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Film noir portraits
With its singular focus on the very best portrait photography of the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood film noir era, every page of this coffee-table volume is rich in brooding atmosphere. The portraits gathered here, of actors such as Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Gene Tierney, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Jack Palance, Joan Crawford and Richard Widmark, were taken by premier studio photographers such as Robert Coburn, Ernest Bachrach and A.L. \"Whitey\" Schafer. Their remarkable ability to exaggerate the play of shadow and light to dramatic effect is the reason that their work still has the same ability to arrest the viewer as it did in the 1940s. The photographs remain some of the most innovative and striking portraits in the history of cinema. Carefully curated, the photographs are taken from the collection of MPTV, one of the world's most exclusive archives of entertainment photography. The book includes many previously unseen images, including hitherto unpublished outtakes from The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957); and classic moments from films such as Gilda (1946), Double Indemnity (1944), The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and celebrated B-noirs such as Gun Crazy (1950) and The Hitch-Hiker (1953). Reel Art Press' exquisite print quality serves to emphasize the timeless power of the black-and-white studio portraiture.
Book
Film Noir and the Arts of Lighting
More than any other set of films from the classical era, the Hollywood film noir is known for its lighting: the cast shadows, the blinking street signs, the eyes sparkling in the darkness.Each effect is rich in symbolism, evoking a world of danger and doppelgangers.But what happens if we set aside the symbolism?.
eBook
Devotion
Garrett Bradley works across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, and cultural histories in the United States. Her collaborative and research-based approach to filmmaking is often inspired by the real-life stories of her protagonists. This book explores Bradley's work through the lens of devotion and features conversations with the artist and contributions from the likes of Ashley Clark, Arthur Jafa, Joy James, Tyler Mitchell, Kevin Quashie, and Claudia Rankine. This is the first volume in a new series of readers copublished with Lisson Gallery entitled Re:, which will respond to a number of its artists and themes past and present. Adopting archival material alongside newly shot footage, Bradley's films exist simultaneously in the past, present, and future, not only disrupting our perception of time, but also breaking down our preconceived ideas about objectivity, perspective, and truth-telling. These narratives unfold naturally in both feature-length and short form, revealing a multitude of individual and collective stories. The social, economic, and racial politics of everyday life--its joys, pleasures, and pains--are lyrically and intimately rendered on screen.
Book
The Mysterious Romance of Murder
From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade; Nick and Nora Charles to Nero
Wolfe and Archie Goodwin; Harry Lime to Gilda, Madeleine Elster,
and other femmes fatales-crime and crime solving in fiction and
film captivate us. Why do we keep returning to Agatha Christie's
ingenious puzzles and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled murder
mysteries? What do spy thrillers teach us, and what accounts for
the renewed popularity of morally ambiguous noirs? In The
Mysterious Romance of Murder , the poet and critic David Lehman
explores a wide variety of outstanding books and movies-some famous
(The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), some known mainly to
aficionados-with style, wit, and passion.
Lehman revisits the smoke-filled jazz clubs from the classic
noir films of the 1940s, the iconic set pieces that defined
Hitchcock's America, the interwar intrigue of Eric Ambler's best
fictions, and the intensity of attraction between Humphrey Bogart
and Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, Cary Grant and
Ingrid Bergman. He also considers the evocative elements of
noir-cigarettes, cocktails, wisecracks, and jazz standards-and
offers five original noir poems (including a pantoum inspired by
the 1944 film Laura) and ironic astrological profiles of Barbara
Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Graham Greene. Written by a
connoisseur with an uncanny feel for the language and mood of
mystery, espionage, and noir, The Mysterious Romance of
Murder will delight fans of the genre and newcomers alike.
eBook
Argentine Cinema
Argentine Cinema: From Noir to Neo-Noir examines the phenomenon of Argentine film noir. Beginning with definitions of film noir and its international iterations, the book presents a history of the development of film noir and neo-noir in Argentina (from the 1940s to the present), as well as a technical, aesthetic, and socio-historical analysis of such recent Argentine neo-noir films as The Aura, The Secret in Their Eyes, and The German Doctor. It considers the question of inscription of such classic noirs as Double Indemnity and The Third Man and looks forward to future scholarly work on other Latin American noir and neo-noir films, especially those produced in Mexico and Brazil.
eBook
Transcultural Appropriation and Aesthetic Breakthrough of Hollywood Film Noir in Contemporary Taiwan Suspense Thriller Films: A Case Study of Who Killed Cock Robin (2017)
The production of suspense thriller films has recently surged in Taiwan. These films adopt narrative techniques and visual aesthetics reminiscent of classic and neo-noir Hollywood cinema but also address social issues in Taiwan and represent transcultural aesthetic appropriation of film noir. This article employs a case study approach to examine the narrative and visual style of the Taiwanese suspense thriller Who Killed Cock Robin (2017), using film narratology as a textual analytical framework. This study considers themes, characters, visual style, and narrative structures, focusing on fundamental characteristics of classic film noir and neo-noir. This study reveals that the selected film both appropriates and deviates from the aesthetics of Hollywood film noir. It effectively incorporates aesthetic elements from classic Hollywood film noir and neo-noir, enriching the intricacies of storytelling and character depiction, while also localizing them through complex narrative strategies and nuanced Taiwanese cultural and social elements. The film brings attention to several prevalent issues in Taiwan’s media landscape, including truth manipulation, sensationalism, tabloidization, and conglomerate and political control. The film portrays Yi-Chi as a morally compromised character embodying the detective archetype with classic noir traits, while also reflecting the “Eastern mentality” in Taiwan journalism. Despite his moral compromises, Yi-Chi partly retains traditional virtues, presenting a nuanced view of human nature that blends pessimism and optimism in Taiwan. This approach creates a distinct cross-cultural narrative that resonates emotionally with Taiwanese audiences, while also contributing to the broader global cinematic discourse on film noir.
Journal Article
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands
Consider the usual view of film noir: endless rainy nights populated by down-at-the-heel boxers, writers, and private eyes stumbling toward inescapable doom while stalked by crooked cops and cheating wives in a neon-lit urban jungle. But a new generation of writers is pushing aside the fog of cigarette smoke surrounding classic noir scholarship. In Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir , Robert Miklitsch curates a bold collection of essays that reassesses the genre's iconic style, history, and themes. Contributors analyze the oft-overlooked female detective and little-examined aspects of filmmaking like love songs and radio aesthetics, discuss the significance of the producer and women's pulp fiction, and investigate topics as disparate as Disney noir and the Fifties heist film, B-movie back projection and blacklisted British directors. At the same time the writers' collective reconsideration shows the impact of race and gender, history and sexuality, technology and transnationality on the genre. As bracing as a stiff drink, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands writes the future of noir scholarship in lipstick and chalk lines for film fans and scholars alike. Contributors are Krin Gabbard, Philippa Gates, Julie Grossman, Robert Miklitsch, Robert Murphy, Mark Osteen, Vivian Sobchack, Andrew Spicer, J. P. Telotte, and Neil Verma.
eBook
Nordic Genre Film
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.
eBook
In a Lonely Street
Taking issue with many orthodox views of Film Noir, Frank Krutnik argues for a reorientation of this compulsively engaging area of Hollywood cultural production. Krutnik recasts the films within a generic framework and draws on recent historical and theoretical research to examine both the diversity of film noir and its significance within American popular culture of the 1940s. He considers classical Hollywood cinema, debates on genre, and the history of the emergence of character in film noir, focusing on the hard-boiled' crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain as well as the popularisationof Freudian psychoanalysis; and the social and cultural upheavals of the 1940s.
The core of this book however concerns the complex representationof masculinity in the noir tough' thriller, and where and how gender interlocks with questions of genre. Analysing in detail major thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and The Killers, alongside lesser known but nonetheless crucial films as Stranger on the Third Floor, Pitfall and Dead Reckoning Krutnik has produced a provocative and highly readable study of one of Hollywood most perennially fascinating groups of films.
eBook
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