Film Noir

Description

Explores the development of film noir as a cultural and artistic phenomenon. This book traces the development of what we know as film noir from the proto-noir elements of Feuillade's silent French crime series and German Expressionism to the genre's mid-twentieth century popularization and influence on contemporary global media. By employing experimental lighting effects, oblique camera angles, distorted compositions, and shifting points-of-view, film noir's style both creates and comments upon a morally adumbrated world, where the alienating effects of the uncanny, the fetishistic, and the surreal dominate. What dreworiginal audiences to film noir is an immediate recognition of this modern social and psychological reality. Much of the appeal of film noir concerns its commentary on social anxieties, its cynical view of political and capitalist corruption, and its all-too-brutal depictions of American modernity. This book examines the changing, often volatile shifts in representations of masculinity and femininity, aswell as the genre's complex relationship with Afro-American culture, observable through noir's musical and sonic experiments. Concluding with extensive bibliographies, filmographies, recommended noir film viewing, and a reflective chapter by Alain Silver and James Ursini on their own influential studies and collections on film noir criticism, this book offers students and scholars of Film Studies a scholarly, cultural andaesthetic history of the genre. Title page Copyright CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS INTRODUCTION 1. THE CINEMA OF UNCERTAINTY AND THE OPACITY OF INFORMATION FROM LOUIS FEUILLADE'S CRIME SERIALS TO FILM NOIR 2. WARNING SHADOWS: GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM AND AMERICAN FILM NOIR 3. HARD-BOILED TRADITION AND EARLY FILM NOIR 4. COLD WAR NOIR 5. NOIRING THE PITCH: THE CONFLICTED SOUNDTRACKS OF OUT OF THE PAST, THE BLUE GARDENIA AND THE LONG GOODBYE 6. SPLIT SCREEN: SOUND/MUSIC IN THE STRANGER/CRISS CROSS 7. GENDER AND NOIR 8. THE SUBVERSIVE SHADE OF BLACK IN FILM NOIR 9. POSTSCRIPT: A HISTORY OF OUR WRITING ABOUT FILM NOIR SELECTED BOOK CHAPTERS ON FILM NOIR SELECTED FILM NOIR BOOKS SELECTED GUIDE TO FILM NOIR INDEX