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"Film noir -- United States -- History and criticism"
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Driven to Darkness
From its earliest days, the American film industry has attracted European artists. With the rise of Hitler, filmmakers of conscience in Germany and other countries, particularly those of Jewish origin, found it difficult to survive and fledùfor their work and their livesùto the United States. Some had trouble adapting to Hollywood, but many were celebrated for their cinematic contributions, especially to the dark shadows of film noir.
Driven to Darknessexplores the influence of Jewish TmigrT directors and the development of this genre. While filmmakers such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Edward G. Ulmer have been acknowledged as crucial to the noir canon, the impact of their Jewishness on their work has remained largely unexamined until now. Through lively and original analyses of key films, Vincent Brook penetrates the darkness, shedding new light on this popular film form and the artists who helped create it.
eBook
Film noir : light and shadow
A new anthology from Silver and Ursini, longtime expert commentators of the noir movement. This book focuses on the visual style of the classic period through essays that consider individual films, directors, stylistic elements, or subgroups of movies in the film noir style. There are updated versions of key articles and original essays from other experts in the field.
Book
Unless the threat of death is behind them : hard-boiled fiction and film noir
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.
eBook
Nightmare Alley
Classic film noir offers more than pesky private eyes and beautiful bad girls—it explores the quest for the not-so-attainable American dream.
Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL
Desperate young lovers on the lam ( They Live by Night ), a cynical con man making a fortune as a mentalist ( Nightmare Alley ), a penniless pregnant girl mistaken for a wealthy heiress ( No Man of Her Own ), a wounded veteran who has forgotten his own name ( Somewhere in the Night )—this gallery of film noir characters challenges the stereotypes of the wise-cracking detective and the alluring femme fatale. Despite their differences, they all have something in common: a belief in self-reinvention. Nightmare Alley is a thorough examination of how film noir disputes this notion at the heart of the American Dream.
Central to many of these films, Mark Osteen argues, is the story of an individual trying, by dint of hard work or, more often, illicit enterprises, to overcome his or her origins and achieve material success. In the wake of World War II, the noir genre tested the dream of upward mobility and the ideas of individualism, liberty, equality, and free enterprise that accompany it.
Employing an impressive array of theoretical perspectives (including psychoanalysis, art history, feminism, and music theory) and combining close reading with original primary source research, Nightmare Alley proves both the diversity of classic noir and its potency. This provocative and wide-ranging study revises and refreshes our understanding of noir's characters, themes, and cultural significance.
eBook
The Maltese Falcon to Body of Lies
Film noir is by definition dark, but not, this book argues, desperate. Examining twenty-eight great noir films from the earliest examples of the genre, including The Maltese Falcon , The Big Sleep , and Out of the Past , to such twenty-first-century spy films as The Good Shepherd , Syriana , and The Bourne Ultimatum , this study explores the representations of trust and commitment that noir and spy films propose. Through thorough examination, von Hallberg provides insights into the cultural history of film and our cinematic experience with the concept of trust.
eBook