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...