Film Noir

ISBN-13: 9781474413077 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 240 str.

Homer B. Pettey;R. Barton Palmer

Opis

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 popularisation 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 drew original 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, as well 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 and aesthetic history of the genre.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Notes on Contributors; List of Figures; The Noir Turn, Homer B. Pettey; 1. The Cinema of Uncertainty and the Opacity of Information from Louis Feuillade’s Crime Serials to Film Noir, Vicki Callahan; 2. Warning Shadows: German Expressionism and American Film Noir, Janet Bergstrom; 3. Hard-boiled Tradition and Film Noir, Homer B. Pettey; 4. Cold War Noir, R. Barton Palmer; 5. Noiring the Pitch: The Conflicted Soundtracks of Out of the Past, The Blue Gardenia, and The Long Goodbye, Krin Gabbard; 6. Split Screen: Sound/Music in The Stranger/Criss Cross, Robert Miklitsch; 7. Gender and Noir, Elisabeth Bronfen; 8. The Subversive Shade of Black in Film Noir, Charles Scruggs; Postscript: A History of Our Writing about Film Noir, Alain Silver and James Ursini; Selected Reading Guide to Film Noir: Book and Book Chapters; Selected Viewing Guide to Film Noir; Index.