If there’s one thing film noir buffs love more than cigarette smoke illuminated through a venetian blind, it might be rhyming puns. Take the sobriquets attributed to Eddie Muller, who’ll be at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland this weekend to oversee “Noir City: Portland.” He’s frequently dubbed the “czar of noir,” and his website identifies him as a “noirchaeologist.” Both titles have been well-earned over the last twenty years, as Muller has spearheaded initiatives that include the annual Noir City festival in his native San Francisco; the publication of Noir City magazine; hosting the weekly “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies; and the restoration and preservation work done by the non-profit Film Noir Foundation. (Prior to all this, he worked as a bartender and a newspaper reporter, making him something of a “Renoirsance” man.) (Sorry.)

I had an opportunity to speak with Muller by phone from his home in San Francisco, and he proved to be as enthusiastic and knowledgeable about what’s become his life’s work as one would hope. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Back in 2014 I wrote about an edition of “Noir City: Portland,” and it looks like that might be the last time you brought the show to town. Has it really been a full decade?

A: I have completely lost all track of time so I couldn’t verify that. But it’s been a while.

Q: We happen to be speaking on July 4th, so it seems relevant to note that film noir has a reputation as one of those quintessentially American art forms, like jazz or baseball. What about the genre springs from the unique characteristics of this country and its culture?

A: That question is kind of at the core of most of the work I do now. Is that true? Is it an American phenomenon? I’m not denying that what you say is absolutely true, but part of the reason for that is that Hollywood was the film center of the world during the mid-twentieth century. So it stands to reason that most of the influential films being made would be coming from Hollywood. But you can’t overlook the fact that a great number of the people who were making those films in Hollywood had come from Europe. Either they were just following the work or they were running from the Nazis.

So when you look at what is quintessentially American about it, I would look at the language. That vernacular speech, the hard-boiled language that people associate with film noir, that is quintessentially American. It may exist in other countries, but I’m not adept enough in other languages to know if it’s as funny, as witty, as wisecracking as what was being turned out in America. The demarcation points for film noir in this country had a lot to do with the influence of those Europeans. It was a visual style of which there was some evidence in the 1930s and earlier, it wasn’t until all of those people—the cinematographers, the directors, the set designers, the art directors—were really ensconced in Hollywood that it became a movement. So while America was the center of the movement, it was not an entirely American concept. In Germany and France, they were making films that would be considered noir before such things were being made in Hollywood.

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Q: Maybe the way in which it is most American is that it’s the product of immigrants who brought talent, energy, and specific worldviews and revolutionized the typical Hollywood genres of mysteries and crime dramas.

A: The mood of noir is somewhat European and the voice, the sound of noir is very American.

Q: And it quickly became a global phenomenon. One of the films scheduled to screen this weekend is Carlos Hugo Christensen’s 1952 Argentine film Never Open That Door, which is the newest restoration project from the Film Noir Foundation.

A: That particular film was just dead-on for me. It’s based on two stories by Cornell Woolrich, who has taken on the mantle of noir writer supreme in America. He’s the emblematic writer of noir fiction. So the fact that this writer-director-producer from Argentina came to the United States specifically to meet Woolrich and get the rights to these stories from him is really fascinating to me. Clearly he had seen American films based on Woolrich’s stories and the stories had been published in South America. In France, the publisher Gallimard had a famous imprint called the Série noire, which published all the great crime fiction, not just from America, but from around the world. There was a similar thing called The Seventh Circle in Argentina, and that’s where Christensen discovered Woolrich.

Q: And this isn’t the first South American film the Foundation has restored…

A: All the films we’ve done that aren’t in English are from Argentina. That’s our unexplored treasure trove. It’s partly serendipity, because fourteen or fifteen years ago my wife and I travelled to Buenos Aires just after the only complete version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis had been discovered there. I ended up meeting the person responsible for that discovery, Fernando Pena. Every since, Fernando and I have been fabulous colleagues. I wish I could find people like Fernando in other countries so that we could do the same thing. France doesn’t need one, maybe, but somebody in Spain or Greece or Scandinavia who not only knows the history but knows where the films are. Fernando is the curator for the largest film museum in South America and he has a massive film collection of this own. He’s one of the world’s great cinephiles. Once we established a relationship, he would say “Eddie, here’s a film you must see: The Beast Must Die.” I wish I had this happening in other places in the world. He knows that noir is my specialty, and there’s clearly a market for this stuff now. (I may have played a small but significant role in helping to create that market.)

Q: There does seem to be this seemingly bottomless bucket of films noir that continue to be rediscovered. The work you do on TCM and elsewhere is a testament to that, but it’s still remarkable that someone like me, who considers themselves a decades-long fan of the stuff, can be constantly impressed at not just the volume but the quality of the catalog. By definition though, there is a finite number of these titles. Will we ever run out of classic noir?

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A: In my lifetime, probably not. It’s a complicated thing. Forgive me if I go on a tangent here, but it’s a tangent that’s very important to me. The digital age has made accessibility to these things much easier. When I started doing this, the films were restored in 35mm photochemically and were played at my film festivals. After doing that for a while, I realized a lot of people were donating to the Film Noir Foundation, and that a lot of these people weren’t really reaping the benefits of that if they’re not able to come to our film festivals and see the movies on film. I was a real purist. But we decided we had to start putting this stuff out digitally. While we haven’t completely transitioned, if you look at a film like The Black Vampire, there is not a restored 35mm print. It’s only restored as a Blu-ray. There was a 35mm print we made as a preservation of the film, but all of the restoration work was done digitally, and that’s what people can now see.

My concern about all this is that people don’t quite understand the downside of digital. If you count on seeing something streaming, then it can evaporate instantly. It’s all about whoever controls what I call “the spigot.” So we’re in a predicament. I think it would be awful if we lost these films. But I also hate it when we work so hard to restore a film and then these fly-by-night outfits take our restoration, cut off our restoration credits, and upload it to YouTube claiming that they found it!

Q: That’s terrible. And literally criminal.

A: It happens every time we do a restoration. Cinema Classics Limited [note: not a real company] or whoever comes out and has the audacity to say in the comments section “We work hard to restore these films. Donations accepted.” For what? For cutting off the credits identifying the agency that actually did the restoration and uploading it?

Q: I’m sure you have attorneys who can try to stop this, but it probably feels like a game of Whac-A-Mole.

A: It’s really difficult. You can put anything up on YouTube, but trying to get anything taken down is an absolute nightmare. So, God forbid we ever lose films because they aren’t available on the Internet, but by the same token, we spend $80,000 to $100,000 on a restoration and then somebody just puts it up there and says give me the money!

Q: You’re talking to a guy who used to own an independent video store, so I appreciate the value of physical media.

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A: Every time a new technology is developed, the people who own it convince the government that this is all for the benefit of the consumer. Whether it’s a merger of companies or whatever, it’s all for the consumer. But if a consumer sitting in front of their streaming TV thinks they now somehow have a benefit because they’re paying for some way of connecting to watch it and then they’re paying $7.99-$14.99 for all these different monthly services, how that somehow is advantageous to the consumer, when it all used to be one simple bill, is pretty mind-numbing. And back then if you wanted something that wasn’t on your cable service, you went to the independent video store and you found it. And then you would say, well, we don’t have that in stock but I’ll find it for you. Now we’re breeding a culture that says if it’s not streaming on my TV then it doesn’t exist.

Q: Another disadvantage, and a reason that events like “Noir City” are so important, is that these days we generally end up watching films alone at home, bathed in the light of the TV screen instead of in a theater where you can have that communal experience—and, just as importantly, you can’t pause the movie. It’s an immersive experience without all the distractions.

A: That’s exactly it. Going to the movies when I was growing up was always a tremendous experience. The lights go down and you enter this manufactured dream state. There’s nothing like it. I mean, I get it when people say they don’t go to the movies anymore, it’s just horrible. Yeah, if you’re going to a movie where there’s twenty minutes of commercials and all the people sitting around you are on their phones the whole time, even during the movie, I hate that myself. That’s not the festivals I put on. We are all about trying to recreate the old-school style of going to the movies where everything you said is true. And the people coming to these movies, that’s what they want.

Q: There’s a certain self-selection as far as the audience.

A: Exactly. The challenge from my perspective over the years is that other people are very specific about what they like and don’t like, whereas I am kind of a ringleader. My goal is to get people into the tent. Sometimes I’ll hear, “Why are there so many young people here?” and I’m like “That’s the whole point!” They’re the ones who will have to carry this torch. This goes back to your question about whether we’ll run out of movies to show. When you’re programming these things, as much as I love to find obscurities and dig up rarities that even the hardcore fans haven’t seen before, you still have to keep recycling the classics. Because there are younger people who either haven’t seen it or have never seen it on a movie screen. I’ll sometimes show Out of the Past or Double Indemnity and I’ll get some pushback: “Are you running out of things to show?” I’ve been doing this long enough that someone who was ten years old when I started is now twenty-five or thirty. They’ve never seen these films on the big screen! Who wouldn’t want to experience Out of the Past on a big movie screen for the first time?

Q: Looking at this weekend’s programming, you’ve bookended with a pair of iconic films: Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place. In between are a slew of lesser-known titles. You lure them in with the stuff they’ve heard of and then say, well, if you liked that check these out.

A: Precisely. That is our operating template for the festivals now. And when people wonder why we’re showing something that all the hardcore fans have seen, I want to remind them that you are welcome to bring other people with you to the theater who maybe haven’t seen those movies. I’m hoping that Gilda and In a Lonely Place are favorite movies of a lot of people who will then bring three or four others with them to see it on a big screen.

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Q: Disregarding those two for a moment, and daring to ask an impossible question, which of the other four films would you recommend to someone who could only see one?

A: That’s very, very hard to say. Because of where I’m at in my career right now, I’m going to say it’s Never Open That Door. I think it can be a revelation for people to realize that they made this movie in Argentina and it’s absolutely as good as any noir film made in the United States. I often try to put things together in the program that resonate, so we’re showing The Window, which is based on another Woolrich story, just before Never Open That Door.

(Noir City: Portland runs from Friday, July 19, through Sunday, July 21, at the Hollywood Theatre.)