The boundaries and meaning of noir: suture, metaphor and the historical imaginary

This chapter offers first a response to the open ontology of noir, proposing that the project to define noir (e.g., Frank Krutnik) can be understood in terms of the Lacanian logic of masculine sexuation, imaginary borders, and a reconsideration of the concept of “suture”. I then carry the concept of the Lacanian Imaginary from the ontology to the historiography of film noir, and Thomas Elsaesser’s “historical imaginary”. I compare the repressive function of the concept with the Lacanian structure of metaphor. I consider Elsaesser’s own attempt to rediscover the lost possibilities in the history of film noir in terms of the relationship to the past theorised by psychoanalysis and the possibility of introducing new possibilities as expressed by Bergson and Žižek. I show that the emergence of necessity from contingency that attends the production of the historical imaginary is a retroactive effect that reshapes the past in the image of the present, through a reading of Ginette Vincendeau’s study of Poetic Realism as “French Film Noir”.