Speaking of the "last days of the ancien regime" at the NC e-zine...one of the last projects to surface at the time was a book review and interview related to a book entitled THE DARK GALLERIES, a "museum guide" to the many portraits that appear as elements in film noir. (We can all rattle off several obvious examples, such as LAURA, THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, and SCARLET STREET, but it turns out that this phenomenon was incredibly pervasive in the 1940s and--to a lesser extent--the 1950s.)

The author--academician Steven Jacobs, who has also examined the use of architecture in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, researched the usage of portraits in noir/noir-related films in the 1940s/1950s and created an intriguing typology of those images in his book.

Looking back at the preparatory work done for the interview, it turns out that there were 79 films (mostly in America, with a few in Britain) that feature portraits that are in some integral to the narrative within the film in which it appears. Of those, 62 occurred in the 1940s, with a remarkable "cluster effect" from 1944 to 1948, where paintings appear in 48 films (including 13 in 1946 alone).

Jacobs, who covers a great deal of ground in the book's extended introduction, does not seem to notice this clustering, which suggests to me a kind of semi-conscious anxiety percolating in the US (and elsewhere) as it contemplates what we might call a "crisis of old money" as it attempts to reposition itself after the upheaval of WWII.

Jacobs' approach is more formalist, restricting itself to aesthetic categorization--which, while not as sweeping as it might be, is still fascinating in its own right. A search for him on the Internet resulted in the discovery of a lecture he gave in 2016 at New York's Swiss Institute which was built around THE DARK GALLERIES. The lecture was filmed and resides on Vimeo; it was embedded into the page at the Swiss Institute website that documents the event (you'll need to scroll down a little bit on the page to find it). You can access the page via this link:

https://www.swissinstitute.net/event/lecture-the-dark-galleries-painted-portraits-in-film-noir-with-steven-jacobs/

Note that a 16-minute collage of film clips focusing on moments in key films involved with portraits is included as part of the presentation. (And note that this film is projected against a bare wall, and thus is suboptimal; I've yet to locate a version of this collage in a more standard format.

Jacobs' book is still in print and is available from various source on the Internet. It remains one of the more distinctive pieces of research on film noir undertaken by twenty-first century scholars, and is especially recommended to those with a penchant for "melo-noir," where so many of the examples of this phenomenon occur.