Strongly influenced by domestic hard-boiled novels of the 1920s and 1930s, one of the most American film genres, film noir, had its boom time in the 1940s. Generally believed to have mostly vanished from studios and theaters by the late 1950s, the genre briefly resurfaces every few years in the so-called “neo noirs” of various […]
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Tag: Laura
Perplexing Plots. Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell (2023)
Generally, storytelling, narratives, modes of presentation and the story behind it, define most works of fiction and movie plots alike. As those techniques changed over the decades (as did audiences who step by step were introduced to this), new and exiting ways of shooting film and presenting characters entered popular forms of entertainment. The simple, […]
The Essence of Film Noir: The Style and Themes of Cinema’s Dark Genre by Diana Royer (2022)
Part of the unique intensity of noir and neo-noir movies is rooted in the combination of masterful scripts, extraordinary directors and the skillful highlighting of the psychological aspects wherever a protagonist needs to take action. But often is sabotaged while trying, to simplify one of many film noir plots. By carefully investigating the genre, several […]
American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (2014)
What actually was the idea of Englishman Allen Lane during WWII found its way to the United States: the invention of a small, affordable book format, available almost anywhere where you could buy chewing gum and cigarettes. Lane, after unsuccessfully searching for small-sized books to read on his daily train rides, in 1935 founded Penguin […]
Houses of Noir: Dark Visions from Thirteen Film Studios by Ronald Schwartz (2014)
For the connoisseur of old wine, it is not impossible to determine origin, year and characteristics of a certain brand or region by taking a sample. The same goes for noir films, which due to lighting, editing, setting, or simply by their respective casts can be traced back to a particular studio or production year […]
Out of the Shadows: Expanding the Canon of Classic Film Noir by Gene D. Phillips (2011)
Since the last two years saw an enormous wave of reissues of vintage crime novels – mostly out of print and now hard to find hard-boiled mystery – often being the source document for movies of the film-noir genre, it is not at all surprising to witness a growing interest in the movies of that […]