Distilled into Something New: Film Noir from 1955 to 1970 and
Robert Motherwell

Just as Block Cinema demonstrated the shared interests and images of early film noir and Abstract Expressionism—in the winter of 2003 with the series Dark Dreams—the connections between the concurrent artistic movements go beyond a shared pessimistic outlook, a drawing on the dream world for inspiration, and a delving into man’s unconscious. Film noir and Abstract Expressionism both bumped up against their own definitions as they grew older and began to be chased away by the dawn of competing ideas and practices.

In the mid-1950s the film noir genre was creatively pushed and pulled apart: old noir directors boiled down their previous efforts into prototypical examples of the genre; new noir directors exploded the very idea of a prototypical noir. The results were a mess of emblematic, classic films that were and weren’t film noir. These films were somehow both oddities and exemplars: they contained the essence of film noir—the perfect torture sequence, the Mickey Spillane hard-boiled private eye—but in distilling it they also became something new and inimitable. The Night of the Hunter’s particular brand of American gothic, fairy tale, and film noir, for instance, is widely influential and unlike anything else ever made. These great late film noirs led, paradoxically, to an exodus, as filmmakers abandoned film noir while incorporating many of its elements into other now reinvigorated genres.

Similarly, although Robert Motherwell is renowned for both his painting and his role as the artist-communicator of the Abstract Expressionist movement, the longevity of his career gives a rare glimpse into how the movement evolved within an artist’s practice. As Motherwell worked to define and explain what Abstract Expressionism was, his own work like that of film noir directors, strayed over time outside the boundaries that he had helped delineate.

The exhibition Robert Motherwell: An Attitude Toward Reality, From the Collection of the Walker Art Center is in the Block Museum's Main Gallery September 26 to December 6. The galleries are open Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings until 8 pm.

Thursday, September 24, 8 pm
Kiss Me Deadly

Wednesday, September 30, 8 pm
Rififi
(Jules Dassin, 1955, U.S., 122 minutes, 35mm)
Director Jules Dassin left his mark on film noir with classics like Brute Force and Night and the City. In 1952 he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and after he refused to testify he was blacklisted. Three years later, he directed this low-budget French film noir that won him best director at Cannes and changed what was possible for film noir—in effect perfecting the modern heist movie where the protagonists are tragic heroes. Rififi is a virtuosic directorial performance, famous for its nearly thirty minute heist sequence that ratchets up the suspense by eliminating all music and dialogue: the silent scene is almost unbearably tense, as if the audience has been enlisted in the nighttime burglary.

Wednesday, October 14, 7 pm FREE!
Filmmaker Domietta Torlasco in person!
Antigone's Noir
(Domietta Torlasco, U.S., 2008, 29 minutes, digital video)
Written and directed by Northwestern University professor Domietta Torlasco, Antigone’s Noir is composed of three interlocked episodes (Lenox, Effie, and Judy Barton) that look back at classic film noir. Each episode envisions—with the help of scenes shot in contemporary settings, documentary photographs, and footage from public archives—what might have happened before a film started or after it ended. Relationships between protagonists and marginal figures, between male and female characters are shifted, creating irreverent configurations of memory and desire that reach beyond the archetypes of the femme fatale and the innocent woman. Professor Torlasco will introduce the screening and answer questions afterwards.

Wednesday, October 14, 8 pm
Diabolique
(Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955, France, 116 minutes, 35mm)
The term and the genre of film noir are half-French. In the hands of the brilliant and misanthropic director Henri-Georges Clouzot, the genre became something closer to psychological horror. In Diabolique, Clouzot and his longtime cinematographer Armand Thirard manage to create an atmosphere of dread and suspense that’s so pervasive that even everyday objects like bathtubs and clothes hampers become fiendish. Set in the French countryside, this is the story of a school headmaster so piggish he’s inadvertently goaded his wife and his mistress into conspiring to kill him. It soon becomes clear, however, that it isn’t clear at all what’s happened.

Thursday, October 15, 8 pm
The Big Combo
(Joseph H. Lewis, 1955, U.S., 89 minutes, 35mm)
“First is first, and second is nobody.” These are the words that Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), a mob financier, lives by. Brown is the focus of an obsessive quest by detective Leonard Diamond (Cornell Wilde), whose tactics eventually push his target to retaliate. What follows is an unbelievable torture scene, conducted with a hearing aid and a bottle of hair tonic. All the action and atmosphere is accentuated by The Big Combo’s brilliant, breathtaking use of chiaroscuro. If you’ve never seen a film by Joseph H. Lewis, who directs with raw, primal energy and brutal economy, you may not be ready for The Big Combo.

Friday, October 30, 8 pm
Night of the Hunter
(Charles Laughton, 1955, U.S., 93 minutes, 35mm)
In the words of director Charles Laughton, Night of the Hunter is “a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale.” Preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum in a sensational performance) is a sleepy-eyed man of God and a serial killer. Briefly in prison for auto theft, he overhears his cellmate, who’s soon to be hanged, talk of hiding $10,000. Released, Powell travels to his cellmate’s hometown to comfort his widow with the word of God and the cold certainty of death. Filmed with a stark, nearly surreal aesthetic that owes much to German Expressionist cinema, Night of the Hunter, ignored by audiences and rejected by critics on its release, is now a profoundly influential classic.

Wednesday, November 11, 8 pm
The Sweet Smell of Success
(Alexander Mackendrick, 1957, U.S., 96 minutes, 35mm)
Instead of guns and hoods, The Sweet Smell of Success has pens and gossip columnists. But the props are no less dangerous and the people no less monstrous. Burt Lancaster is columnist J.J. Hunsecker, a character based on Walter Winchell. With a readership of 60 million Americans, J.J. has the powerful pining for his approval. Into his orbit crashes the struggling press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), a man so plainly broken that J.J. cannot shake the temptation to twist, manipulate, and command Falco into breaking up J.J.’s little sister’s loving relationship with a musician. Cinematographer James Wong Howe had the streets of New York hosed down so that they “gleamed with the sweat of fear.” A raw, cynical, and surgically precise film, which critic David Denby has called “the most acrid, and the best” of all New York City movies.

Thursday, November 12, 8 pm
Touch of Evil
(Orson Welles, 1958, 95 minutes, 35mm)
Surreal, preposterous and magisterial, Touch of Evil drives the film noir somewhere way past where it breaks down: this is a wild, envelope-exploding film that’s as much about the genre as it is the story it tells. Opening with a lengthy, now iconic tracking shot of a corrupt and combustible border town, it never looks back. Charlton Heston and Welles—obscenely obese here, even by his standards—turn in the type of ornate performances that make caricature look subtle. Critic David Edelstein sums the film up well: “I first saw it when I was 14 and thought it was one of the worst pictures ever—garish, oppressive, and appallingly overacted. Grown up, I'd go with those same adjectives, except now I think it's one of the best.”

Wednesday, November 2, 8 pm
Underworld U.S.A
(Sam Fuller, 1961, 98 minutes, 35mm)
As a young boy, Tolly Devlin saw his father viciously murdered by gangsters. Years later in prison, he discovers the identities of the killers and learns that they are rapidly rising in the ranks of the criminal hierarchy. As he sets out for revenge, he dangerously plays the government and organized crime off each other. A B-movie only in terms of budget and studio backing, and based on a series of stories in The Saturday Evening Post, Underworld U.S.A. is as high-pitched, sensational, and chilling as only a Sam Fuller film can be.

Thursday, December 3, 8 pm
The Killers
(Don Siegel, 1964, 95 minutes, 35mm)
Rather than a remake of director Robert Siodmak’s 1946 version, The Killers should be considered an entirely new interpretation of the Ernest Hemingway short story on which it is based. It’s also film noir stripped to its barest, most violent elements. After John Cassavetes is gunned down by Lee Marvin and his partner, the hit men begin to wonder why their target didn’t run. And so the men begin to ask the central question of this film: are there things worse than death? Shot in full color, which enhances director Don Siegel’s razor sharp detail and Lee Marvin’s brutal efficiency, The Killers also costars Ronald Reagan in his last film.

Friday, December 4, 8 pm
Le Cercle Rouge
(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970, France and Italy, 140 minutes, 35mm)
Although Alain Delon and Jean-Pierre Melville did not work together until the last eight years of Melville’s life, it still feels like Delon was built from Melville’s imagination. He is Melville’s ideal hero. Without emotion or extraneous movement, Delon expresses himself through patient waiting and bursts of balletic action, if ballet were about meting out death. Delon is at the center of Le Cercle Rouge, which begins with an epigraph about destiny that Meville made up and attributed to Siddhartha. In the face of fate nobody looks better than Delon, not even a young Eastwood, and while he and two other criminals—a drunken former policeman and an escaped convict—pull off a beautiful heist the nooses around their necks slowly tighten.