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

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.

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....

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.

Scandinavian Noir

Author: Wendy Lesser
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374718717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
"Even those unmoved by its subject will thrill to [Scandinavian Noir], a beautifully crafted inquiry into fiction, reality, crime and place . . . Perhaps when it comes to fiction and reality, what we need most are critics like Lesser, who can dissect the former with the tools of the latter." --Kate Tuttle, The New York Times Book Review An in-depth and personal exploration of Scandinavian crime fiction as a way into Scandinavian culture at large For nearly four decades, Wendy Lesser's primary source of information about three Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—was mystery and crime novels, and the murders committed and solved in their pages. Having never visited the region, Lesser constructed a fictional Scandinavia of her own making, something between a map, a portrait, and a cultural history of a place that both exists and does not exist. Lesser’s Scandinavia is disproportionately populated with police officers, but also with the stuff of everyday life, the likes of which are relayed in great detail in the novels she read: a fully realized world complete with its own traditions, customs, and, of course, people. Over the course of many years, Lesser’s fictional Scandinavia grew more and more solidly visible to her, yet she never had a strong desire to visit the real countries that corresponded to the made-up ones. Until, she writes, “between one day and the next, that no longer seemed sufficient.” It was time to travel to Scandinavia. With vivid storytelling and an astonishing command of the literature, Wendy Lesser’s Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery illuminates the vast, peculiar world of Scandinavian noir—first as it appears on the page, then as it grows in her mind, and finally, in the summer of 2018, as it exists in reality. Guided by sharp criticism, evocative travel writing, and a whimsical need to discover “the difference between existence and imagination, reality and dream,” Scandinavian Noir is a thrilling and inventive literary adventure from a masterful writer and critic.

By Gaslight

Author: Steven Price
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374714118
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 676

Book Description
A literary tour de force of a detective's ceaseless hunt for an elusive criminal By Gaslight is a deeply atmospheric, haunting novel about the unending quest that has shaped a man’s life. William Pinkerton is already famous, the son of the most notorious detective of all time, when he descends into the underworld of Victorian London in pursuit of a new lead on the fabled con Edward Shade. William’s father died without ever finding Shade, but William is determined to drag the thief out of the shadows. Adam Foole is a gentleman without a past, haunted by a love affair ten years gone. When he receives a letter from his lost beloved, he returns to London to find her. What he learns of her fate, and its connection to the man known as Shade, will force him to confront a grief he thought long-buried. A fog-enshrouded hunt through sewers, opium dens, drawing rooms, and séance halls ensues, creating the most unlikely of bonds: between Pinkerton, the great detective, and Foole, the one man who may hold the key to finding Edward Shade. Steven Price’s dazzling, riveting By Gaslight moves from the diamond mines of South Africa to the battlefields of the Civil War, on a journey into a cityscape of grief, trust, and its breaking, where what we share can bind us even against our darker selves.

Out of the Past

Author: Ben Tyrer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319309420
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
This book presents a new reading of film noir through psychoanalytic theory. In a field now dominated by Deleuzian and phenomenological approaches to film-philosophy, this book argues that, far from having passed, the time for Lacan in Film Studies is only just beginning. The chapters engage with Lacanian psychoanalysis to perform a meta-critical analysis of the writing on noir in the last seven decades and to present an original theory of criticism and historiography for the cinema. The book is also an act of mourning; for a lost past of the cinema, for a longstanding critical tradition and for film noir. It asks how we can talk about film noir when, in fact, film noir doesn’t exist. The answer starts with Lacan and a refusal to relinquish psychoanalysis. Lacanian theories of retroactivity and ontology can be read together with film history, genre and narrative to show the ways in which theory and history, past and present, cinema and psychoanalysis are fundamentally knotted together. Tyrer also explores Lacan through particular noir films, such as Double Indemnity andThe Maltese Falcon — and demonstrates the possibilities for a Lacanian Film Studies (as one that engages fully with Lacan’s entire body of work) that has hitherto not been realised.