So Dmytryk informed his audience in 1980 at the University of Texas about the original moment of inspiration for his evolving noir aesthetic. That Dmytryk chose Honore Daumier as the basis for film noir is hardly surprising, since Daumier's works not only exhibit what would become the noir visual style, but also contribute to the noir sensibility, its Weltanschauung and its social commentary. Moreover, Dmytryk and Daumier found themselves at odds with their governments for their sardonic critiques of economic repression and political hypocrisy. By referring to Daumier's style, Dmytryk also invokes Honore de Balzac's sardonic realism in La Comédie humaine, since Daumier illustrated Balzac's works and both he and Balzac contributed to La Caricature in the 1830s. Not surprising, then, that aesthetic experiments of modernism in the nineteenth century would attract the critical and cinematic eye of film noir directors and be the basis for the evolution of the art form. As evidenced by French cinema from the 1930s, film noir was already a term applied to films with subversive accounts of the ‘black despair of a hopeless life’, as Georges Altman concluded of Le Jour se lève in 1939: ‘Actors, theme, and words are cast and bathed in images which are never common, banal, or pernicious. A film noir, but that's as it should be’. That concept of a noir vision, as Dmytryk admits, depended upon the transmutation of style and content from antecedent artistic movements and texts, an evolutionary process both imitative and original.