Out of the Past... by Jacques Tourneur, 1947.

...and Into the Night!

Jacques Tourneur, the son of French director Maurice Tourneur, was one of the many directors born in Europe who went to live in the US and work in Hollywood. He was also not the only one to first work in horror films and then in noir. Tourneur produced some excellent horror movies, focusing on the supernatural (let’s pretend you can focus on invisible things), like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and, of course, Night of the Demon, which remains a great piece of cinematic art, despite the short-sighted intervention of the studios that destroyed the whole unseen-threat mechanism. In 1947, Tourneur directs this beautiful and classic film noir. I have a soft spot for noir. I just thought I’d let you know at this point.

A Brief and Boring Synopsis of the Plot, just in case.

Robert Mitchum is the ever-cool-yet-so-vulnerable former detective Jeff Bailey who now owns a gas station in a small town. He is dating Ann Miller, a local girl (Virginia Huston plays the ultra-good blonde girl so gracefully) but he has a secret past he will now have to reveal to her (in a flashback of course!) since he was visited by Stephanos, a tough guy that works for Whit Sterling (played by a young Kirk Douglas), a charming big time crook. Jeff's true name is Jeff Markham and he was once employed by Whit to find his former girlfriend, Kathie Moffat (played by the overwhelmingly beautiful Jane Greer) who ran away with a lot of money after shooting him.

A "coloured-only" club I suppose.

He follows her trails to Mexico City and falls in love with her, believing her to be a damsel in distress.

They fool around like children and lovers do. Tension builds up!

A kiss...

A gust of wind and nature invades this room.

And then rain. A tropic garden. Wind. Rain. Rain. Sex. That's class people! All the intensity and inevitability, all the tension released with a powerfull and effective image. That's what sex was like; a tropical storm.

They run away to San Francisco where they live hidden until they are found out by Jeff’s former assistant who now threatens to sell them to Whit. Jeff tries to reason with him but Kathie shoots him and escapes. Jeff buries his old partner and tries to build a new life with Ann. But his past raises its ugly head and Whit wants him back for another job. Jeff decides that this is a chance to face his past and leave it behind once and for all but he soon realizes that he is called to play the fall guy in the elaborate schemes of Whit and Kathie, who is now back in the fold and has an agenda of her own. After much confusion, double-crossing and cigarettes lit in darkness, Jeff decides to give Kathie to the police, instead of running away with her, her being a double-crossing succubus after all, and… oh you know the rest. It’s a film noir. Everything goes wrong.

It's a Film and it's Black.

You know what to expect from noir films in terms of visual style. However, there are not that many stairs in this one nor do they play an important role, no mirrors and broken reflections, no clocks, no crooked angles and other key images of the expressionist tradition.

Tourneur shots from below a few times to create tension and reveal characters in the awkwardly lit faces of the protagonists but he never takes this into extremes. He also uses high contrast photography, especially when the action moves into the city or indoors, concealing faces, allowing shapes to hide in deep shadows, trap the hero in a web of black lines, but then, again, he has his own language and never goes as far into expressionism territory as other classic noir films go.

Light comes from below so that the faces come out, revealing features and blowing small things to megaproportions. A quick glance is of major importance and reveals character. Plus, this lighting establishes a secretive atmosphere and translates to image what Jeff is actually doing, that is dispensing the dark, shedding a light on his past. A dim and confusing light of course.

The lines distort and the room gets smaller. Jeffs gets trapped in lines and shadows. We are meant to take this literally.

More examples of noir lighting.

Amidst the chaos of confusing signs, Jeff and Ann meet in the forest. The light breaks down forms. Aglance interrupted, a gesture fragmented by shadows and stripes of light.

Tourneur has a thing for corridors, both actual corridors and corridor effects. He does this with country roads, city streets, inside the hotel etc.

An example of this corridor-effect he likes so much. It's all just linear perspective by the book. All the lines meet in a bright area in the horizon.

There's another one.

Look at how he sets his shots in an almost "renaissance" way, linear perspective and all. He also places vertical lines inside his images (I am talking about images here because once they are set they remain almost still- it’s like a painting with moving characters).

Check out the depth of this one. Not unlike Orson Welles’ deep focus shots, it is meant to reveal not amaze: there is work to be done, a car to be fixed, humble and simple work, the church is just down the road (another corridor effect) so this is obviously a place blessed by God, the sky and mountains beyond all, so this is as close to natural living as it gets within a society, and the man in black from the city comes to ruin it all. There, we have America spelled out for us. Enter the contrast between pure and tainted, innocence and corruption, the small town and the city, the town-upon-the-hill and Babylon. All in one shot. This antithesis between nature (represented by the village or small town) and the big city, often translated as day vs. night, is a dominant theme in film noir and the backbone of Out of the Past.

They look like paintings, don't they? The innocence and majesty of the great American outdoors tainted by this dark figure. Sublime photography. Everything comes out so clear. American cinema always knew how to distinguish the background from the action.

It's all about contrasts. Water is fluid, rocks are solid, humans are neither.

Lines cross and not a single one is straight. There are no surfaces, just deep shadows. What should be familiar is dark and abysmal.

The noir detective, trenchcoat and all, trapped inside a web of shadows. His form is fragmented by boxes of light and all kinds of lines (the windows, the crane, the ladder...).

The Night that is the City and some Notes on Determinism.

It's always night in City Noir.

A new honest and full life, with a straight job and a straight girl awaits him in the little town by the mountains while the past with all its confusion and secret agendas, motives and general dishonesty and corruption waits for him in the city (where is always night). Tourneur carries out this antithesis by contrasting the well lit outdoors scenes in the country, where everything is clear and distinct, forming an almost embossed image, with the constant night of the city, both indoors and outdoors, where according to "the noir canon", shapes and lines intertwine, confuse and trap. This is an almost Christian black/white antithesis. Notice how Kathie always comes out of the light and introduces darkness to the room? It’s not just that she “seems to live by night”, night follows her. She is a dark angel, the angel of light in this male fantasy world that film noir is.

Don't be so hard on Jeff. You would fall for her too. She's dressed in white, she comes out of the light of the sun or the moon, so she must be a good person, right?

All these antitheses actually spell out: city = evil. The metropolis can destroy a man. Too many people, no sense of community, too many agendas, too many hidden powers, too many faceless ones, a man can’t make a difference, individuality becomes isolation and man is prey to a machine that promises happiness but deals misery more often than not. When it does deliver what it promises, it does so at the price of someone else’s misery and the loss of a man’s dignity and values. There we have that American romantic ideal, so accurately captured by Steinbeck in his books. We’ve found out that capitalism (what the American city is all about) is truly a beast. We shouldn’t forget that the tradition upon which film noir flourished was that of the pulp detective/crime novels by writers who grew up and wrote during the Great Depression. But just you wait, the 50s are around the corner and the beast will take its revenge, ending the film noir period by means of black lists and commitees on un-American activities. Film noir is actually more political than the gloves of a femme fatale and the fear of women (though all these play a huge role). It’s just sad that Americans have forgotten this great tradition of theirs and tend to believe that things like socialism and labor unions are alien viruses from outer space while they're as American as apple pie and the statue of Liberty (you get my point here). Humans and their history…. so complicated. Oh well, let us not be sad about some re-writing of history for now and return to the film.

I consider Out of the Past to be one of the most typical noir films because it perfectly portrays the existentialism-determinism combination that I believe is the core of these films. Revealing dialogue follows:

-Buddy, you look like you’re in trouble.

-Why?

-Because you don’t act like it.

-I think I’m in a frame.

-Don’t sound like you.

-I don’t know. All I can see is the frame. I’m going there to look at the picture.

By introducing here the term determinism, I don’t imply fate or cause-and-effect laws and other narrative tools we use to make sense out of it all. It is only in retrospect that we can construct sense and any attempts to extend these mechanisms into the future in order to determine its shape are helpless due to our forgetting that they are but mechanisms. In other words, they are but abstractions, not blueprints that are bound to produce reality. They are useful and rather unavoidable tools if you don’t want to exist in the same way a tree does. Fate or God introduce metaphysics into our system, and as any noir anti-hero knows, there are no such things. The current state of a determinist system gives rise to the state of that system in the following moment (as Mark Bould so cohesively phrases it), and so on and so forth, in an unforeseeable way.

The noir world is presented as a determinist system, especially, as we see in Out of the Past, the city. The hero, with his unique, often obsolete, deeply personal set of values that are in contrast with those of the rest of the world (hence existentialism) is trapped inside its belly as a living moving part of it. He can observe the wheels and cogs and other strange machinery and try to find a vantage point from which he could observe the whole system work, find out the way and the purpose so he can free himself. He can see the frame but he can never see the picture. Machine parts have no faces, you know. There is a hint of order in this chaos but time is running short or he is too entangled in it to make sense out of it. Jeff returns to the city and gets trapped in plans and schemes that are hard to figure out. All he can see is the confusing shadows of the machines at work but not how he fits into all this and how to break free. When he eventually understands the layers of the web in which he is trapped and acts to solve the puzzle it is already too late. He is tainted. There is no way out for him, there can’t be. No happy endings here. Jeff was doomed from the start, since he decided to play the game. But was there really a decision made there in Mexico City? Hm… Damn you deterministic universe!

It all leads to this point. Looking at another dead man.

The Horror + the Horror + an Experiment.

In the scene right before they leave together, Kathie tries to convince him that he is as rotten as she is, because he fell for her in the first place, and so they deserve each other. There is no point in him trying to escape it. It’s time for him to realize this and forget his dreams of honesty and a sincere relationship with Ann. Jeff understands what she says in a slightly different way. Since he couldn’t resolve this and still has feelings for her, hidden in his harsh words to her that seem to repeat “I am rotten” rather than “you are rotten”, even though he knows what she is, there can be no hope for him. There is something wrong with him, something that can’t be fixed. There is no guarantee that he was right all along, if all he is now is the man his past created and that past is inescapable. That’s his fear. What good are his concepts of right and wrong if he can’t seem to make them ring true inside when he faces his past? He decides to escape this maze and return to the dream of a future with Ann by double crossing Kathie and calling the police. A last shot at happiness, with desperation written all over it and doomed to fail.

Let us try something out now. Let’s just assume that the whole movie from the point Stephanos comes to call him back to when Jeff and Ann meet in the woods and exchange promises that will not be kept is a dream. Let’s take that liberty and edit the film again, adding blur effects where this starts and ends. Let’s say that Jeff revisited the city the way we revisit a trauma, by reliving it in the monstrous form of a nightmare. The story with Kathie and Whit was just another love triangle story which ended with Jeff broken hearted and Kathie back in the fold, ego boosted and all. Every ounce of guilt, every fear is augmented in this dream sequence; the framing, the confusion, the betrayals. Scary heh? Noticed how we just produced the plot for Lynch’s, excellent and haunting, Lost Highway?

Out of the Past, for me, deals with the inevitability of the trauma, its everpresence, the constant reliving and re-negotiating the meaning of these little disasters around which we build ourselves. Can we face the arbitrary nature of our construction? Can we move beyond our past? Can we leap our own shadows? Are people really capable of change? Is there a possibility for resolution or every moment everything is at stake? Maybe Jeff is right. Maybe a man has to do what a man has to do and this is all there is to it. Maybe there can never be a resolution (how could we untie the knot we are) and traumas are never fully healed since there is now a human being grown around them. Maybe all we can do is face them and renegotiate them, produce a more useful configuration of our parts. It’s just us and this is all there is after all, right? Right.