Lawrence Gipe / Exhibition Proposal / "Film Noir (Colonial)”
Works are oil on panel, 16" x 20", 2025
“Film Noir (Colonial)” is a series of oil paintings based on screenshots from film noir set in post-colonial locales such as Algiers and Cairo.
There are multiple screen captures from “The Man from Cairo” serving as sources for this series, as well as the template for Colonial Noir, “Algiers” (1941), and it’s musical remake, “Casbah” (1948).
After 40 years of watching these films I noticed a subgenre from 1946-on that introduces an American lead character into the post-WW2 geopolitical reality of indigenous cultures overthrowing, or co-existing tenuously, with their colonial occupiers. I call this “Film Noir Colonial” (I also like “Casbah Noir”), or “Exotic Noir” as it was recently dubbed by one French critic.
Though it doesn’t check every box as a genuine film noir, “Casablanca” (1942) is considered a predecessor to the genre, with its classic anti-hero Humphrey Bogart playing the character Rick. In the film, Rick symbolizes a non-interventionist America: “I stick my neck out for nobody”. By the film’s end - mirroring America itself in 1942 - Rick has seen enough, and will join he cause against the Axis. By 1946, the US position had changed from anxiety to triumph, and the new reality was reflected in this subgenre.
In some cases, the American presence is interjected into espionage surrounding Western powers and their struggle to police and maintain their colonial empires.
Usually this foreign power was French, as they 1.) suppressed particularly exotic Mediterranean sites; and 2.) offered producers the opportunity to get American actors together with the latest French actress - as a stranded French beauty was de rigueur in these narratives.
For instance, George Raft’s character in “The Man from Cairo” (1953) represents a new, confident American interloper, just as Rick represented an ambivalent American only 4 years earlier. His character mirrors the US’s willingness to take over as mediator, and later aggressor, in maintaining colonial status quo.
My goals here are post-modernist, with intent to re-examine the nostalgia and ideology embedded in these image-tropes by creating a painted meta-narrative, derived from multiple films from the era.
Lawrence Gipe, 2025