Geoff Mayer, Brian Mc Donnell-Encyclopedia of Film Noir-Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated(2007) (2024)

American film noir: The history of an idea

Film Quarterly, 1995

More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts

The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television , 1999

Postmodernity is the New Black: The Evolution of American Film Noir

American Film Noir

Out of the Past: Film Noir, Structure and Temporality

This paper contends that, given the thoroughgoing criticism of Lacan and despite the current turn towards philosophy in film studies, psychoanalytic theory must not be abandoned. To this end, I propose a new reading of the critical category of film noir in terms of Lacan’s point de capiton and his theorisation of the retroactive construction of meaning. This is not a regression to the investigations of film, language and psychoanalysis articulated in the 1970s (Metz, Screen) but a return to the site of this encounter to plot a new trajectory for psychoanalytic enquiry into the cinema. While the intersection of psychoanalysis and noir is of course well established, the major interventions (Kaplan, Krutnik) have been oriented towards questions of gender. This leaves unexplored the possibility of noir’s relation to Lacan’s theory of signification presented Seminar III, ‘Instance of the Letter’ and ‘Subversion of the Subject’. It is a truism of film criticism that noir is a retroactive category. However, this function is insufficiently understood in noir historiography (Naremore), which gives little consideration to the theoretical implications of this characterisation. This paper investigates both the wealth of writing on noir as well as various film noir tropes to understand this conception of noir as retroactively constituted. The critical history of noir and the films themselves indicate a structure, predicated on the retroactive production of meaning, which is irresistibly suggestive of Lacanian theory. Reading noir with Lacan, I suggest that this retroactive “noir temporality” is the temporality of the Symbolic order. As such, this paper explores the function of the signifier “noir” as a point de capiton in film criticism, enabling the analysis of a certain type of 1940s Hollywood film; and how a noir film such as Double Indemnity (1944) is concerned with the retroactive production of knowledge through narrative structure.

Boundary Crossing and the Construction of Cinematic Genre: Film Noir as 'Deferred Action

Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media. …, 2007

Did Film Noir Happen or was it a Set-Up?

Is film noir a genre? Many film schol- ars argue against this notion, insisting it was reconstructed as a genre only in retrospect – that is to say, apart from any evidence that, at the time of pro- duction, anyone was aware that a film noir was, in fact, what they were pro- ducing (Neale 2000). By way of contrast, science fiction, a musical or a western manifests a conscious intent to produce the given genre at the initial point of production. To make matters more confusing, all would agree that direc- tors such as Robert Aldrich in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil (1958) are self- consciously quoting from the ‘earlier genre’ of film noir. But how is this possible if such a thing never happened? Citizen Kane (1941) itself is mentioned in passing by Nino Frank in his 1946 seminal article, ‘Un nouveau genre “policier”: L’aventure criminelle’ (widely regarded as the first declaration of ‘film noir’). In that case, Welles would have to be seen as reworking, at the end of its ‘classic’ phase, a genre he helped instigate in the first place, but which nev- er actually took place at the time. This is the sort of time warp worthy of Chris Marker’s La Jetée.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY IN FILM NOIR

2018

Sin City, Style, and the Status of Noir

Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez, 2015

Robert Rodriguez claims that his Sin City “translates” Frank Miller’s graphic narratives, its source texts, “directly to the screen.” Surprisingly, however, Ro- driguez’s film includes almost constant references to film noir, to film production, and to cinematic conventions – conventions Rodriguez either adheres to or throws into relief. But this overt remediation of Miller’s narrative actually mirrors Miller’s own remediation of early noir fiction. Noir, in Rodriguez’s hands, becomes more than a style or a story that might appear in various forms. It is a discourse that consists of a particular relationship between a text’s style and its structure. This discourse thus depends upon style, but “style” understood to be the particular way in which the signs will obtain in the context of a medium and its conventions. And if we can define style in this way, we can better understand the relationship between discourse and the material medium in which it presents. This article demonstrates the importance, when considering style and discourse, of investigating medium-specific methods of signification, as what a sign “means” depends on what the medium is capable of. Particularly at this moment, as investigations of narrative tend toward the cognitive processes and contextual elements involved in its reception, we would do well to bear in mind the relationships – among medium, style, and whatever histories and conventions come with them – that make up discourse, as these relationships constitute the real process of signification.

Film Noir