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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 The book includes many previously unseen images, including hitherto unpublished outtakes from The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957); and classic moments from films such as Gilda (1946), Double Indemnity (1944),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
Siren City
Hailed for its dramatic expressionist visuals, film noir is one of the most prominent genres in Hollywood cinema. Yet, despite the \"boom\" in sound studies, the role of sonic effects and source music in classic American noir has not received the attention it deserves.Siren Cityengagingly illustrates how sound tracks in 1940s film noir are often just as compelling as the genre's vaunted graphics.Focusing on a wide range of celebrated and less well known films and offering an introductory discussion of film sound, Robert Miklitsch mobilizes the notion of audiovisuality to investigate period sound technologies such as the radio and jukebox, phonograph and Dictaphone, popular American music such as \"hot\" black jazz, and \"big numbers\" featuring iconic performers such as Lauren Bacall, Veronica Lake, and Rita Hayworth.Siren Cityresonates with the sounds and source music of classic American noir-gunshots and sirens, swing riffs and canaries. Along with the proverbial private eye and femme fatale, these audiovisuals are central to the noir aesthetic and one important reason the genre reverberates with audiences around the world.
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
Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions
In the words of Richard Maltby . . . \"Maximum Movies--Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked.\" One of these worlds comprises a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies--Kiss Me Deadly, Shock Corridor, Fixed Bayonets!, I Walked with a Zombie, The Lineup, Terror in a Texas Town, Ride Lonesome--pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by the studios' B-divisions and fly-by-night independents. The other is occupied by critics, intellectuals, cinephiles, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Manny Farber, and Lawrence Alloway, who championed the cause of these movies and incited the cultural guardians of the day by attacking a rigorously policed canon of tasteful, rarified, and ossified art objects. Against the legitimate, and in defense of the illegitimate, in an insolent and unruly manner, they agitated for the recognition of lurid sensational crime stories, war pictures, fast-paced Westerns, thrillers, and gangster melodramas were claimed as examples of the true, the real, and the authentic in contemporary culture--the foundation upon which modern film studies sits.
eBook
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
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
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
The Fall of Virtuous Men: Mexican Film Noir, and the Crisis of Values in the Postrevolutionary State, 1950–1959
International reconsideration of Mexican film noir is a recent phenomenon. For decades, Mexican film criticism tended to dismiss the importance of this tradition and even to deny its existence, often citing the presence of melodramatic elements in would-be noir films and the lack of a crime novel tradition for screen adaptations. By comparing two Mexican films to similar American productions and examining the local political and economic conditions of the former, this article argues that Mexican film noir had its own pessimistic viewpoints, which were borrowed from journalism and the illustrated press. These viewpoints were based on existing social ailments and delivered relevant criticism of the institutions, classism, and sexual norms of the postrevolutionary Mexican state of the 1940s and 1950s. A revalorização do filme mexicano noir é um fenômeno recente. Durante décadas, no entanto, os críticos tendiam a descartar a importância desta tradição ou mesmo a negar sua existência. Muitas vezes, as razões citadas para esta exclusão foram a presença de elementos do melodrama nos filmes que poderiam ser reconhecidos como parte do gênero noir do filme e a falta de uma tradição mexicana de romance policial para sua adaptação. Comparando dois filmes mexicanos com filmes americanos similares e examinando as condições políticas e econômicas em que os primeiros foram produzidos, argumenta-se que o filme mexicano noir tinha suas próprias fontes para apresentar perspectivas pessimistas que eram livremente extraídas do jornalismo e da imprensa ilustrada. Essas perspectivas refletiam problemas sociais prevalecentes e incluíam críticas relevantes às instituições, ao classismo e às normas de gênero do Estado mexicano pós-revolução nos anos 1940 e 1950.
Journal Article