What may come to mind first whenever the visual aspects of the genre film noir are discussed, may be the dark atmosphere, the sharp contrast of light and shadow, and people in desperate situations whose actions echoed brilliantly the many original hard-boiled scripts and novel adaptations usually associated with the stlye. One aspect halfway neglected, […]
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Tag: Film Noir
Musik im klassischen Film noir by Janina Müller (German) (2019)
Janina Müller’s study (“Music in classic film noir”) takes a close look at the scores of mostly the popular films noir and a few rather unknown ones. Here it means studying, juxtaposing and evaluating the scores of several films, while their uniqueness in comparison with standard Hollywood movies is questioned. As there is hardly one […]
From Ameche to Zozzled: A Glossary of Hard-Boiled Slang of the 1920s through the 1940s by Joe Tradii...
The hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and the many films noir later, apart from several other similarities, shared a special gangster jargon and street-wise language that lent an extra air of authenticity to those works. As the many weird expressions, prohibition-time lingo, proverbs and often sexists, racist and plainly offensive words used there quickly went […]
Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game. The Way It Never Sounded by Andra Ivănescu (2019)
Without doubt, video games have become a part of the popular culture; with some aspects of the game culture also introduced (and marketed) in the non-virtual present in the form of merchandise, costumes, action figures and so forth. It is a huge market – while gaming now has obtained the status of a cultural practice […]
Urban Noir: New York and Los Angeles in Shadow and Light by James J. Ward and Cynthia J. Miller (eds...
Both Los Angeles and New York City have been of particular interest to movie producers, especially to those who shot drama that was later called film noir. The authors want to dig deeper to unearth the reasons for those locations, since the ”… inescapable question, then, is: Why this animosity toward the two cities that, […]
Dark City. The Real Los Angeles Noir by Jim Heimann (2018)
With Dark City a very unusual portrait of an American city is now available. It impresses with many pictures of the city of angels that show the really shadowy sides, the ones that inhabitants from the early 1910s until the 1950s experienced, and that provided the soil and inspiration for many novels and movies. As […]
Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s by Alan Nadel (2017)
Alan Nadel, probably best known for his expert writings on the Atomic Age and American everyday life in the 1950s, has come up with another study of that period. A time when not just the permanent fears of a hot war or Soviet invasion were present, but also strange (or possibly communist) activities from your […]
War Noir: Raymond Chandler and the Hard-Boiled Detective as Veteran … by Sarah Trott (2016)
Highly respected and valued by many fans of crime fiction and most likely America’s most distinguished crime writer ever, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) together with Dashiell Hammett invented a new type of tough detective, independently of each other, they founded a style that later was described as “hard-boiled.” Many of their novels were turned into successful […]
The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s by Robert Miklitsch (2017)
Film noir in the 1950s is a very special period in the genre‘s/style’s history, since for some experts film noir ended just then, while for others it almost died then and had finally vanished completely in the early 1960s. (To resurface as neo-noir in the early 1980s). In the resent book the author tries to […]