Liminal Noir in Classical World Cinema by Helford, Elyce Rae; Weedman, Christopher;

Short description:

Applys a noir lens to films which defy easy generic categorization

Long description:

While few can deny its incalculable influence on popular filmmaking during and after World War II, film noir has been and remains one of the most contentious categories of cinema, involving more debates than consensus about what constitutes a noir. This collection explores the amorphous parameters of this dark cinematic phenomenon by utilising an expanded, nuanced definition of film noir, which reaches beyond traditional conceptions of genre, style, and cycle to examine its complex international origins and emphasis on issues of liminality. Through illuminating case studies of single films from nations including Argentina, the former Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Poland, Spain, and the US, authors consider elements of genre hybridity, border crossing, boundary breaching, and other signifiers of liminality to reassess classical-era films that defy conventional generic and stylistic categorisation.

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction - Elyce Rae Helford and Christopher Weedman

Part I. Exposing Cultural Anxieties

1. The Despair of the Noir Generation: Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds - Alan Woolfolk

2. The Fleap being Neither Flea nor Fly: Ida Lupino’s Interrogations of Female Trauma in Never Fear - Julie Grossman

3. Running Aimlessly: Camino Cortado and Autarkic Spain - Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

4. Race and the Noir Western: Navigating The Walking Hills - Elyce Rae Helford

Part II. Reconceptualising National Cinemas

5. ‘My Mama Done Tol’ Me’: Jewish Émigré Noir, Hybridity, and Black-Jewish Relations in Blues in the Night - Vincent Brook

6. Expressionism, Existentialism, and Socialism in Scars of the Past - Milan Hain

7. The Deadly Seduction of a Rake: British Costume Melodrama, Noir, and the ‘Othered’ Woman in The Gypsy and the Gentleman - Christopher Weedman

8. Argentine Gothic-Noir Fusion in The Black Vampire - Osvaldo Di Paolo Harrison and Nadina Olmedo

Part III. Aesthetics and Antecedents

9. A ‘Feeling of Suspension’: Tradition and Modernity in La Pointe Courte - Alicia Byrnes

10. Dostoyevsky ‘58: Richard Brooks’s Brothers Karamazov as Baroque Noir - Matthew Sorrento

11. Men in Black: I Confess, the Hitchcock Noir, and the American Gothic - David Greven

Index