There is little doubt today, that film noir research and the spread and development of psychoanalysis have boosted academic Film Studies to a large extend; for a short period in the early 1970s, the psychoanalytical approach to Film Studies even seemed to be the only method that brought results. For film and psychoanalysis had a […]
Search results for film noir
Film Noir by Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer (eds.) (2016)
Recent publications on film noir tell of the lively interest in the style/genre/cycle. And ever since film noir was subject to definition (and analysis) by french critics, the question of what exactly it is, a style, a genre, a cycle, a movement, has not been answered in total. “Film noir,” as reports Homer B. Pettey, […]
Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing … by Dennis Broe (2014)
There are many different approaches to the analysis of film noir, since film studies today deal with almost any facet, be it technical, stylistic or director specific. Dennis Broe, however, has the emphasis on the social-cultural and most of all the working class aspects of these films. He locates the origins of film noir to […]
A Companion to Film Noir by Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson (eds.) (2013)
This edition of mostly recent texts on the style, genre and aesthetics of film noir covers a huge variety of themes such as technical details and production modes, elaborates on the roots of many noir films in American (hard boiled) detective fiction and pulp stories, and expands into the survey of the many “victims,” so […]
Pulp Fiction to Film Noir by William Hare (2012)
With the advent of the Great Depression, Hollywood discovered new characters and fresh labels of films that displayed the effects of the economic struggle on various types of individuals, be it the small-time crook, the innocent and wrongly accused businessman, the farmer or the simple secretary. All of them had to face new obstacles in […]
Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream by Mark Osteen (2013)
By choosing the rather bleak Edmund Goulding noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947) as the namesake for his new book, author Mark Osteen surprises with his fresh approach to films noir. He concentrates on the major antagonists, so to speak, of the American dream, and the American pursuit of happiness, a constitutional right in a way. […]
Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy by Robert B. Pippin (2012)
Whenever you hear a character in the next film noir you are watching say something that sounds a lot like sarcasm, heavy irony or simply like the words of a doomed man… you may have caught one of the moments Professor Pippin uses to build a whole theory. Build it around the attitude, not the […]
In Lonely Places. Film Noir Beyond the City by Imogen Sara Smith (2011)
There seem to be specific instances that make a particular type of movie clearly identifiable as belonging to a certain group. For example, we like to have deserts, gunfights and horses if we watch a western movie, and we may look out for earrings, battleships, sabers and the Jolly Roger when we watch a pirates […]
Film Noir Graphics: Where Danger Lives by Alain Silver and James Ursini (2012)
So there comes another strike by professional collaborators team Alain Silver and James Ursini, two critics, collectors and authors of books and journals on movie directors, film industry, and Film-Noir in particular. By their mere output, the two authors today form part of the canon of modern Film-Noir appreciation. The reader then is confronted with the […]