The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s RobertMiklitsch. University of Illinois Press. 2017.

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-245
Author(s):  
Daniel P. Murphy
Author(s):  
James Naremore

The term ‘film noir’ originated with French film critics during the 1930s, but it soon became associated with American films in the mid-1940s. ‘The idea of film noir’ explains the strong influence of the Surrealists on French attitudes toward the new American films. The first and most important book on film noir was A Panorama of the American Film Noir: 1941–1953, compiled by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton. They define noir in terms of five affective qualities typical of Surrealist art: oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. Film noir continued through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and forms of the genre have spread all around the world.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Fay

Postwar American film noir explores an artificial world that does not foster human happiness and growth, but leads to a kind of human incapacity to act and respond. Beyond merely depicting these negative environments, noir lays bare the attachments to bad living and unsustainable striving that underwrite the accumulating culture of the Anthropocene at midcentury. Positioning itself as the genre that critiques postwar peaceful prosperity, noir gives us the characters, places, and scripts for human expiration as the counter to both nuclear survivalism and consumer capitalism. The hospitality of film noir is rental property. Indeed, impermanent dwelling of the individual and humanity as a whole is one of noir’s lessons for the Anthropocene. American noir is an ecological genre that teaches us in the spirit of Roy Scranton’s book how “to die in the Anthropocene.”


2021 ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Anna Marta Marini

In his ongoing comic book series Sonambulo, versatile artist Rafael Navarro has been able to channel his Mexican American cultural heritage by creating a unique blend of narrative genres. In his work, Navarro exploits classic American film noir as a fundamental reference and hybridizes it with elements distinctive to a shared Chicanx heritage, such as lucha libre cinema, horror folktales, and border-crossing metaphors; the construction of an oneiric dimension helps bring the narrative together, marking it with a peculiar ambiance. Drawing heavily on a diverse range of film genres, as well as ethnocultural pivots, this comic book series carves out a definite space in the panorama of the Mexican American production of popular culture, adding a powerful voice to the expression of US ethnic minorities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann McClellan

Philip R. Brogdon is an avid Sherlock Holmes aficionado and the first Black American ever inducted into the exclusive – and predominantly White – Sherlock Holmes society, the Baker Street Irregulars. His small monograph, Sherlock in Black (1995), brings a wealth of archival information and insight into the Black history of Sherlock Holmes fandom, ranging from famous fans of colour to Black fan creators and a history of both professional and amateur fan art, film and music. This article argues that Brogdon’s Sherlock in Black archive provides an important counter-history to White establishment fan narratives popularized by the Baker Street Irregulars and raises important questions about the roles race and identity play in collecting, fandom and identity. How does Brogdon define Black Sherlockian fandom? What did it mean to him, and to other fans, to see this long history of Black Sherlockians in American film and media? What kinds of activities and creations are included? Brogdon’s Black Sherlock Holmes archive illuminates how fans of colour construct their own fan identities and how they see themselves in relation to large, often primarily White, cultural constructs.


Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin

The association of woman with Paris and death was a popular trope in nineteenth-century French culture and finds expression in cinematic representations of the Parisienne as femme fatale. This chapter considers la Parisienne as femme fatale in Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève(1939) and Le quai des brumes(1938), and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960). These films can be considered examples of French film noir and their female protagonists read as femme fatales. However, the femme fatale of French film noir is different from the femme fatale of American film noir; she comes from a different cultural tradition and is informed by a different cultural figure. This chapter argues that the development of the femme fatale as a cinematicarchetype passed through a cultural tradition not usually associated with the noir genre: nineteenth-century French culture and the tradition of the filles d’Eve embodied in the type la Parisienne. The French version of this archetype grew out of the popular nineteenth-century trope of the association of woman with the city and death. Indeed, there is an aesthetic and narrative overdetermination of the femme fatale by the figure of la Parisienne, particularly through iconographical motifs associated with the type, like fashion, ambiguity, sexuality and danger


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