Although it is conventional, and perhaps logical, to regard the avant-garde and the commercial cinemas separately, major new developments in each arose concurrently in the USA during the Second World War and, to some extent, in response to it. The dark Hollywood trend that was retrospectively dubbed film noir could be seen, as Paul Arthur and David James have observed, as an industrial form of an equally dark trend in the new genre of art cinema that came to be known as the trance film: “both modes feature a somnambulist protagonist who enters a menacing, often incomprehensible environment in a search for sexual, social, or legal identity, and both states are characterized by the same deadened affect, increased capacity for absorbing or inflicting violence, iconographies of entrapment, and the dissolution of geographic boundaries.”
