been linked to the European literary and philosophical movement known as Existentialism, though frequently when commentators use that term, it's less with the writings of Sartre and Camus in mind than as a stand-in for ideas like ''absurdity" and ''alienation." In an essay portentously called ''Film Noir and the Meaning of Life," his contribution to ''The Philosophy of Film Noir," Steven M. Sanders, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, claims that ''the thread running through the design of film noir is the sense that life is meaningless." Noir, Conard writes, is nothing less than ''a sensibility or worldview that results from the death of God."

Many have also perceived a European influence in the way the original noir films looked. Noir visual style is usually traced back to the jagged geometries of German Expressionism. The lineage of noir makes the link plausible: Edgar G. Ulmer, the émigré director of the stark low-budget classic ''Detour," was, for example, an assistant to F. W. Murnau, a key figure of the German Expressionist movement's cinematic wing. Many noir fans believe that the peak of noir style is the cinematography of John Alton (born in Austria) in such films as Anthony Mann's ''T-Men" and Joseph H. Lewis's ''The Big Combo." ''He Walked by Night," directed by Mann and Alfred L. Werker, offers a catalog of Alton's art: Each shot change brings surprises of angle and scale. The screen becomes an abstract field of light and dark shapes. Human beings get reduced to a silhouetted torso or a spot-lit fragment of face. Guns, lamps, and other objects take on an unexpected prominence. The lighting can make palpable the clammy air of an LA bungalow or convey the terror of a chase through a sewer tunnel in shots seemingly lit only by a single flashlight.

But although European ideas, expressed in a European style, informed early noir, attempts to define the genre in visual terms have foundered. Films like ''Kiss Me Deadly" and ''Touch of Evil," made during or shortly after the period of Alton's masterpieces, look different from his work-and from each other.

Nor can noir be defined by character or storytelling conventions. Any American film that was made from about 1945 to about 1955 that involves crime and is not a comedy, a musical, an exotic adventure, or a Western could probably be said to have something in common with the noir films of that period-from George Stevens's ''A Place in the Sun," an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel ''An American Tragedy," to the plastic-surgery shocker ''Jail Bait," directed by no-budget auteur Edward D. Wood Jr.

Faced with so much ''noir," and in so many diverse forms, some scholars have thrown up their hands, declaring that noir doesn't exist at all. There are better ways to talk about these films, these critics say-in terms of the aesthetics of their directors, for instance. Howard Hawks's ''The Big Sleep," for example, can be seen as a film that's become eclipsed by its genre. Though it is adapted from Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled detective novel, the film jettisons the book's intense sexual nausea and its sense of an unredeemable, all-pervasive corruption. In their place, Hawks offers not only a benign view of the enjoyments of bachelorhood but also a durable commitment between Bogart's Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall's rich gambler. The treatment of both subjects recalls other Hawks films more than any supposed tenet of the noir school.

Today, noir seems defined more by a sense of nostalgia than by any other element. The connection between nostalgia and noir was apparent as early as the 1970s, which saw the release of such films as ''Chinatown," Roman Polanski's detective film set in Los Angeles in the 1930s, and ''The Long Goodbye," Robert Altman's Raymond Chandler adaptation. More recently, ''L.A. Confidential" and ''Pulp Fiction" both expressed an appreciation for the noir of old. (As did ''Get Shorty," in which John Travolta's loan shark even attends a screening of ''Touch of Evil.")

As ''The Philosophy of Noir" reminds us, during its peak era, noir was the form that imported ''European" alienation, doubt, and dread into the framework of the American crime film. More recently, noir seems to have come to designate a longing for a time when these things could still be perceived as startling. As always, however, the definition of noir itself remains in the shadows.

Chris Fujiwara, a writer living in Chelsea, is the author of ''Jacques Tourneau: The Cinema of Nightfall" (Johns Hopkins University Press. He is working on a critical biography of Otto Preminger, to be published by Faber & Faber.