The nose knows

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 2010)

Less a gushing homage to noir than part of a wave of 1970s conspiracy thrillers, Roman Polanski's "Chinatown" is one of the best (and few) examples of a film revitalizing and expanding conventions of past Hollywood.
The early noirs of the 1940s and 50s used rapid-fire dialogue, claustrophobic sets, shadowy cinematography, canted angles, convoluted plots and various shady characters to construct an impenetrable web of conspiracy and betrayal. Within this web our heroes find themselves trapped, helpless, confused and yanked about like a puppet on a string.
The very cinematic language of these films was oppressive, every detail actively scheming against both off-screen audience and on-screen hero (frequently a private investigator or police detective), both attempting to hack their way through the film's conspiratorial universe, often to no avail.
Of course these early noir directors didn't know they were making noirs. The term hadn't been invented and these artists were simply responding, intuitively, to the anxieties of the time: the trendiness of existentialism, expressionism, the onset of war, urban sprawl etc.
The last of the noirs made in the classic mould was, arguably, "Blast of Silence", a film which anticipates both Antonioni (where space and self disconnect) and Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" (loners in oppressive urban jungles) and provides clues as to which direction the genre was heading. From this point onwards, classical noirs ceased and noir then branched off into two directions, "neo noirs" and a whole mass of films which are noirs but are never classified as such.
Neo noir was born under the sway of postmodernism, and so these films tended to be formalist games and vapid exercises in aesthetics. Concurrently with their rise came wave after wave of genuine noirs which, like the noirs of the 1930s and 40s, consciously or unconsciously reflected a changing world. And so whilst early noirs gave us noirs confined to tiny rooms, their characters battling their way from one small sound-stage to the next, these noirs expanded and began to take into account the growing consciousness of its post war audience.
So we have such widely divergent films as "The Parallax View", "Marathon Man", "Capricorn One", "Apocalypse Now", "Taxi Driver", "Manchurian Candidate", "Z", "Three Days of the Condor", "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold", "The Conformist", "Cutter's Way", "All The President's Men (In "Perspectves on Film Noir", Raymond Durgnat even calls a science fiction film like "2001: A Space Odyssey" a film noir) etc etc, all films influenced by Vietnam, Watergate, whistle-blowing and a growing suspicion of any and all leaders. The existentialist's web of fate, in which a malevolent universe "naturally" conspires against man ("The Killing", "Wrath of God" etc), thus increasingly gave way to more politically charged plots.
The genre remained quiet in the 1980s, aside from a subset of "tech noir" films like "Blade Runner" and "Terminator". Both films are about hunters, noir fate personified as relentless source code (man as machine, his future engineered). The Coens and Lynch then came along, the former neo-noirists largely interested in parlour tricks. Around this time neo noir also intersected with nudity, films like "Basic Instinct", "Body Heat", "Last Seduction", and "Jade" serving up femme fatales as figures to fear and salivate over.
The 1990s saw noir seeping into television ("The X-Files", "Twin Peaks" etc). With zeitgeist tapping tag-lines such as "The Truth Is Out There" and "Trust No One", such shows posited a world of vast conspiracies, the common man at the mercy of all manners of ridiculously elaborate forces (religion, genetics, government plots, class, economics, monsters etc). It was now man's duty to trawl through these labyrinths of information, discovering some elusive "truth" that ensured his own freedom. In the mid 1990s the puppet masters then took the form of diseases and genetic disorders. Then with the internet age came the "conspiracy documentary", which proliferate on websites and peer-to-peer networks.
Nowadays, noirs have the expansiveness of such shows as "The Wire", their characters at the mercy of a far wider range of forces (politics, science, sex, religion, globalization, capital, mysticism, Hollywood, genetics, technology, screenwriters, family, fate, bureaucracy etc). The best of these take place in a forever un-mappable universe, conflicts never resolved, characters trapped in the global flux, their heroes increasingly rootless, set adrift in a world of influences so vast that the human mind can do nothing but succumb. These noirs are such widely divergent fare as "Ran", "Inland Empire", "Demonlover", "Mulholland Drive", "The Wire", "Code 46", "Boarding Gate", "Platform", "Eyes Wide Shut", "Miami Vice", "Girlfriend Experience" etc etc. Of course nobody thinks of these films as "film noirs". They much rather champion self-consciously emulative fare.
In any case, if "Chinatown" doesn't have the scope of later noirs ("Chinatown", unlike modern noirs, firmly believes its conspiracies can be uncovered), it's nevertheless one of cinema's most elegantly written tales. Elsewhere the film is brimming with neat details; consider the way Polanski constantly jumps from arid landscapes to fertile orchards (Chinatown's "conspiracy" revolves around land, water and agricultural property), the "water motifs" inserted into virtually every sequence (ponds, stuffed fish, paintings of lakes, swordfish etc) and the way Polanski aptly casts John Huston as the film's villain, Huston's "Maltese Falcon" being one of the first films to bring together all the tropes that we now commonly associate with "noir".
9.5/10 - Masterpiece.