#Noir vs dark reader movie#
#Noir vs dark reader series#

#Noir vs dark reader series#

Noir, when it rises above a series of clichéd filmic gestures (trenchcoats, fedoras, cigarettes, lipstick), seems to be the language to express the darkness at the heart of our troubled times.

#Noir vs dark reader movie#

International mainstream movie makers, makers of art cinema, and independent filmmakers alike have their work defined as “neo-noir” or “noir-influenced,” which no longer has to imply corny pastiche convincing recent Hollywood examples include Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) and Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik, 2012). Whatever the case, if film noir was not a genre at the time of its first appearance-if by genre we mean a film industry-recognised way of producing and marketing films-it has certainly become one, in the industry and the academy, in our time. While Gilles Deleuze referred to film noir unproblematically as a “great genre” in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, and the late actor-director Dennis Hopper felt able to call it “everyone’s favourite genre” while he was directing The Hot Spot (1980), film critics have spent the last forty years debating whether film noir is a genre, a sub-genre, a film style, or a film movement. Instead film noir is, as Naremore puts it, a discourse, a way of processing and thinking about films as much as a pattern for their production. The basic paradox of film noir lies in the fact that no one who made the original series of films ever heard the term it has always been applied ex post facto, in contrast to the way other genres (such as the musical or the western) were used by Hollywood to plan production schedules and distribution strategies. Naremore’s book is now widely accepted as a canonical text Tom Gunning described it as “the first study of film noir that achieves the sort of intellectual seriousness, depth of research, degree of critical insight, and level of writing that this group of films deserves.” Gunning continues: If we abandoned the word noir, we would need to find another, no less problematic, means of organizing what we see. As I argue throughout this book, every category in criticism or in the film industry works in this fashion, usually in support of the critic’s or the culture’s particular obsessions. By such means, we can discuss an otherwise miscellaneous string of pictures, establishing similarities and differences among them. Whenever we list any movie under the noir rubric, we do little more than invoke a network of ideas as a makeshift organizing principle, in place of an author, a studio, a time period, or a national cinema.

There is, in fact, no transcendent reason why we should have a noir category at all. Given the current situation, debates over whether specific films are “truly” noir, or over the problem of what makes up a film genre, have become tiresome. Naremore’s wonderful More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (1998/2008) ends by saying: In 2004 Sante told our colleague Peter Doyle, “noir is a category badly in need of a twenty- or thirty-year moratorium, at least in films.” When we decided to do this special Contrappasso noir issue-a grab bag of essays, interviews, and new and classic poetry-we were aware that some time ago two critics whose work we greatly admired, Luc Sante and James Naremore, had expressed fatigue with the term. The Noir Issue remains available in print form at, for Kindle, and in other ebook formats at Smashwords. We also feature interviews with Dennis McMillan and Adrian Wootton. Contributors include Luc Sante, Suzanne Lummis, Nicholas Christopher, Barry Gifford, Morris Lurie, Dahlia Schweitzer & Toby Miller, Andrew Nette, and Matthew Asprey Gear. The issue was edited by Noel King and Matthew Asprey Gear. From the archives: Here is the introduction to our special 2013 issue on Noir in film, fiction, and other arts.