As we try to define the cinematic origins of, and influences on, film noir, we inevitably find ourselves faced with the bigger problem of defining noir itself. Following stories that take the divergent paths of hard-boiled detectives, police investigations and romantic deadly triangles, and traverse across urban cityscapes, suburban households and remote wastelands, we realise the ‘centre’ of noir cannot be located. Critics have argued equally persuasively on behalf of German Expressionism or Poetic Realism as the true progenitor of the genre, but here I want to argue that the path to finding the antecedents to noir lies not in mapping out specific visual motifs or narrative elements, such as the ‘rain-slicked highway’, high-contrast lighting or even the ‘hard-boiled detective’, since each of these components is frustratingly variable from film to film. Rather, we are better off approaching noir from the question of its epistemological and ideological missions, which are much more consistent across the many films we identify as noir, despite the dissimilar styles, narrative lines and character types we are likely to cross in our investigation.

If we start with the kind of knowledge produced and the status of evidence, especially the role of visual evidence in defining what we know in noir, then I would argue that Louis Feuillade's crime films in the silent era are a productive venue to explore as the genre's predecessor. These films, as I have argued elsewhere, offer neither a strategy of ‘showing’ nor one of ‘telling’, but rather a third path in film history, one preoccupied with the limits of knowledge, the ‘cinema of uncertainty’. As Allan Sekula notes in his seminal essay, ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, the photographic image has long been at the centre of the crisis of bourgeois culture, which simultaneously claims that the world is a collection of visible, ‘knowable and possessable objects’ but also maintains that the creative artist/spirit can transcend and transform the alienating machine of science/rationality and its economic handmaiden, capitalism.