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

Exhibition from 28 March to 13 May 2025

To mark the 80th anniversary of the ‘Série Noire’ collection, the Galerie Gallimard is presenting a new exhibition, La Série Noire au cinéma. 80 ans d'écrans noirs et de nuits blanches, from 28 March to 13 May 2025.

In August 1945, at the instigation of translator Marcel Duhamel, a friend of Jacques Prévert and Raymond Queneau, Éditions Gallimard launched a brand new collection, the ‘Série noire’, devoted to the most representative works of the new English and American crime novel. Peter Cheyney, James Hadley Chase, Raymond Chandler and Don Tracy were among its first authors. But it was from 1948 onwards, on the initiative of Claude Gallimard, that the collection took off in an extraordinary way, increasing its number of publications and print-runs, in shared ownership 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 credentials, is inextricably linked with the vogue for American film noir in French cinemas in the post-war period. But its links with the big screen go beyond this phenomenon, particularly with the adaptation of the first French novels in the collection, of which Touchez pas au grisbi ! by Albert Simonin, adapted by Jacques Becker in 1953, is the most significant and early example.