The Filter and the Viewer: On Audience Discretion in Film Noir

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To the French critics who originally labelled certain films noir it seemed that a class of Hollywood products had gone darker during the war years – as though a dark filter had been placed over the lens. Films were not designed or marketed as noir, and retrospectively noir's status as a genre is still unsettled. Yet there is widespread interest today in experiencing diverse films as noir, and even in using a Noir Filter in Instagram and video games. Pursuing the filter clue, the noir experience can be thought of as subjection to a dark filtering of narrative. Image filtering styles can help to resolve not only the puzzle of noir's quasi-genre status but also an issue of general interest in aesthetic experience. The use of image filters makes a distinctively powerful contribution to the experience of a work or genre, or to the cultural dominance of an aesthetic regime, due to the unobtrusive formative role it plays in the economy of experience.

Among the evidence of the continuing fascination of film noir, there is now a Noir Filter. Anyone who wants that hard-edged, high-contrast black-and-white look can impose it on images in Photoshop or Instagram, or adopt it while playing a video game (Fig. 1). The "filter" is a digital manipulation rather than glass or gauze placed over a lens, but it similarly enforces a selection of light values. Using a filter, you can instantaneously and globally affect the quality of your screen content in the way that a photographer can affect the visual quality of an image by placing something over the camera lens. And the filtering principle applies more widely: there could be other sorts of filters mechanically or quasi-mechanically imposing noir quality on a scene or a world. A writer could choose to "noirise" a story by dimming the plausibility of hopeful alternatives and highlighting depravity and futility. An actor could noirise a character by choosing a default attitude of weariness or wariness.

Figure 1:Resident Evil 2 – with Noir Filter.

The Noir Filter brings an odd twist to the constitution of experience, if we relate it to the usual meaning of filtering in the cinematic context. One is invited to place a filter over a presented world to alter its perceptible quality in a desired way, somewhat as though one were handed a pair of tinted glasses to wear; but the more standard cinematic role of a filter is to have already qualified a presented world pervasively and inalterably, not subject to the audience's discriminating notice. That is, filters are tools of film makers, not of film viewers. Although the aesthetic empowerment of the consumer might be taken as typical of interactive new media in contrast to the passivity of traditional cinematic experience (Hansen, 2004), in the case of the Noir Filter the interesting aspect of the photographic or video game option is its emulation of a valued cinematic experience. In this experience, an optical design has been imposed by the filmmakers; the audience sees the result of the use of that imaging tool rather than seeing the tool make that change. (Analogously, the audience experiences the result of censorship without having participated in the behind-the-scenes discussions of what subjects films can deal with, what plot resolutions are dramatically and morally valid, or what characters and stories audiences can best relate to.) Any discretion the audience exercises in constructing a film's meaning must be exercised within the filtering's constraint.¹ Within the film experience the filtering plays a formative role. Can a filter, as a filter, be put into the viewer's hands? Obviously, the answer is yes on certain assumptions, given that a Noir Filter can be a viewer option, but the assumptions that require the answer to be no – that normal viewing and discretionary construction of meaning must be downstream from the filtering of the viewed scene, that awareness of filtering would neutralise its filtering power – still need to be reckoned with.

The filter premise, thus problematised, is a doorway to thinking about a question of general aesthetic interest: what intentionally added qualification of a presentation (that is, not on the plane of unconscious or social-ideological formations) might affect it globally and seemingly inalterably (unlike elective manoeuvres of style), and how an audience might, for one reason or another, voluntarily cooperate in maintaining such qualifications. Even before Noir Filters were offered to consumers, the varying retrospective discernments of a historical noir genre hinted at a decisive role of viewer choice in experiencing a film as noir – beginning with the French critics who saw a class of American films going "dark" during World War II and elected to link these films with the dark "poetic realist" French films of the 1930s (Frank, 1946; Chartier, 1946). The fact that the classic noir films were not made or marketed as "noir" and the exceptional diversity and flexibility of the noir canon, along with the lack of agreement among critics and scholars about whether noir constitutes a genre in the way that westerns or gangster films do, all suggest that viewer interest in noir elements may be as important as artistic intent in placing a film in the noir category. One of these elements, the harsh high-contrast look that became popular in the 1940s, is straightforwardly filter-like because it involves a selective photographic registration of light. But other elements can work in filter fashion, too, and can be more in the control of the viewer – subject to the condition that any filter, while in use, enforces its qualification of everything it filters.

Filtering in the broadened sense I propose could be thought of as a kind of stylisation. But if style is conceived as an appreciable artistic way of forming material, which is to say as a presentable value, then a significant ambiguity arises; for filtering by its very nature eludes conscious appreciation and yet can be, and in noir experience commonly is, lifted up for appreciation and treated as style. To see how filtering can be a distinctive means of stylisation, and perhaps also of establishing genre, it will be helpful to mark out the distinctive role of filtering in the economy of experience and the distinctive act of discerning that filtering. I will start by considering the general nature of filtering and the role of filtering in viewing films; then, invoking distinctions between curious watching, interested viewing, and critical viewing that bear on our specification of the aesthetic powers of filtering, I will elucidate the kinds of interest in noir filtering that sustain the genre-like status of noir. In a postscript, I will suggest possible applications of the filtering idea to major aesthetic regimes of experience, including noir's seeming opposite, Romanticism.

Filtering

The original filter is a device of felt, a cloth weave that screens out solid elements as liquid or air is passed through it. From the filterer's perspective, the process removes impurities or excess. A glass or gauze camera filter similarly acts by subtraction, screening out unwanted light, but unlike grosser filters it does not normally screen out things. It does not make one feel an absence or prompt one to fill out a picture. The result of visual filtering is that one sees everything in the scene, but a little differently. In the light that has travelled from the world to the photographic sensor – or as the result of chemical or digital processes that emulate filtering – certain frequencies, intensities, and lines of light have been advantaged over others, changing the tonality and border definitions and saliences of things.

Some optical filtering would be noticed only by specialists, like the polarisation filter that makes the sky seem more blue in Hollywood westerns; others are purposely obtrusive, like the colouring of scenes in Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994) (Brinckmann, 2014, pp. 24–29). Between these extremes, some effects are discernible as intentional modifications of the image, and the audience is meant to be affected by them but without seeing them as an added feature like a tint. For example, a subtle degree of colour desaturation can produce a sense of historical oldness or situational grimness.² Another example is the softly brightening "glamour shot" used in classical Hollywood films for close-ups of romantic leads, often done with a diffraction filter.

Because of a change in standards, the glamour shot now serves as a good demonstration of the element of will in filter experience. I am a viewer of a later generation for whom it is strange and distracting to see Ingrid Bergman become slightly fuzzy in certain shots in Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) (Fig. 2), but even so I can consent to it, and tune in to how the image promotes her as an object or model of desire; and in consenting and tuning in, I realise that other audiences have done the same, perhaps not entirely unconsciously.

Figure 2:Notorious – Ingrid Bergman.

We might specify the filter effect, at its most characteristically interesting, thus:

Watching, Viewing, and Viewing

The shift I just made from "seeing" to "viewing" and my reference to a "viewing world" was meant to pick out a distinctive intentional element in some experiences of presentations. With a fair degree of support from ordinary uses of the word, I suggest it will be helpful in this context to understand viewing as a mode of seeing that is interested in a distinctive way. This sense of viewing can usually be taken for granted in film or art criticism and aligns with the variable "viewer" (versus the standard "subject") position in spectator theory (Mayne, 1993). Viewing in this pointed sense differs from watching a film curiously (and likewise from scrutinising a film for its technical, cultural, psychological, semiological, or metaphysical properties). Just insofar as one is watching an Ingrid Bergman film to find out what happens in it, one may see what a Bergman fan sees in the glamour shots yet not view the shots’ content in the same way. The Bergman fan views Bergman as especially compelling when seen close up. (Of course, the Bergman fan must also be watching to see what happens to her. The modes of seeing mix together.) Viewing has some sort of relationship agenda, as in viewing something fondly, or admiringly, or sceptically, or with resistance (Diawara, 1988; Mayne, 1993); watching is more neutral, though it is usually sustained by the hope of seeing something noteworthy happen. (Despite having an agenda, viewing can be passive and complacent in comparison with watching. Sometimes it is because one is watching a film alertly that one is able to notice something in it that will challenge an attitude or overturn a preconception.)

When we choose to use one term versus the other for the experiencing of films, the sense of the distinction is often this: one is a watcher when one is merely taking in whatever the film happens to offer ("Want to watch a film tonight?") – treating the film as a "show"³ – or monitoring it for information; one is a viewer when one intends to get a definite aesthetic reward from the film. The Nielsen rating service checks who is watching a television show (who has that channel on), while television producers must be concerned also with the reactions of their viewers (those who intend to tune in to this sort of content). Watching leads naturally to reporting what one saw, and is motivated by the desire to find things out; viewing leads to evaluative conversation, and is motivated by the desire to have things to have attitudes about.

Filmgoers commonly experience films in the modes of watching and viewing without any sense of distinction between them. But if the filtering issue comes up – if, say, I ask you what you think of this gleaming close-up of Ingrid Bergman in Notorious – the two modes will pull apart from each other, because filtering caters only to a viewing interest. Filtering makes no difference to the things and events that a watcher can report having seen.

Because of the dependence of the noir phenomenon on the activity of critics and late-coming noir aficionados, a further relevant distinction needs to be drawn between viewing in a broad sense, in which one gets whatever one wants to get from a film – which could be a favourite actor's performance, or a few funny scenes, or confirmation of a racist attitude – and the kind of committed Viewing in which one intends to have some version of the aesthetic experience the film is fitted to provide, whenever this is an operative premise. Films might be viewed as specimens of noir with the thought that they were made that way or simply because they turned out that way. Decision-makers in the film industry will mostly think of the audience as a mixture of curious watchers and already-attuned viewers since they market to customers who pay to see films for a variety of reasons, only one of which might be an attraction to a noir quality. Film critics, however, are standardly geared to Viewing, their mission being to articulate their experiences of films for the benefit of fellow Viewers with whom they share a personal investment in cinematic experience. (They may also earn their keep by providing guidance for a broader audience.) On the plane of film criticism, a Viewable film is expected to be a significant inflection of its Viewers’ lives, whether it thrills or disappoints. For Viewers, the meaning of a noir experience, or of noir in general, will be at stake. The industry's watcher-viewer premise is continually supported by the audience's myriad embraces of things they like, which may or may not support a term like "noir" as a marketing tag or video store category; the critic's Viewer premise is supported by judgements of what is meaningful in film experience as part of life experience, which may or may not support a term like "noir" as a topic for articles and books. (Clearly the industry did have audience support for producing many films that can be deemed noir, and Viewers do have usable data on the basis of which to discuss noir meaning.)

Certain kinds of filtering can be classified as "industrial" since they reflect general calculations about enhancing the filmgoing experience – as in making the western sky more blue, or making romantic leads more attractive, or giving certain sounds more crisp salience. To think of the harsh visual design of some prototypical noir films as a popular look is to think of noir filtering as supporting a certain stream of filmgoing in an industrial way, much as maintaining a brilliant outdoorsiness supports the popularity of westerns. In this frame of reference, a popularity-supporting cinematic quality may or may not be tied to genre-level predictability or be anyone's artistic target; it may simply have become an industry trend or standard, perhaps responding to audience preferences (Altman, 1984). Filtering that fulfils a particular aesthetic recipe for a work or set of works worth caring about, on the other hand, can be appreciated as such by Viewers. For noir-loving Viewers, the aesthetic aspect of noirish visual design stands out above its industrial aspect.⁴ Noir Viewers also have reason to take the structural question of genre more seriously since it determines how noir qualities belong to the meaning of a work and to multiple works they may wish to view as a constellation.

Filtering and Viewing

As I suggested in my third specification of the filter effect, filtering is normally part of the grain of the projected world the audience perceives. One does not register it as information or respond to it as an expression in the way that one responds to an actor's gesture or a camera movement. Nor is it an effect like a blurry shot from the point of view of a character losing or regaining consciousness (though admittedly an extreme glamour shot crosses over into being this sort of effect). It is basic to the scene-setting. This world is this way.

Every artistically deliberated film has a visual and aural design that filters its recorded scenes. Effective filtering contributes to an aesthetically valuable unification of qualities. It can enhance photographic credibility at the same time as it elicits emotion. And it can even do this differently for different units within a film. In Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2020), for example, which tells a story spanning multiple decades, different film stocks are emulated in the colour processing to give events in each decade an appropriate period look (Hurlbut, 2020).⁵ If the experience of looking at these differently filtered segments is fully acceptable as an experience of simply looking at the story's world, the audience will have all the stronger a sense that the story is playing out in each of those times, subject to the associations they have with those times. For the same reason, when Judy Garland as Dorothy moves between the sepia monochrome and Technicolor worlds of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), the relative vibrancy of the colours of Oz and the bleakness of Kansas can be felt in a diffusely general way; after the initial shocks of change, neither tonality need register as an effect. Oz is a world ripe with wonderful possibilities, and Kansas is a world with fantasy filtered out. (When colour filtering moves are miscalculated and are felt as intrusive effects, as many have complained about musical numbers in South Pacific [Joshua Logan, 1958], there is aesthetic disaster, as the film's director admits; Logan, 1978, pp. 122–139.)

A possible objection to my proposed separation of filtering from effects is that filtering would then logically extend to far too many elements in films, potentially to everything. Not only is Ingrid Bergman filtered in her glamour shots, Ingrid Bergman herself is a filter inasmuch as the character of Alicia Huberman in Notorious is established by Bergman's enactment. Not only is Bergman a filter, the film Notorious is a filter constraining the world of that story by filtering out many of its non-Hitchcockian aspects. Not only is Notorious a filter, all cinema of this sort is a filter, reducing the physical world photographically; and mind and body are filters, constraining world representation in human ways. But now the concept of filtering has run indeterminately into the concept of formation. If a distinctive significance is to be ascribed to filtering, then it must be restricted to cases like the glamour shot where one can see that a modification of the perceptible world has been implemented. But since such modifications are noticed, it is not true that the world-as-filtered has the same epistemic status as the perceptible world as such. Filtering is not world-defining but is, after all, an effect ventured within the presentation of a world.

The best reply might be as follows. To be sure, a distinction must be maintained between filtering and the most basic formation of film experience, and in practice it is not difficult to maintain it. Even though filtering goes into the grain of the film experience, one can often spot it fairly easily and consciously accept or reject it, as I accept the Ektachrome look of the 1960s in The Irishman and have reservations about the glamour shots in Notorious. But an extraordinary act of critical distancing is required to contemplate cinema itself (as opposed to a particular lens or a particular film or light sensor) as a filter. Cinematography is, of course, a filtering of visual and acoustical information from the physical world, and audiences are charmed by a cinematically standard transfiguration in the world-appearance they see on screens. But precisely because they are entering a cinematic world, there is no sense of subtraction or bias in the basic world opening. Thinking of the cinematic image as such as a filtering would lead one's attention outside of cinema altogether, back to the physical world or into psychology or metaphysics. But we can notice cinematic filtering as a way in which cinema is opening its world to us.

If it is important to recognise that filtering can be noticed, nevertheless an audience will not normally want to experience filtering as an effect, since that would require their occasion-by-occasion consent to something that the presenters are doing with the presentation; the general scene-setting reliability of filtering would be lost. Oz would not be a fantastic world of adventure; Kansas would not be a world of ordinary human reality.⁶

It is reasonable, then, to regard filtering as a global condition on a film's showing of a world that is indeed alterable even though it does not seem elected and imposed. In normal viewing, Ingrid Bergman's glamour shots reveal her as enchanting in that way (and Bergman's and Hitchcock's stylings of the role analogously reveal the character of Alicia Huberman with an emphasis on certain qualities, though this will rightly be understood as an active interpreting or fashioning rather than a mechanical filtering). I will now illustrate the same point from noir, viewing noir cinema as the showing of a reliably disenchanting world.

Noir as a Filtering

Noir has been called a movement, a series, a sensibility, a style, a "fabric woven out of many threads" (Sanders, 2006, p. 91), and, still controversially, a genre (Damico, 1978/1996).⁷ It has also been called something more filter-like: a "stain" (Schrader, 1972/1996, p. 53; Hirsch, 1981, p. 211) and an "anamorphotic distortion" of other genres (Žižek, 1993, pp. 199–200).⁸ Certain noir elements seem very much like genre elements: a noir film deploys certain kinds of characters (a compromised good protagonist juxtaposed with a mainly evil counterpart) under certain psychological constraints (of dislocation and fatal obsession) in certain (uncomfortable) settings in order to work through certain issues that have social resonance (testing the moral reference points of mainstream society with cynical perspectives, bleak prospects, and violent bad outcomes). If filmgoers can correctly predict these things about a film based on a genre labelling, then the film product has indeed been placed on one of the right shelves for ordinary viewing purposes. If critical Viewers can correctly anticipate that a film will significantly address certain issues that are worth recurrently framing in a certain way – as, for example, westerns deal with the problem of confronting evil on the frontier of civilisation – then the film fulfils one of the most meaningful criteria of genre membership. Genre expectations need not be perfectly satisfied; twists and innovations are desirable. But so is a unity of qualities and a clear target of imaginative interest. Given the wide variety in style and narrative content that will be found in any noir canon, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the elements of noir do not hold together strongly enough among films regarded as noir films, or separately from non-noir films, to constitute as robustly centred a category as westerns:⁹

Film noir is not a genre […] It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. (Schrader, 1972/1996, p. 53)

There are many overlaps among noir films, to be sure, supporting the general sense of noir that makes the present discussion possible, but it is hard to find a canon's worth of noir films that conform closely to a type. The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), and Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944), three of the benchmark early noirs, are vastly different from each other in style and teleology.¹⁰ A murder takes place and there is an investigation, but beyond that unremarkable common core each film goes in its own direction. They were not assigned to a genre at the time (other than "crime" or "melodrama") and they do not have a clear genre uniformity even in retrospect. Yet many consumers and critics are now disposed to see them not only as noir but as prototypically noir. An unprepared viewer might well be puzzled by this.

Extending Paul Schrader's observations, I suggest that the basis of the noir identification is that these films experimented with some potent style manoeuvres that made available, without definitely imposing, a filtering. At the height of noirism the manoeuvres came to include a high-contrast black-and-white image, obtrusive shadows, a bias towards night-time, a claustrophobic mise-en-scène,¹¹ a suppression of heroic qualities in the protagonist, a cynical view of conventional social values, and an ineluctability of doom (assured in some cases by removing suspense in this dimension, starting out with the bad ending and unfolding the tale in flashback). The result is that an audience now may attune themselves to any combination of these elements to put on the filter, in effect, for themselves and experience as noir the world revealed by any film that contains enough (for them) of the noir elements. When viewers are primed to enjoy noirishness, or to invest in films critically as noir Viewers, they do experience a bleak noir world of futility much as the viewers of westerns experience a world where good must defeat evil by the well-played gun. By visiting the film noir world, viewers may reinforce a pessimism they feel in real life or, contrariwise, protect themselves from such a mood, having placed it in a separate world they can enter and leave at will, a world made safe by conventions they recognise – now a fascinating 1940s–50s world they can revisit, or a relevantly similar later world. Or they may be helped by noir predictability to focus on the actors’ interpretations of noirish states of mind.

A film experienced as noir has been noir-filtered, but it is not the case that any film that can be viewed as noir will support the use of any noir filter. This point about the non-standardness of noir cinema has been well rehearsed by scholars (Durgnat, 1970/1996; Naremore, 1996; Naremore, 2008, pp. 9–39; Conard, 2006), but I would like to amplify it with reference to the qualities of the noir classic Laura. Laura does not look noirish at all – it is an excellent example of high-key Hollywood visual design.¹² Nor is it a noirish story, at least in the most obvious way. Rather than impose a degrading doom on its principals, Laura gives them a romantic happy ending. A virtuous protagonist, police detective Mark MacPherson (Dana Andrews), ends up coupled with a well-qualified love interest, Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), to whom he was intuitively drawn while she was presumed dead. We are given adequate reason to view Hunt as a good person insofar as she expresses generous thoughts about her creepy patron Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) and her worthless fiancé Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) and is finally proven innocent of the murder. Some elements of the film are at least in the noir neighbourhood: MacPherson may be uneasy in his work (at times he steadies himself by playing a little toy baseball game); he is cynical about women, who have disappointed him in the past (perhaps he could only love a woman who does not exist); his yearning for a dead woman he never met is a dangerous compulsion ("You’d better watch out or you’ll finish up in a psychiatric ward", Lydecker tells him; "I don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse"); the actual Laura has a tendency to use men for her own advantage (and escapes her comeuppance for this only by chance, thanks to a forcible plot twist); and there is no strong moral reference point, not even in a secondary character. These are edgy features that made the film more interesting at the time without placing it in a new genre. For the New York Times critic, it was an "intriguing melodrama" ("T.M.P.", 1944). The original 1944 trailer advertised it as a film people might interpret differently, depending on their evaluation of Laura herself:

Who is Laura? What is Laura? […] so dangerous to know […] every woman will feel that when it comes to men, Laura gets by with murder; every man will feel that when it comes to murder, it couldn’t involve a more enticing girl […] The strangest, most dangerous experience in love and murder.¹³

At the discretion of the contemporary viewer, Laura has enough moral dislocation to qualify as a film noir. It is in the noir canon not because it contains strong examples of noir imagery and storytelling, but because it is a strong suspense film with some elements that fit into a noirish trend at the time and that can be experienced now as though darkly filtered, so that one can visit the noir world by viewing Laura; or one can enjoy a sense that Laura is evocatively flirting with noir status from within a more mainstream Hollywood style.

If we think of Laura as containing a noir aspect, we can say that noir viewers of Laura "notice" that aspect. But if we think of Laura as having noir potential that will be realised only by viewers who earlier or later come to be determined to experience Laura as noir, then the model of applying a filter seems more apt.¹⁴

For a noir viewer invested in viewing the whole of Laura in subjection to a strong noir filter, a happy ending would be a major anomaly. The expectation and concluding perception would therefore be that Mark and Laura's relationship will be unlucky for one reason or another. But such a viewer would be at cross purposes with the writer and filmmakers whose aim is to concoct an "intriguing melodrama", and with the many viewers who join with them in wanting love relationships to seem uncertain while the story is unfolding, but not doomed.

On the other hand, noir expectations need not all be equally dark. Some viewers would attend to the ambiguity, the food for thought in flirting with noir reference points like the disillusioned hero and the femme fatale, while others would prefer to contemplate hopelessness. Some viewers would be thrilled by exceptions to the rule, moments of emotional connection between noir characters like shafts of light unexpectedly piercing the darkness. (Many viewers might remember the oft-cited noir They Live by Night [Nicholas Ray, 1948] more for the light of the young lovers’ relationship than for the darkness surrounding them.) And, as the critical literature on noir shows, earnest noir Viewers can use a variety of comprehensive models for evaluating films as noir, reflecting their intellectual interests in formalised film criticism and in psychology, ethics, sociology, history, and narrative theory. Thus even without strong genre credentials, noir can be sustained as a category of film viewing by the overlap and resemblance among these expectations and experiences.

The category of film noir, now more widely embraced than ever, supports a heightened awareness of viewer choice determining the character of film experience. Whatever filmmakers might have originally intended, viewers now might choose to live in a noir world in a given film because they enjoy escaping from the moralising filter of the Production Code and the cheery, brightly lit spaces of a classical Hollywood film, or just because it is a darkly vivid world for their imaginations to play in, or because it seems to give a fuller perspective on the morally ambiguous real world (Holt, 2006). They can develop a bleakness-filtered response to a larger noir world as well as to occurrences within particular noir stories (Tan, 1996; Yacavone, 2015, pp. 167–169) – perhaps including a pessimism about romance that can override any indication of romantic success in Laura.¹⁵

The Noir World

An appropriately expansive idea of filtering helps us to examine a normally hidden variable in film production and a corresponding variable in the film spectator's aesthetic comportment. Having accepted the basic cinematic bargain of being subjected to a screen presentation, the spectator also accepts, usually but not necessarily unconsciously, comprehensive filterings of that presentation.

The films now classified as noir were not made using a Noir Filter, but they are seen as "noir" by later viewers who are selectively sensitive to their noirish qualities. Something in the nature of filtering was occurring in the styling of the production and occurs again in aesthetically interested viewing and intellectually motivated Viewing of films deemed noir. Widely appreciated noir filterings include a pervasive moral dislocation in the narrative and a harsh, unsettling visual look. On the evidence of Laura's acceptance as noir, the harsh visual look is not essential, but some sense of moral dislocation is, and the filtering that produces that sense can be supplied as much by the noir-interested viewers as by the original film work.

The concept of filtering is connected to the concepts of viewing, Viewing, and world – and thus to genre as a certain world set up to reward a certain viewing and capable of supporting certain Viewer discernments. Filtering is connected to viewing (as opposed to open-mindedly curious watching) because the difference filtering makes is aesthetic, so that it furthers the satisfaction of interested viewers who may already be motivated to contribute to filtering from their side, perhaps only by mood or unexamined enthusiasm but perhaps as Viewers reflecting on the experience of a significant kind of film. (Only Viewers would be likely to identify and evaluate filtering as such.) Filtering is connected to world because the difference filtering makes is global and inescapable, quasi-natural, in contrast to an expression or "effect" within a projected world; the significance of this difference is empty for watching, which only wants to see what happens, but positive for viewing, which wants to live feelingly in that world. Filtering can even be used to multiply fully accepted worlds within a film world, as with Kansas and Oz in The Wizard of Oz and more subtly with the different time frames of The Irishman. Finally, filtering is connected to genre, so far as genre is an invitation to enter a certain world that will predictably support a certain viewing. Noir is an invitation to live in a reliably noir-filtered world and in that respect exemplifies genre. With films deemed noir, however, it is striking that a lack of consistent noir filtering of image or narrative by the filmmakers need not spoil a film's noir character as a whole – not for viewers who are determined, and may have consciously chosen, to have a noir experience.

Postscript: Filtering in Aesthetic History

A non-elective filtering is exerted by any major style that has established itself as inescapable. The best of all examples would be culturally instituted aesthetic regimes such as the idealised naturalism of Greek sculpture that became fundamental for the Western view of human form and the sparely evocative Daoist-influenced style of landscape painting that became a standard for Chinese representations of Nature. Such a style can be accepted throughout any episode of experience as a global filtering, that is, an unavoidable qualification of everything one can see – especially central references for aesthetic norming such as the male body or the mountain. The last century saw comprehensive style programmes like Socialist Realism, with its aim of supporting the revolutionary transformation of the lives of the ordinary people in a communist country (Brown, 1991), and architectural Modernism offering a rational optimisation of the constructed human habitat (Rowe, 2011). In their most ambitious conceptions these style programmes aspire to become pervasive qualifications of an experienced world so that they would no longer stick out as styles people could choose to like or dislike and yet would continuously promote the imagining of a superior life on the terms they have set. They would in fact be preventing many things from appearing, but most people would be unaware of that exclusion; the world-appearance they control would be thought of as whole, a fraternal world of strong, patriotic workers or an efficient world of well-positioned walls and passageways.

In the present era of the Noir Filter, in contrast, the strangely self-binding power of elective filtering comes to the fore. There is at least one great precedent for this in the 18th- and 19th-century popular European craze for the "romantic" – oddly foreshadowed two centuries earlier in Don Quixote's intoxication with the romances of chivalry. As with noir, the prototypes and formulas for the romantic have varied considerably, but in general the Romantic enthusiasts consciously chose to have experiences that were pervasively, inescapably qualified by imaginative outreach to the marvellous: "By giving the common a higher meaning, the everyday, a mysterious semblance, the known, the dignity of the unknown, the finite, the appearance of the infinite, I romanticize it" (Novalis, 2007, p. xvi; original emphasis). The Romantics believed in their innate power to do this ever freshly (Berlin, 1999); to use terms of cinema technology, they saw themselves as the bulb and the lens in the projector of world appearance. They can be interpreted as trying to outshine the dark cultural filtering of modern disenchantment.¹⁶

The Romantics would not welcome the metaphor of filtering. The relevant optical metaphor for them would be the added illumination of the imagination allowing the subject to see things that ordinarily go unseen:

"When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?" Oh! no, no! [replies William Blake]. I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!" I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it. (Blake, 1880, p. 200)

With its relentless foregrounding of soul-shaking encounters with extraordinary presences and its heavy reliance on descriptors like "holy" and "beauteous", Romantic literature may claim to be "looking through" to amazing things and "enlarging the circumference of the imagination" (Shelley, 1840/1965, pp. 40–41), but in many of its best-known specimens it appears to the unenchanted mind as a strongly filtered experience, comparable in its aggressively massaged content to the early "arty" cinema of soft focus and gleaming highlights, of which the glamour shot is a vestige.¹⁷

If romantic filtering is recognised as a means to an exhilarating experience of added illumination, then it figures as an antitype to noir's foreclosing on possibilities of happiness. This has an especially significant implication for works like Laura and Notorious that can be experienced as both romantically gleaming and noirishly gloomy: they can be appreciated as venues for an intriguing intuitive uncertainty about the basically promising or unpromising character of human life.¹⁸ Dual filtering can produce a poignantly mixed-up world.

1 On discretionary construction of film meaning as a general principle, see Gaut (2010, p. 177). Berys Gaut incorporates a restricted version of David Bordwell's (1989, pp. 17–23) constructivism about meaning in his own pluralistic "patchwork" theory (pp. 180–192).

2 See St. James (2022) for an enlightening discussion of digital colouring as a pervasive filtering in contemporary cinema and TV.

3 Note that watching is the normative way of taking in a performed show (vaudeville, magic, Broadway, TV, Las Vegas) so far as a "show" is conceived as "whatever will be shown". A show is approached as an occasion of possibly noteworthy manifestations – things to talk about, if not necessarily to care about.

4 Compare Tom Gunning's (1995) distinctions between "industrial" ways of constituting genre (for opportunistically fluid marketing), "pragmatic" ways (as in logically diverse video-store categories reflecting consumer interests), and "critical" (in the sense of "academic") ways. See also Janet Staiger's (1997) argument against purity of genre in any phase of Hollywood production.

5 An earlier filtering strategy might have referenced the palette of a familiar style of painting rather than a film stock, as for example Vincente Minnelli wanted to incorporate the look of Thomas Eakins's paintings in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) (Altman, 1987, p. 277).

6 Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) is a significant comparison here because it emphasises the weird drainedness of the brown-filtered regular world and the ontological unfathomability and unpredictability of the colourful Zone to such an extent that we are hindered from accepting either setting as a reliable world. It could be argued that we do have to consent to the expressive colouring moment by moment, and our alertness is called upon at the end to consider what it means that the Stalker's daughter, somehow a child of the Zone though living outside it, is in colour.

7 On the roots of noir's definition see Bordwell et al. (1985, pp. 74–77), emphasising patterns of nonconformity in filmmaking discerned by noir-minded criticism, and James Naremore (1996), who concludes that the film noir concept "has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse – a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings, helping to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies" (p. 14). Ben Tyrer (2013), argues that the signifier "noir" furnished a mental point of attachment retroactively dominating variously related film experiences – a structure of emerging significance found within noir stories as well. For the pessimistic Steve Neale (2000), "as a concept film noir seeks to homogenise a set of distinct and heterogeneous phenomena; it thus inevitably generates contradictions, exceptions and anomalies and is doomed, in the end, to incoherence" (p. 145).

8 Slavoj Žižek's conception of the noir "anamorphosis" has to do with a psychological analysis of narrative content rather than with cinematic form. There is at least one earlier use of the filter metaphor in noir criticism: Foster Hirsch wrote in 1981 that the femme fatale character can be seen as the more self-reliant woman of wartime or postwar society "passed through the noir filter" (pp. 19–20). Hirsch also uses the very different metaphor of "the noir keyboard" (p. 53).

9 See Raymond Durgnat's (1970/1996) survey of numerous film cycles in which noir films can be found.

10 These are three of the four films that Nino Frank commented on in 1946; the other was Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), a Raymond Chandler private-eye thriller with a distinctly noir look (Frank, 1946). According to Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton (1955/1996, p. 17), The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944) was discussed in similar terms around that time also; it has in common with Laura the dangerous romantic inspiration of a painting of a beautiful woman. One could pick a different threesome that would have much more in common both visually and narratively, such as The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), and Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949); but then one would probably have identified a "cycle" à la Durgnat (1970/1996).

11 On the visual hallmarks of noir, see Place and Peterson (1974). On early forerunners, see Bordwell and Thompson (2017).

12 The point is made also by Neale (2000, pp. 161–162). Elizabeth Cowie (1993, p. 126) disagrees without discussion (but her larger discussion of noir as a genre is valuable). The noir-minded Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg (1968/1996) find that because of the "greed and cruelty" in certain characters in Laura the film's "endlessly bright rooms […] soft carpets and clocks and screens and china figures express a menace not reduced by the high-key handling" (p. 31).

13 The trailer can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEWD98ICXRI.

14 Compare Frank Krutnik's (1991) formulation: "What is referred to as the ‘noir style’ tends to be a more disparate series of stylistic markings which can be seen as noir when they occur in conjunction with sets of narrative and thematic conventions and narratological processes. In isolation or even when combined together, the elements identified by such critics as Paul Schrader and Place and Peterson […] are not specific to the film noir, nor to the crime film, nor even to 1940s cinema" (p. 19; my emphasis).

15 As Daniel Yacavone (2015) suggests, following Mikel Dufrenne, the total expression of a film world "may also provide a kind of expressive glue, in the form of a ‘common quality of feeling’ that somehow reconciles contrasting or incongruous spaces, times, and events on an affective plane, as well as disparate tones, moods, and other feeling contents (some of which, if isolated from the whole, would be found to be discordant or in seeming contradiction)" (p. 197).

16 Drawing on Charles Taylor, Alan Woolfolk (2006) discusses the modern "horizon of disenchantment" as the cultural setting for noir.

17 Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932) is full of this artiness, produced by a silk stocking over the camera lens – the approach taken purposely, Capra (2004, p. 167) said, to increase the film's chances of an Oscar.

18 For a debate on noir qualities of Notorious, see Film Noir of the Week (2011). It is worth noting also that the French surrealists seized on dark American crime films as prompts for imagining the "social fantastic" (Naremore, 2008, p. 18).

REFERENCES

Film-Philosophy is an open access peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to the engagement between film studies and philosophy. The journal is interested in the ways in which films develop and contribute to philosophical discussion. We particularly welcome articles that set up an active engagement between film studies and philosophy, thereby sustaining a thoughtful re-evaluation of key aspects of each discipline.There has been an increasing interest in film-philosophy as a discipline within Film Studies since the 1990s and Film-Philosophy itself has played an important role in this development. We provide an important avenue for publication in the field of film and philosophy.

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