La Série Noire at the Cinema 80 years of black screens and sleepless nights

Under the impetus of translator Marcel Duhamel, a friend of Jacques Prévert and Raymond Queneau, Éditions Gallimard launched a brand new collection in August 1945, the "Série noire," dedicated to the most representative works of the new English and American detective novel. Peter Cheyney, James Hadley Chase, Raymond Chandler, and Don Tracy were among the first authors. But it was from 1948, at the initiative of Claude Gallimard, that the collection took off, increasing its number of publications and its print runs, in shared exploitation with Hachette. Ten million copies were sold in ten years and a thousand titles published in twenty years!

The success of this reinvented genre literature, to which the NRF lends its literary credit, is inseparable from the vogue for American film noir in post-war French theaters. But its links with the big screen go beyond this phenomenon, notably with the adaptation of the first French novels in the collection, of which Albert Simonin's Touchez pas au grisbi! , adapted by Jacques Becker in 1953, offers the most significant and early example.

Thus Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, then Eddie Constantine, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jeanne Moreau… will be some of the emblematic figures of this fascinating companionship between the world of the written word and that of the screen, at a time when the book and the image seem to participate in the same mythology: that of the “milieu” where, beyond the picturesque, the social codes and the excesses of an era, and not without humor or fear, something of human truth is said – and lines of evolution of the novel, cinema and publishing are traced.  

80 years, 3,000 thrillers and some 500 films later, the "Série noire" remains more attached than ever to this dual affiliation where its myth was forged.

Exhibition organized with the exceptional support of the Bibliothèque des littératures policières.