THE BLACKBOARD: Re: Essay (sic) on French origins of film noir in the 1930s

I think we first have to discover/uncover all of the contents of the "paradigm" before we decide that we know what it is. In that sense Ahearn is correct to go after Paul Schrader--whose approach to noir has, as Dan Hodges has noted on many an occasion and in multiple platforms, is doubly dubious in that it tries to make sweeping, superficial summaries of noir's "essence" from what amounts to about 5% of the films that should be surveyed.

The problem is that Ahearn often does the same thing. And he's far from alone in doing that--it seems to be the raison d'etre for much of the scholarly endeavor in noir studies.

I'm familiar with Kuhn's work and the potential for applying it in this instance, but what we have here, IMO, is a premature paradigm that many have built upon in a jackleg manner; even those who are trying to "crash" that paradigm have often tried to use a ridiculously small portion of the "canon" to try to enforce the "shift."

To have two different theories for phenonema has to do with things that work below or beyond the human capacity to see; for multiple theories of noir, we would be dealing with the things that we feel or sense that stem from how we see, "read" and "feel" a film as it unfolds, which is why several of those "noir-o-meter" categories are geared to work phenomenologically in order to acquire appropriate scale and something resembling accurate gradation.