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Author: John Grant Publisher: Limelight Editions ISBN: 9781557838315 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 765
Book Description
Offers a reference guide to film noir, extending from relevant films from before the genre was established to contemporary neonoirs and other types of film derived from the genre.
Author: John Grant Publisher: Limelight Editions ISBN: 9781557838315 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 765
Book Description
Offers a reference guide to film noir, extending from relevant films from before the genre was established to contemporary neonoirs and other types of film derived from the genre.
Author: Paul Meehan Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 9781476672359 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This critical study traces the common origins of film noir and science fiction films, identifying the many instances in which the two have merged to form a distinctive subgenre known as Tech-Noir. From the German Expressionist cinema of the late 1920s to the present-day cyberpunk movement, the book examines more than 100 films in which the common noir elements of crime, mystery, surrealism, and human perversity intersect with the high technology of science fiction. The author also details the hybrid subgenre's considerable influences on contemporary music, fashion, and culture.
Author: Nicholas Christopher Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1439137617 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
Film noir is more than a cinematic genre. It is an essential aspect of American culture. Along with the cowboy of the Wild West, the denizen of the film noir city is at the very center of our mythological iconography. Described as the style of an anxious victor, film noir began during the post-war period, a strange time of hope and optimism mixed with fear and even paranoia. The shadow of this rich and powerful cinematic style can now be seen in virtually every artistic medium. The spectacular success of recent neo-film noirs is only the tip of an iceberg. In the dead-on, nocturnal jazz of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, the chilled urban landscapes of Edward Hopper, and postwar literary fiction from Nelson Algren and William S. Burroughs to pulp masters like Horace McCoy, we find an unsettling recognition of the dark hollowness beneath the surface of the American Dream. Acclaimed novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher explores the cultural identity of film noir in a seamless, elegant, and enchanting work of literary prose. Examining virtually the entire catalogue of film noir, Christopher identifies the central motif as the urban labyrinth, a place infested with psychosis, anxiety, and existential dread in which the noir hero embarks on a dangerously illuminating quest. With acute sensitivity, he shows how technical devices such as lighting, voice over, and editing tempo are deployed to create the film noir world. Somewhere in the Night guides us through the architecture of this imaginary world, be it shot in New York or Los Angeles, relating its elements to the ancient cultural archetypes that prefigure it. Finally, Christopher builds an explanation of why film noir not only lives on but is currently enjoying a renaissance. Somewhere in the Night can be appreciated as a lucid introduction to a fundamental style of American culture, and also as a guide to film noir's heyday. Ultimately, though, as the work of a bold talent adeptly manipulating poetic cadence and metaphor, it is itself a superb aesthetic artifact.
Author: William Hare Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 0786490292 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
During the Great Depression, pulp fiction writers created a new, distinctly American detective story, one that stressed the development of fascinating, often bizarre characters rather than the twists and turns of clever plots. This new crime fiction adapted brilliantly to the screen, birthing a cinematic genre that French cinema intellectuals following World War II christened "film noir." Set on dark streets late at night, in cheap hotels and bars, and populated by the dangerous people who frequented these locales, these films introduced a new antihero, a tough, brooding, rebellious loner, embodied by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. This volume provides a detailed exploration of film noir, tracing its evolution, the influence of such legendary writers as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and the films that propelled this dark genre to popularity in the mid-20th century.
Author: Eddie Muller Publisher: Running Press Adult ISBN: 076249896X Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
This revised and expanded edition of Eddie Muller's Dark City is a film noir lover's bible, taking readers on a tour of the urban landscape of the grim and gritty genre in a definitive, highly illustrated volume. Dark Cityexpands with new chapters and a fresh collection of restored photos that illustrate the mythic landscape of the imagination. It's a place where the men and women who created film noir often find themselves dangling from the same sinister heights as the silver-screen avatars to whom they gave life. Eddie Muller, host of Turner Classic Movies' Noir Alley, takes readers on a spellbinding trip through treacherous terrain: Hollywood in the post-World War II years, where art, politics, scandal, style -- and brilliant craftsmanship -- produced a new approach to moviemaking, and a new type of cultural mythology.
Author: Andrew Spicer Publisher: Scarecrow Press ISBN: 0810873788 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 533
Book Description
Film noir_literally 'black cinema'_is the label customarily given to a group of black and white American films, mostly crime thrillers, made between 1940 and 1959. Today there is considerable dispute about what are the shared features that classify a noir film, and therefore which films should be included in this category. These problems are partly caused because film noir is a retrospective label that was not used in the 1940s or 1950s by the film industry as a production category and therefore its existence and features cannot be established through reference to trade documents. The Historical Dictionary of Film Noir is a comprehensive guide that ranges from 1940 to present day neo-noir. It consists of a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, a filmography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on every aspect of film noir and neo-noir, including key films, personnel (actors, cinematographers, composers, directors, producers, set designers, and writers), themes, issues, influences, visual style, cycles of films (e.g. amnesiac noirs), the representation of the city and gender, other forms (comics/graphic novels, television, and videogames), and noir's presence in world cinema. It is an essential reference work for all those interested in this important cultural phenomenon.
Author: Mark T. Conard Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813171709 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
A drifter with no name and no past, driven purely by desire, is convinced by a beautiful woman to murder her husband. A hard-drinking detective down on his luck becomes involved with a gang of criminals in pursuit of a priceless artifact. The stories are at once romantic, pessimistic, filled with anxiety and a sense of alienation, and they define the essence of film noir. Noir emerged as a prominent American film genre in the early 1940s, distinguishable by its use of unusual lighting, sinister plots, mysterious characters, and dark themes. From The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), films from this classic period reflect an atmosphere of corruption and social decay that attracted such accomplished directors as John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles. The Philosophy of Film Noir is the first volume to focus exclusively on the philosophical underpinnings of these iconic films. Drawing on the work of diverse thinkers, from the French existentialist Albert Camus to the Frankurt school theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the volume connects film noir to the philosophical questions of a modern, often nihilistic, world. Opening with an examination of what constitutes noir cinema, the book interprets the philosophical elements consistently present in the films—themes such as moral ambiguity, reason versus passion, and pessimism. The contributors to the volume also argue that the essence and elements of noir have fundamentally influenced movies outside of the traditional noir period. Neo-noir films such as Pulp Fiction (1994), Fight Club (1999), and Memento (2000) have reintroduced the genre to a contemporary audience. As they assess the concepts present in individual films, the contributors also illuminate and explore the philosophical themes that surface in popular culture. A close examination of one of the most significant artistic movements of the twentieth century, The Philosophy of Film Noir reinvigorates an intellectual discussion at the intersection of popular culture and philosophy.
Author: Lee Clark Mitchell Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192844768 Category : Detective and mystery films Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
The argument of Noir Fiction and Film is curiously counterintuitive: that in a century of hard-boiled fiction and detective films, characteristics that at first seemed trivial swelled in importance, flourishing into crucial aspects of the genre. Among these are aimless descriptions of people and places irrelevant to plot, along with detectives consisting of little more than sparkling dialogue and flippant attitudes. What weaves together such features, however, seems to be a paradox: that a genre rooted in solving a mystery, structured around the gathering of clues, must do so by misdirecting our attention, even withholding information we think we need to generate the suspense we also desire. Yet successful noir stories and films enhance that suspense through passing diversions (descriptive details and eccentric perspectives) rather than depending on the center pieces of plot alone (suspected motives or incriminating traces). As the greatest practitioners of the genre have realized, the how of detective fiction (its stylistic detours) draws us in more insistently than the what or the who (its linear advance). And the achievement of recent film noir is to make that how become the tantalizing object of our entire attention, shorn of any pretense of reading for the plot, immersing us in the diversionary delight that has animated the genre from the beginning.
Author: John Grant
Author: John Grant
Author: Paul Meehan
Author: Nicholas Christopher
Author: William Hare
Author: 
Author: Barry Gifford
Author: Eddie Muller
Author: Andrew Spicer
Author: Mark T. Conard
Author: Lee Clark Mitchell