Film Noir: A Critical Introduction

ISBN-13: 9781780933139 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 288 str.

Ian Brookes

Opis

What is film noir? With its archetypal femme fatale and private eye, its darkly-lit scenes and even darker narratives, the answer can seem obvious enough. But as Ian Brookes shows in this new study, the answer is a lot more complex than that. This book is designed to tackle those complexities in a critical introduction that takes into account the problems of straightforward definition and classification. Students will benefit from an accessible introductory text that is not just an account of what film noir is, but also an interrogation of the ways in which the term came to be applied to a disparate group of American films of the 1940s and 1950s.

Recenzje

Film Noir has long been a fascinating, complex cinematic period style. For students interested in the problematic conception of noir as a genre, Ian Brookes surveys critical, theoretical, and historiographic scholarly discourse on noir and its multifaceted nature. Brookes traces conceptions of noir from early pre-noir antecedents to wartime and postwar incarnations of the classic noir cycle, and examines the anxieties of returning veterans. Sheri Chinen Biesen, Author of Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir

Spis treści

Acknowledgements IntroductionPart 1: What is Film Noir?1. Genre and the Problem of Film Noir2. Visual Style and Narrative Themes3. Genre and GenderPart 2: The History of Film Noir4. Prehistory and the Wartime Period, 1939-19455. The Postwar Period, 1945-19506. The Late Period, 1950-1958Part 3: Case Study: The Veteran Problem and Postwar Film Noir7. The Discourse of Veteran Readjustment8. The Veteran and the Readjustment Narrative9. Conformity, Community, and CitizenshipCoda: The End of Film Noir BibliographyFilmography Index

O autorze

Ian Brookes teaches in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he has taught film noir courses for several years. He is also the editor of Howard Hawks: New Perspectives (2016).