Film Noir

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Luhr
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Black Film ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
Aesthetic Distance

Film noir is a term coined by French critics in 1946 to describe what they considered an emerging and exciting trend in Hollywood films—one that signaled a new maturity in American cinema. The term translates into English as “black film,” and the darkness to which it refers applies both to the grim themes and events in many of these movies, as well as to their dark look. Many of them deal with doomed characters entangled in immoral and/or criminal activities that go horribly wrong. Such characters lose their psychological mooring and become increasingly desperate, and the depiction of that desperation can at times destabilize the traditional securities and aesthetic distance of the viewer from the events of the film. The cinematography of many of these movies often features images crisscrossed with ominous shadows and filled with dark, mysterious spaces. This article explores the origins of the genre in the 1940s, major influences upon it, its development and many transformations, its intersections with other genres, its place in Hollywood history as well as postwar American culture, its frequent bouts with industry censorship, reasons for the difficulties that critics encounter with defining it, its ongoing popularity, and its extensive influence upon multiple media.

scholarly journals There’s No Nostalgia Like Hollywood Nostalgia

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
American Literature ◽  
American Culture ◽  
National Cultures ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Wide Range

This essay argues that the complexities of the nostalgic impulse in Hollywood cinema are inadequately described by Svetlana Boym’s particular description of Hollywood as “both induc[ing] nostalgia and offer[ing] a tranquilizer” and her highly influential general distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. Instead, it contends that Hollywood departs in important ways from the models of both the restorative nostalgia established by the heritage cinema and Great Britain and the reflective nostalgia commonly found in American literature. Using a wide range of examples from American cinema, American literature, and American culture, it considers the reasons why nostalgia occupies a different place and seeks different kinds of expressions in American culture than it does in other national cultures, examines the leading Hollywood genres in which restorative nostalgia appears and the distinctive ways those genres inflect it, and concludes by urging a closer analysis of the more complex, multi-laminated nostalgia Hollywood films offer as an alternative to Boym’s highly influential categorical dichotomy.

Screening Europe in Australasia

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie K. Allen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
World War ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Dramatic Shift

This book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as always having dominated global film culture through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century. Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history—and its implications for cross-cultural exchange—was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, and brings it vividly to life. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions.

The (Asian) American Dream

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shilpa S. Davé
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Dream ◽  
American Culture ◽  
National Identities ◽  
South Asian Americans ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Film Comedy

This chapter focuses on the film comedy Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), an alternative to the immigrant journey often seen in Hollywood films where the old country is full of hardships, but the new country of America offers freedom and opportunity. Because the film is a stoner comedy, it is not readily recognizable as an Asian American story. However, within the genre of the stoner comedy, these films create a new narrative that normalizes Asian Americans and South Asian Americans as a central part of American culture and in the process redefines the boundaries of American regional, cultural, and national identities.

Seduction and Mutually Assured Destruction

2017 ◽  
pp. 90-111
Author(s):  
Ana Cabral Martins
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Pulp Fiction ◽  
David Fincher ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Cinematic Adaptation

In cinema, the most prevalent representation of the figure of the seductress has been the femme fatale or the “vamp”. This chapter will explore the femme fatale in various incarnations in American cinema throughout its history. This chapter will also overview several definitions of femme fatale, and its connection with sex, seduction and destruction, in cinema's history, principally the American silent film's “vamp”, personified by the actress Theda Bara; and the 1940s filmnoir's femme fatale, personified by actresses such as Rita Hayworth and Barbara Stanwyck. In an attempt to trace a connection between different embodiments of the femme fatale in American cinema, this chapter will focus, in particular, on David Fincher's cinematic adaptation of the pulp fiction novel Gone Girl (2012), by Gillian Flynn. Not only does Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) offer one of the most recent interpretations of the traditional film noir trope, it also provides a modern update of the femme fatale.

‘The Blackest Disney Movie of All Time!’: A Goofy Movie and the Production of ‘Film Blackness’

Animation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 126-140
Author(s):  
A. Joseph Dial
Keyword(s):  
Black Music ◽  
Black Film ◽  
Black Representation ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
High Regard ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Disney films have a distinct way of always feeling in-time, a sensation the company understands and monetizes. A Goofy Movie (AGM) was released in 1995, and since its theatrical release, the film has continued to capture the hearts and minds of a cult audience of passionate fans. Among this array of fans is a core of Black millenials who hold the film in high regard due to its R&B soundtrack and relatable narrative. However, the moments of Black representation within the film are less interesting than how a Black reading becomes possible. What are the component parts of the film’s making when arranged in such a way that invokes an essential Black lifeworld? AGM affixes Blackness to its form not through any profound representation of race. Rather, considering its animators as technical performers, the dark history behind the American cartoon, and how Black music is used to not just make Blackness known but believable instantiate what Michael Gillespie terms, ‘film Blackness’ in Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016).

The Night of the Human Body: Statues and Fantasy in Postwar American Cinema

2017 ◽  
pp. 101-117
Author(s):  
Susan Feleman
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Second World

Although it is conventional, and perhaps logical, to regard the avant-garde and the commercial cinemas separately, major new developments in each arose concurrently in the USA during the Second World War and, to some extent, in response to it. The dark Hollywood trend that was retrospectively dubbed film noir could be seen, as Paul Arthur and David James have observed, as an industrial form of an equally dark trend in the new genre of art cinema that came to be known as the trance film: “both modes feature a somnambulist protagonist who enters a menacing, often incomprehensible environment in a search for sexual, social, or legal identity, and both states are characterized by the same deadened affect, increased capacity for absorbing or inflicting violence, iconographies of entrapment, and the dissolution of geographic boundaries.”

Classic Hollywood

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Pravadelli
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Textural Analysis ◽  
Classic Period ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Film Style ◽  
Women's Films

Studies of “Classic Hollywood” typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. This book complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, the book breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases. The book's analysis follows Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the “Transition Era” and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films. The book's analysis is set apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. The book views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency. The result is a synthesis of theoretical approaches to a legendary cinematic era.

5. The suburbanization of American culture

2018 ◽  
pp. 84-104
Author(s):  
Eric Avila
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
Shopping Malls ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Automobile Culture

After World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s dominant superpower, inaugurating a golden age of prosperity and abundance. Depression and war were over, affording time to enjoy the comforts of domestic normalcy. Yet the cultural record of that moment belied the cause for optimism. “The suburbanization of American culture” describes how postwar American culture registered a new set of spatial and racial tensions and codified a new suburban way of life. It considers Hollywood’s film noir genre; the soaring popularity of television in the 1950s; the development of shopping malls and theme parks; the increasing automobile culture; the rise of pop art and rock and roll; and the American youth radicalized by the Vietnam War.

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