More than night Naremore, James
2008., 2008, c2008., 2008-01-14
eBook
"Film noir" evokes memories of stylish, cynical, black-and-white movies from the 1940s and '50s—melodramas about private eyes, femmes fatales, criminal gangs, and lovers on the run. James Naremore's ...prize-winning book discusses these pictures, but also shows that the central term is more complex and paradoxical than we realize. It treats noir as a term in criticism, as an expression of artistic modernism, as a symptom of Hollywood censorship and politics, as a market strategy, as an evolving style, and as an idea that circulates through all the media. This new and expanded edition of More Than Night contains an additional chapter on film noir in the twenty-first century.
Examines the influence of noir on global cinema Early audiences were drawn to the experimental lighting effects, oblique camera angles, distorted compositions, and shifting points-of-view of film ...noir.International noir continues to appeal on a global scale, because no other cinematic form has merged style and genre to effect a vision of the disturbing consequences of modernity. In fact, various national cinemas now boast an indigenous expression of the genre and other cinematic genres continue to rely upon film noir's narrative structure and visual style, as evidenced by noir Westerns and noir Science Fiction. This collection of essays examines noir's influence on film narrative and technique in the ceinematic traditions of Britain, France, Scandinavia, Japan, China and Korea.
Nordic Genre Film Gustafsson, Tommy; Kääpä, Pietari; Hakola, Outi ...
05/2015
eBook, Book
A transnational comparative approach to contemporary popular Nordic genre film. Nordic Genre Film offers a transnational approach to studying contemporary genre production in Nordic cinema. It ...discusses a range of internationally renowned examples, from Nordic noir such as the television show The Bridge and films like Insomnia to high concept 'video generation' productions such as Iron Sky . Other contributions focus on road movies, the horror film, autobiographical films, historical epics and pornography. These are contextualized by discussion of their position in their respective national film and media histories as well as their influence on other Nordic countries and beyond. By highlighting similarities and differences between the countries, the book combines industrial perspectives and in depth discussion of specific films, while also offering historical perspectives on each genre as comes to production, distribution and reception of popular contemporary genre film.
The first comprehensive collection on the subject of Hong Kong neo-noir cinema, this book examines the way Hong Kong has developed its own unique and culturally specific version of the neo-noir ...genre, while at the same time drawing on and adapting existing international noir cinemas.
How do we distinguish what people do from what merely happens to them? Looking at several film noirs--including close readings of three classics of the genre, Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Orson ...Welles's The Lady from Shanghai, and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past--Pippin reveals the ways in which these works explore the declining credibility of individuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of such limitations.
<!CDATAA Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Flourishing in the United States during the 1940s and 50s, the bleak, violent genre of filmmaking known as film noir reflected the attitudes of writers and ...auteur directors influenced by the events of the turbulent mid-twentieth century. Films such as Force of Evil , Night and the City , Double Indemnity , Laura , The Big Heat , The Killers , Kiss Me Deadly and, more recently, Chinatown and The Grifters are indelibly American. Yet the sources of this genre were found in Germany and France and imported to Hollywood by emigré filmmakers, who developed them and allowed a vibrant genre to flourish. Andrew Dickos’s Street with No Name traces the film noir genre back to its roots in German Expressionist cinema and the French cinema of the interwar years. Dickos describes the development of the film noir in America from 1941 through the 1970s and examines how this development expresses a modern cinema. Dickos examines notable directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Samuel Fuller, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, Anthony Mann and others. He also charts the genre’s influence on such celebrated postwar French filmmakers as Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard. Addressing the aesthetic, cultural, political, and social concerns depicted in the genre, Street with No Name demonstrates how the film noir generates a highly expressive, raw, and violent mood as it exposes the ambiguities of modern postwar society.>
Early in the twentieth century a new character type emerged in the crime novels of American writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: the “hard-boiled” detective, most famously ...exemplified by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Unlike the analytical detectives of nineteenth-century fiction, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s Inspector Dupin, the new detectives encountered cases not as intricate logical puzzles but as stark challenges of manhood. In the stories of these characters and their criminal opposites, John T. Irwin explores the tension within ideas of American masculinity between subordination and independence and, for the man who becomes “his own boss,” the conflict between professional codes and personal desires. He shows how, within different works of hard-boiled fiction, the professional either overcomes the personal or is overcome by it, ending in ruinous relationships or in solitary integrity, and how within the genre all notions of manly independence are ultimately revealed to be illusions subordinate to fate itself.
Tracing the stylistic development of the genre, Irwin demonstrates the particular influence of the novel of manners, especially the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He goes on to argue that, from the time of World War II, when hard-boiled fiction began to appear on the screen in film noir just as women entered the workforce in large numbers, many of its themes came to extend to female empowerment. Finally, he discusses how these themes persist in contemporary dramatic series on television, representing the conflicted lives of Americans into the twenty-first century.
The story follows Henry Wong, a Chinese American Silicon Valley techie and true crime enthusiast, as he works to solve the decades-old cold case of his father George’s mysterious death. Along the ...way, he ends up discovering a great deal about the dark recesses of his family history—and the fallibility of his own mind. The memories that Henry engages in these sessions—all of which seem to connect to the mystery of George’s death—get staged repeatedly across a changing landscape of meanings and contexts depending on the evidence that has been uncovered and retroactively rebuilt in order to support each ongoing theory posited by the investigation.
The term "film noir" still conjures images of a uniquely American malaise: hard-boiled detectives, fatal women, and the shadowy hells of urban life. But from its beginnings, film noir has been an ...international phenomenon, and its stylistic icons have migrated across the complex geo-political terrain of world cinema. This book traces film noir’s emergent connection to European cinema, its movement within a cosmopolitan culture of literary and cinematic translation, and its postwar consolidation in the US, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
The authors examine how film noir crosses national boundaries, speaks to diverse international audiences, and dramatizes local crimes and the crises of local spaces in the face of global phenomena like world-wide depression, war, political occupation, economic and cultural modernization, decolonization, and migration. This fresh study of film noir and global culture also discusses film noir’s heterogeneous style and revises important scholarly debates about this perpetually alluring genre.
Justus Nieland is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University and the author of Feeling Modern: The Eccentriticies of Public Life (2008).
Jennifer Fay is Associate Professor of English and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University and is the author of Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Re-education of Postwar Germany (2008).
"Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland have written an ideal text for students of this fascinating category of films. They've lucidly synthesized recent critical debates and at the same time added an original spin to the topic, viewing noir in the context of internationalism and globalization. Their book deserves a very wide audience." - James Naremore author of More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts
