In 1957, the Situationist writer and filmmaker Guy Debord produced a collage called "The Naked City," a pastiche reconstruction of a map of Paris titled after the Jules Dassin film, The Naked City. The 1948 film noir, famous for having been shot on location in New York City and thus also for its "documentary" style, was itself an adaptation of Weegee's 1945 book of photographs by the same title. In naming his collage-map after these American works, Debord was not so much appealing to their interest in urban sensationalism or crime, but instead to their novel approaches to understanding what Debord called the "psychogeography" of the city: that is, "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."

Such inquiries into the psychogeography of postwar French and American cities did not end, however, with Debord's avant-garde Situationist International, however. Rather, the French adaptation of American crime film and fiction after the Second World War could be attributed to the ability of film noir and hard-boiled fiction to characterize the haunted quality of cold war cities, as well as the new forms of conduct they demanded. The postwar French reception of American crime film and fiction has, of course, been well documented; what is only beginning to receive attention, though, are the intellectual exchanges and developments made possible by this transatlantic traffic in the crime genre.

The immediate focus of my paper will be François Truffault's film adaptation of David Goodis's novel Down Below as Tirez sur le pianiste! [Shoot the Piano Player, 1960]. The novel, a crime story based on the encounter of two estranged brothers, is set (and written) in Philadelphia, whose geography and history Goodis dramatizes and disrupts throughout his Philadelphia-based fiction. Translated into French in the 1950s, the Philadelphia of Goodis's novel became Truffault's intimately-documented Paris of 1960. Truffault’s film, in turn, is especially sensitive to the ways in which the French traffic in American crime fiction and films noirs since the 1940s revolved around questions of civic organization - not only urban geography, but also an implicit criticism of American social engineering and an interrogation of capitalist ethics. My paper suggests that Truffault, a subtle critic of contemporary film as well as a filmmaker, "translated" Goodis's Philadelphia in order to address such questions directly.

That is, this transformation of Philadelphia into Paris, rather than merely satisfying the exigencies of translation and adaptation, has a history - specifically, a history of French and American intellectual exchanges about urbanism and civic organization that extends from Enlightenment philosophy and Napoleonic city planning to the mystery fiction of Poe, Eugene Sue, and George Lippard. This history is central to both versions of the story. Indeed, both Goodis's novel and Truffault's film draw from the historical status of Philadelphia's urban space as an idealized synthesis of civic form and civic conduct: just as the ordered streets and squares of William Penn's original city plan form the physical setting for the "brotherly love" of the city's name, Goodis's crime novel experiments with the forms of determination and causality this urban plan strives to guarantee. Goodis's experiments, I argue, constitute a psychogeography of Philadelphia's urban space. Likewise, Truffault adapts such literary experiments in his film, to the extent that the camera wanders away from the narrative framework of the lead characters, instead lingering over incidental characters and moments whose stories can only be suggested. More than a purely anti-narrative device, though, such film-work recalls the Situationist experiments in urban geography that privileged wandering [dérive] as a strategy for reconstituting the city as a psychic space.