The Stuff that Dreams are Made of: Os reflexos do noir

Recensão do livro Espelhos do Film Noir (2019), editado por Jeffrey Childs para a Documenta.

L’univers imaginaire de H. P. Lovecraft au prisme du cinéma d’animation

Cet article examine un corpus de films d’animation et présente divers modes d’adaptation et de réécriture. Dans ces variations sur des motifs lovecraftiens, l’hybridation générique est fréquente associant fantasy, horreur et film noir comme dans History of the Necronomicon (Hideke Takayama, 1987). La dimension intertextuelle est marquée ainsi que les déclinaisons parodiques. Les techniques d’animation sont variées : marionnettes en argile, pâte à modeler, crayonnages, pastel, numérique. The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories (Ryo Shinagawa, 2008) exploite un procédé nouveau, le « ga-nimé », une forme d’animation lente en 3-D utilisant des matériaux mixtes et reposant sur des plans fixes. Dans The Night Ocean (Maria Lorenzo Hernandez, 2015), le récit subjectif et potentiellement non fiable de Lovecraft et Barlow est transposé sous la forme du carnet de voyage d’un artiste peintre mélancolique dont les oeuvres sont animées par une grande variété de procédés visuels et sonores, avec une partition musicale envoûtante. Ces deux films permettent de montrer que le cinéma d’animation se prête à la mise en images et en sons d’un imaginaire qui souvent résiste à la transposition à l’écran.

Gothic Noir Filmic Male Gaze: Gender Stereotyping in Margaret Atwood’s “The Freeze-Dried Groom”

Stereotyping has been crucial in artistic representations, especially cinema, in the construction of gender paradigms. Males and females have been portrayed by means of simplified unrealistic clichés with the purpose of controlling and constraining them into patriarchal roles and conventions, promoting societal normative ideologies. Noir women are projections of male anxieties about female sexuality and female independence. In “The Freeze-Dried Groom,” Atwood unveils gender stereotyping through a typically film noir male gaze in three of its stock characters: the femme attrapée, the “detective” and the femme fatale. Hence, Atwood depicts a femme fatale to reflect not just on this character in film noir, but also on female identity, gender dynamics and feminism. She exposes and questions the marriage-family institution, and the patriarchal society as a whole.

“You Won’t Even Know Who You Are Anymore”: Bakthinian Polyphony and the Challenge to the Ludic Subject in Disco Elysium

When approaches to the notion of the ‘self’ as it exists in the game have been discussed in game studies – for instance, through work in existential ludology or through discussions of agency – the ‘self’ in question, explicitly or implicitly, has tended to be the rational, stable, unified and coherent self of the humanist tradition. By fracturing the ludic subject into a set of contrasting and conflicting voices, each with their own apparent motivations and goals, Disco Elysium presents a challenge to this singular and unified understanding of selfhood. That this challenge is situated within the representation of a figure who, at face value, seems to represent the very locus of the authoritative, self-possessed subjectivity of humanism – not only a straight, middle-aged white man, but also a figure of police and colonial authority – strengthens the game’s critical slant. Drawing on theories of ludic and virtual subjectivity, this paper will approach Disco Elysium with a focus on this undermining of stable and unitary understanding of subjectivity. First, the game will be considered in relation to the tradition of film noir, and the way the genre both established and subverted the figure of the detective as the avatar of stable, rational, authoritative masculine selfhood. Next, its treatment of the theme of amnesia will be considered, drawing a parallel to Jayemanne’s (2017) reading of Planescape: Torment to examine how the loss of memory creates structures of discontinuity and rupture in the represented ludic self. Finally, Bakhtinian notions of polyphony will be invoked to address the game’s plurality of different voices not (as it is usually present) in a dialogue between individual subjects but within a single, fragmented subjectivity.

Investigating Nordic Noir

<p>Scandinavian crime films and television series have become popular in recent years. This thesis explores some of the key texts in ‘Nordic noir’ through a discussion of detectives, the environment, and visual style. The emphasis in the project is on textual analysis. The first chapter examines the figures of Wallander and Lund in Wallander and Forbrydelsen respectively. I argue that the conflicts Nordic detectives often have between work and the domestic sphere are an indication of how gender stereotypes are challenged in the Scandinavian crime genre. The second chapter considers the role of the natural and built environments in Nordic noir. Features such as forests and water play a crucial role in Forbrydelsen because of the ways in which they create uncertainty, anticipation, and suspense. The urban spaces of Bron/Broen develop a sense of anonymity that recalls the function of the city in classic film noir. Rather than developing links between Sweden and Denmark, the series suggests that the Øresund bridge that spans the two countries is ultimately a disconnecting, centrifugal force that functions as what Marc Augé would call a ‘non-place’. The final chapter considers the role of colour and light in the films Insomnia and Jar City. My analysis demonstrates that Nordic noir encompasses more than naturalism and realism. Like classic and neo-noir, it includes a range of expressive aesthetic strategies that serve both narrative and thematic functions.</p>

Investigating Nordic Noir

<p>Scandinavian crime films and television series have become popular in recent years. This thesis explores some of the key texts in ‘Nordic noir’ through a discussion of detectives, the environment, and visual style. The emphasis in the project is on textual analysis. The first chapter examines the figures of Wallander and Lund in Wallander and Forbrydelsen respectively. I argue that the conflicts Nordic detectives often have between work and the domestic sphere are an indication of how gender stereotypes are challenged in the Scandinavian crime genre. The second chapter considers the role of the natural and built environments in Nordic noir. Features such as forests and water play a crucial role in Forbrydelsen because of the ways in which they create uncertainty, anticipation, and suspense. The urban spaces of Bron/Broen develop a sense of anonymity that recalls the function of the city in classic film noir. Rather than developing links between Sweden and Denmark, the series suggests that the Øresund bridge that spans the two countries is ultimately a disconnecting, centrifugal force that functions as what Marc Augé would call a ‘non-place’. The final chapter considers the role of colour and light in the films Insomnia and Jar City. My analysis demonstrates that Nordic noir encompasses more than naturalism and realism. Like classic and neo-noir, it includes a range of expressive aesthetic strategies that serve both narrative and thematic functions.</p>

Noir Fiction and Film

The argument of Noir Fiction and Film is curiously counterintuitive: that in a century of hard-boiled fiction and detective films, characteristics that at first seemed trivial swelled in importance, flourishing into crucial aspects of the genre. Among these are aimless descriptions of people and places irrelevant to plot, along with detectives consisting of little more than sparkling dialogue and flippant attitudes. What weaves together such features, however, seems to be a paradox: that a genre rooted in solving a mystery, structured around the gathering of clues, must do so by misdirecting our attention, even withholding information we think we need to generate the suspense we also desire. Yet successful noir stories and films enhance that suspense through passing diversions (descriptive details and eccentric perspectives) rather than depending on the centerpieces of plot alone (suspected motives or incriminating traces). As the most accomplished practitioners have realized, the “how” of detective fiction (its stylistic detours) draws us in more insistently than the “what” or the “who” (its linear advance). The achievement of recent film noir is to make that “how” become the tantalizing object of our entire attention, shorn of any pretense of reading for the plot, immersing us in the diversionary delight that has animated the genre from the beginning.