Historical Dictionary of Film Noir

Author: Andrew Spicer
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810873788
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 533

Book Description
Film noir_literally 'black cinema'_is the label customarily given to a group of black and white American films, mostly crime thrillers, made between 1940 and 1959. Today there is considerable dispute about what are the shared features that classify a noir film, and therefore which films should be included in this category. These problems are partly caused because film noir is a retrospective label that was not used in the 1940s or 1950s by the film industry as a production category and therefore its existence and features cannot be established through reference to trade documents. The Historical Dictionary of Film Noir is a comprehensive guide that ranges from 1940 to present day neo-noir. It consists of a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, a filmography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on every aspect of film noir and neo-noir, including key films, personnel (actors, cinematographers, composers, directors, producers, set designers, and writers), themes, issues, influences, visual style, cycles of films (e.g. amnesiac noirs), the representation of the city and gender, other forms (comics/graphic novels, television, and videogames), and noir's presence in world cinema. It is an essential reference work for all those interested in this important cultural phenomenon.

A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir

Author: John Grant
Publisher: Limelight Editions
ISBN: 9781557838315
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 765

Book Description
Offers a reference guide to film noir, extending from relevant films from before the genre was established to contemporary neonoirs and other types of film derived from the genre.

Out of the Past

Author: Barry Gifford
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617034497
Category : Film criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description

In the Hour Before Midnight

Author: Jack Higgins
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101190876
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
In the world of the Mafia, sometimes death is the only way out....

Paris Noir

Author: Jacques Yonnet
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
In Paris Noir, Jaques Yonnet tells us about some of the darker quarters of Paris's Left Bank, centred on the Place Mauberge and the Rue Mouffetard, as he experienced it. This book was mostly written during the 1940s, under the Occupation and in the immediate post-war period. There is a certain amount dealing with the resistance, but the main thrust of the book is a Paris that existed between the wars - and is well known from Film Noir - but has since disappeared. It concentrates on the people, a mixture of ordinary workers, tradesmen, artists, con men and criminals. It invests the area with a sense of mystery, including occasional supernatural events; its style is remarkable and Yonnet often draws on the language of the inhabitants of the area.

Film Noir and Los Angeles

Author: Sean W. Maher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351396838
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
This book combines film studies with urban theory in a spatial exploration of twentieth century Los Angeles. Configured through the dark lens of noir, the author examines an alternate urban history of Los Angeles forged by the fictional modes of detective fiction, film noir and neo noir. Dark portrayals of the city are analyzed in Raymond Chandler’s crime fiction through to key films like Double Indemnity (1944) and The End of Violence (1997). By employing these fictional elements as the basis for historicising the city’s unrivalled urban form, the analysis demonstrates an innovative approach to urban historiography. Revealing some of the earliest tendencies of postmodern expression in Hollywood cinema, this book will be of great relevance to students and researchers working in the fields of film, literature, cultural and urban studies. It will also be of interest to scholars researching histories of Los Angeles and the American noir imagination.

The Red and the Black

Author: Stendhal
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1425051448
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 562

Book Description
"The Red and the Black" is a reflective novel about the rise of poor, intellectually gifted people to High Society. Set in 19th century France it portrays the era after the exile of Napoleon to St. Helena. the influential, sharp epigrams in striking prose, leave reader almost as intrigued by the author's talent as the surprising twists that occur in the arduous love life.

Seattle Noir

Author: Curt Colbert
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1936070456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
“Featuring short, edgy fiction on the Emerald City’s seamy underbelly . . . seedy characters, private detectives and the like from all over urban Seattle.” —Kitsap Daily News Early Seattle was a hardscrabble seaport filled with merchant sailors, longshoremen, lumberjacks, rowdy saloons, and a rough-and-tumble police force not immune to corruption and graft. Now it’s home to big businesses and a flourishing art, theatre, and club scene. Seattle’s evolution to high-finance and high-tech has simply provided even greater opportunity and reward to those who might be ethically, morally, or economically challenged (crooks, in other words). Seattle Noir features stories by G.M. Ford, Skye Moody, R. Barri Flowers, Thomas P. Hopp, Patricia Harrington, Bharti Kirchner, Kathleen Alcalá, Simon Wood, Brian Thornton, Lou Kemp, Curt Colbert, Robert Lopresti, Paul S. Piper, and Stephan Magcosta. You’ll find tales of a wealthy couple whose marriage is filled with not-so-quiet desperation; a credit card scam that goes over-limit; femmes fatales and hommes fatales; a group of mystery writers whose fiction causes friction; a Native American shaman caught in a web of secrets and tribal allegiances; sex, lies, and slippery slopes . . . “Stories that reflect Seattle’s ethnic diversity as well as tales from its rough past to its glory days of Boeing, Starbucks and Microsoft.” —Publishers Weekly “A new collection of stories all set in Seattle, with characters that break the mold. In many of the Seattle Noir stories, it’s the heroes, not the subsidiary characters, that are African-American, Native-American, Hispanic-American.” —The Seattle Times

Historical Noir

Author: Barry Forshaw
Publisher: Pocket Essentials (Paperback)
ISBN: 9780857301352
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
It's one of the most successful and surprising of phenomena in the entire crime fiction genre detectives (and proto-detectives) solving crimes in earlier eras. There is now an army of historical sleuths operating from the mean streets of ancient Rome to the Cold War era of the 1950s.

Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity

Author: Edward Dimendberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674261577
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
Film noir remains one of the most enduring legacies of 1940s and ’50s Hollywood. Populated by double-crossing, unsavory characters, this pioneering film style explored a shadow side of American life during a period of tremendous prosperity and optimism. Edward Dimendberg compellingly demonstrates how film noir is preoccupied with modernity—particularly the urban landscape. The originality of Dimendberg’s approach lies in his examining these films in tandem with historical developments in architecture, city planning, and modern communications systems. He confirms that noir is not simply a reflection of modernity but a virtual continuation of the spaces of the metropolis. He convincingly shows that Hollywood’s dark thrillers of the postwar decades were determined by the same forces that shaped the city itself. Exploring classic examples of film noir such as The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Naked City alongside many lesser-known works, Dimendberg masterfully interweaves film history and urban history while perceptively analyzing works by Raymond Chandler, Edward Hopper, Siegfried Kracauer, and Henri Lefebvre. A bold intervention in cultural studies and a major contribution to film history, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity will provoke debate by cinema scholars, urban historians, and students of modern culture—and will captivate admirers of a vital period in American cinema.