Rubber suit and grue film that deconstructs the horror genre and is given out free on mobile phones and various web platforms. Submit to no one and take no prisoners.
Walle - no dialog - make the family interactive - man woman and children. A protagonist - male wants the woman.
All end killed by humans.
“The Others”
QUEST FOR FIRE meets NOTLD
Shoot sequentially to avoid wardrobe malfunctions
Film at abandoned scrapyard by waters edge. Use the geography of the river to dictate the action.
QFF Notes
Introductory Credit Notes - explaining the origin of fire and its importance.
Discordant music - Symphonic in nature. Black and White text credits. Main block. Herald on director’s name. Key Cast info. Single Card. Main theme from the film. Special language and body gestures.
Anthony Burgess/ Language Desmond Morris/Body Language
Establishing Vista - Widescreen format. Night. Meet Ron Perlman - wolves kept at bay by the fire. He eats a bug that flies in the air. Throws fire at wolves. Keeping them back. Show the majesty of the space. PAN to find family by another fire. The tribe. MUSIC heralds. Pregnant women/ communal life. Intro of characters. The importance of the flame.
Next Day. Wind blowing. A scavenger apeman tribe nearby. MUSIC sets tone. They sense something. Men smell the wind. What is out there? Eat with hands. Use wood as spears. Monkey style grooming. Not that far removed from apes. Intro of tribal culture.
Women to the water. Man watching. Humping off women at water. Apemen get ready to mount attack. Woman humped at water. POV through the woods.
APEMEN ATTACK!!! - (10:00) - Panic and fear grips the tribe. Boulders poured onto the cave nest from above - an orchestrated movement. FIRE STOLEN - by Apeman as tribe kept at bay. Lantern of fire kept hidden by Sage. Women raped and hurled from rocks. Vicious society. Cavemen kill ape that escapes with fire. Women dragged away by Apemen.
Aftermath - Dead Apemen and Cavemen. The Cavemen have taken over the site but lost the fire. Cavemen in woods. Running scared. Wounded. Music drives the emotion. Wolves attack the Cavemen. Without fire, they are vulnerable to predators. Escape to riverside as members felled by the wolves.
Night falls (15:00) - Mist comes in and all are scared. Angelic choir sounds over. Mystical and haunted.
22:00 - Cavemen go for Fire. Venturing out into the night. They hear something. They call back at it. A challenge to the Gods.
Panoramic to group in field - LUSH SYMPHONY OVER - Predators appear (Lions) - they interact - (ANOTHER GHOUL)
THE THREAT - LIONS ATTACK! Chase and run. FEAR and retreat as they hide in trees. They are trapped. They eat the tree bare as the lions wait below. One falls and the lions are gone!!
They continue their trek. They see DEER in the distance. HUNGER!!! Drool!!! They are too far away. They cannot feed.
Steal EGGS from a next. FIGHT amongst thieves and anguish. BRAWL - one sees something in distance.
FIRE!!! - the introduction of the coveted element. Other people as well in the distance.
BURNT OUT - when they arrive. They are warmed by the ashes. ROLL in the grey dirt. Find remnants of meal. HUMAN SKULL - in fire- CANNIBALS!!! - they have been luxuriating in human flesh
STILL LOOKING (33:00) - Carrion - raw flesh and vultures - flies and desiccated corpse meat - animal - they eat
FIRE SCENE - night - Monkeymen smell them. Human women hang from trees. CANNIBALS! -
Tribe of cannibals. at waterhole - next day - Heroes get themselves chased while one runs in to steal fire and - doesn’t get a fiery branch
FIGHT - Giant cannibal killed by hero - Johnny Zed gets bitten by cannibal who bites INTO HIM - Girl tries to run (she bites free her bonds) as one falls behind too weak from losing an arm.
Zed steals fire. PUTS OUT cannibal fire - bleeding from bite from cannibal he bested. OTHERS return to hiding spot - they have FIRE but Zed is smart - don’t make it too big -there is something there. (40:22)
Rae Dawn Chong appears - scaring them - they tell her to go away - throw rocks as they escape with their prize - she follows them into the wild.
RDC scared as much as the en. She follows behind them.
Zed in a bad way. RDC comes upon him (a young girl ghoul?) - crying out to him - Gathering food and fruit - overburdened by their load - dropping everything.
RDC makes a mud pack and preys to him. Talks - and talks - USE MOLD for the bite - she fixes it for him - he finds peace - others drop fruit finding her - what was she doing?
FIRE TRIUMPHANT - it is night and they have FIRE!!! (44:23) a lone flame in the desert - The serengeti - RDC holds self by fre while othes cavort. MUSIC BRINGS someone in the dark - The Cannibal(s)
DAY - Cannibals mount a counter-attack - Apeman sees them - CANNIBALS APPEAR - they are everywhere - they are surrounded!!! Ron P ready to fight.
Mammoths appear. Scaring the cannibals. RDC is scared. Mammoths roar! Everyone worried. What will happen?
Zed has a plan. Takes fire - and - advances to the beasts with an offering. All watch - Preying to his God as he communicates with the mighty beast - bows head and feeds the animal - making peace with them. Feeding the beast.
RDC moves to Zed. More civilized. All cavemen move to mammoths and ESCAPE the cannibals. Mammoths attack Cannibals who are not worthy of protection. STAMPEDE!!!
NITE - They eat - they have fire - RDC writhes by fire - Ron P smells her sex. Moves to her. Pokes her for sex. Goes after her. She wants Zed - not Ron P - he is chuffed Zed mounts her as Ron P goes back to eating. Has it off with her. Aftermath - she wraps up by fire - Zed looks at P -
Day - RDC tells the men not to leave - they head back home - she stays in Serengeti - stay here in the mountains - he leaves her behind - she follows reluctantly.
MAKING TOOLS - RDC laffs at Ron P who gets rock in head - laughter - they have never heard it?
RDC sees birds in flight - she now sleeps with Zed - Zed wakes up - screams!!! RDC is gone!
They continue home. Picturesque waterfall and scenery. Zed hungs for fish - crosses water with fire - misses RDC - flute over - Others watch him as he starts to go back for her (w/fire)
He leaves the fire to follow the girl. He is in love!
Smells her on the hay they slept on. Others are confused. RP sits. waits as Zed lies in the hay smelling her.
(1:00:00 mark) - FLUTE (her theme) - ZED GOES LOOKING
NB: Watch Bicycle Thief and Italo-Neo realism for two handed dramas
Birds in flight & flute - he follows the birds - and sees a HUT!! Made of deer skins. He throws spear at it. Others watch from trees.
POTS/ Civilized man - far beyond what they could have made - thy are simple creatures - RDC is from an evolved peoples - they have language/ decoration/ beauty
VILLAGE - fire and people - a community - Zed approaches - they have fire and are protected by a swamp - he falls into quicksand - SCREAMS!!! - he is going to die - Others wait with fire at rocks not knowing. Arrows fly in -
MASKED and armed people - RDC clan - NO! No! He is mine!! They save hi and drag him into the village. They are mud people - they laff at him - smaller, slighter - a wise man comes to visit - touches him - looks at teeth - People dance and laff. RDC hovers nearby -
Zed offered woman for sex. They whip the air as they feed him. She gets on her knees and they all laff at him. All watch from the sidelines . Speaking a language he does not understand. They want him to mount her. Hahahahaha! - he is a primitive
RDC hovers in the night - saddened by the display. (1:10:00)
RDC sneaks into Zed’s cage. She sleeps next to him and is chased out by witch doctor.
Zed has water/ food/ sex - yet something is wrong. RDC wants to be with him. Zed taken to cave and shown how to make fire. Boy rubs stick in palms on pooh. Smoke - Fire - the process of making fire - blowing on it - making the leap as music builds to make FIRE!!!! The weeds burn and a fire is lit. Symphony and angels resound. Fire is created. ZEd overwhelmed . He has the secret of fire - and cries!!
Others caught in same mud trap. Ron P angry and other ape maintaining fire. Zed is one of the mud people. He has laughter.
Ron P and Other go to leave. They steal wood and knock out others. Go to Zed who is now part of the people. Knocked out by Ron P who drags him out. RDC watches from the shadows. They make good their escape. Taking Zed with him. RDC saves them from dying in the swamp. They are outcasts now. (1:19:00)
Ron P drops rock on Others head - they all laff now - Other is bleeding but it is funny. Rain comes and Zed washes himself as others hide. RDC squeezes Zed - they experience missionary for the first time. She teaches him how to do it. She has sex in mud with him - enjoys it - has orgasm - Ron P and other not happy - but they have found a new way to love and be. (1:22:17)
DAY - RDC suprised by other caveman - the group from the original camp - ANGRY - they have fire and girl - the others want it - they split up - Ron P and Zed go out - RDC and Other hide in cave - it is dark and scary - they hear a cornered bear cub - a BEAR attacks Other - RDC runs away - Bear kills Other almost-
(handheld) - everyone freaked out -
ANGRY CLAN confronts Cavemen - we want fire - We will fight - Other ANGRY CLAN arrives - they are trapped
He leaves fire for them.
They throw arrows at ANGRY CLAN - advanced use of weapons
The cavemen return to their clan - everyone rejoices - happy and glad that fire is here!!! Group hug all around.
FIRE IS DROPPED IN THE WATER BY BALD MAN - IT GOES OUT!!!
Zed speaks to the group - He shows them how to make fire with the horn and sticks that he learned with RDC’s people. “I will show you.” Ron P watches - anticipation - NO MUSIC
It doesn’t work - Ron P dismissive - RDC steps in to do it - NO MUSIC - smoke appears and MUSIC starts up - crowd is thrilled - happy monkeys -
Ron P tells a story about their adventures. Other’s wounds by bear licked clean. Zed looks to the night sky - the moon - and is joined by RDC.
They are tender by the moon as the music rises. He holds her as they look aloft.
FIRE burns in the night once again. FACE OUT
----------------------------------------------------------------
Canada/ France Co-Pro
NAOH - Everett McGill (zed)
AMOUKAR - Ron Perlman
GAW - Nameer El-kadi (Other)
IKA - RDC
** Dwayne Mclean did stunts***
London Symphony Orchestra
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Moon Stages & Meanings
Hi again Julian,
Over the ages, the twelve lunar cycles of the year were given their
own titles by the pagan religions. Here is a breakdown of what
these moons still signify to this day.
The Cold Moon is the first lunar cycle after midwinter and usually
occurs in January. It corresponds to the Rowan moon from Celtic
traditions and its main theme is introspection. The Cold Moon was
named so because it occurs when the weather is cold and long nights
of darkness. For many people it meant a life lived indoors and
warmed only by fire. Psychologically it symbolizes the fermentation
of new ideas in the subconscious, fertilized by dreams and the
tears that are the result of lessons learned.
The second lunar cycle, usually occurring in February is called the
Quickening Moon. It symbolizes sleep, dormancy and healing. It
causes us to look deep inside of us to find the source of what is
holding us back in life. It is also a time of reassessment and the
subtle but solid reorganization of psychic and life forces so that
when we do awake from winter's sleep we awake to pursue our
greatest potential.
The Storm Moon is the third lunar cycle and is named after the
storms that usually take place in March. This moon rules matters of
survival, protection of property, pets, children and keeping food
on the table. It is a practical moon that most favors the gathering
of resources and the discarding of that in life which no longer
works for you. It can also symbolize a psychological crisis that
must take place before one can heal and an emotional clearing out
of those things that hold a person back (like bad relationships and
bad jobs.)
The fourth lunar cycle in April is called the Wind Moon after the
way the wind scatters seeds for the spring. This is a moon that is
thought to most likely bring one a mate for colluding with over the
Spring and Summer. It symbolizes the divine union of the young
male and female and favors dating and new partnerships. It also
favors finding a mentor or guidance in busyness.
The fifth lunar cycle occurs in May is called the Flower moon as
this is when plants (and love too) begins to blue. It symbolizes
the reawakening of the earth from its long winter slumber and the
freedom of the mind from the chains of the subconscious. Thoughts
and dreams are easier to put into action. This is also a very
erotic moon that is also good for dating, mating and business
ventures.
The sixth lunar cycle is in June and is called the Strong Sun Moon.
This is because the moon that rises in the eastern sky strongly
reflects the opposing light emanating from the strong western sun.
This is a moon of clarity, intelligence, prosperity and culture. In
myth and lore, this moon is also seen as being metaphorically
pregnant with the fall harvest and is considered very sacred.
During this moon it is a good idea to give thanks for all that you
have.
The seventh lunar cycle in July is also known as the Blessing Moon.
This moon sheds a steady but dimmer light that heralds the arrival
of autumn. It is a time of lushness and maturity. It symbolizes the
power of the female and male when united and the sacred quality of
enduring love. It also symbolizes love for children, pets and
creativity. This is one of the best moons of the year to make a
"wish" list for what you would like to happen in the future.
The Corn Moon, also known as the August moon, is the seventh lunar
cycle of the year and symbolizes the celebration of harvest. It
also symbolizes food in general including bread as the "staff of
life", the cornucopia and full cupboards. It also symbolizes
fertility and sexual rituals that would enable the birth of human
babies in time for next spring. The Corn moon is also one of the
more powerful occult moons and good time to do magic or rituals.
The eighth lunar cycle of September is known as the Harvest Moon or
Wine Moon. In Celtic Lore it was known as the Wine moon as it
heralded the harvesting of grapes to make wine. The Harvest moon is
a time of reaping your rewards and being thankful for what you have
and what you will receive in the future. As it is a wine moon, the
best way to do this might be to give thanks with a toast.
The ninth lunar cycle in October is known as the Blood Moon. It is
named after the act of having to slaughter animals for food for the
winter and also because the moon often has a red or orange cast
during this time of night. In Celtic magic it is known as the Ivy
moon and it is the best time to do "binding magic" or to contact
one's dead ancestors. The moon marks the death of summer and the
Sun God. This is a very female oriented moon that is also thought
to be good for witchcraft and contacting the dead.
The November moon is also known as the Mourning Moon and is the
tenth moon in the solar cycle. The myth behind it is that the
Goddess is mourning the death of the solar god. It is a time of
quiet dignity, silence and contemplation. It is a celebration of
the crone and the elderly female. In some ways this is a very
practical moon that is good for healing and regeneration.
The moon that occurs in December is aptly known as the Long Nights
moon and it is associated with the Winter Solstice - the longest
night and shortest day of the year. People have been observing this
holiday for 12,000 years. It is a time of peace and hope and one of
the optimum days of the idea to practice any type of manifestation
ritual for the New Year.
Peace and light,
Blair
123-Astrology.com
PO Box 35-082, Shirley, Christchurch, NZ 8030, NEW ZEALAND
To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit:
http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?zGycDIwstMxsTBwMTIxstGa0jGxMHGzsTA==
Over the ages, the twelve lunar cycles of the year were given their
own titles by the pagan religions. Here is a breakdown of what
these moons still signify to this day.
The Cold Moon is the first lunar cycle after midwinter and usually
occurs in January. It corresponds to the Rowan moon from Celtic
traditions and its main theme is introspection. The Cold Moon was
named so because it occurs when the weather is cold and long nights
of darkness. For many people it meant a life lived indoors and
warmed only by fire. Psychologically it symbolizes the fermentation
of new ideas in the subconscious, fertilized by dreams and the
tears that are the result of lessons learned.
The second lunar cycle, usually occurring in February is called the
Quickening Moon. It symbolizes sleep, dormancy and healing. It
causes us to look deep inside of us to find the source of what is
holding us back in life. It is also a time of reassessment and the
subtle but solid reorganization of psychic and life forces so that
when we do awake from winter's sleep we awake to pursue our
greatest potential.
The Storm Moon is the third lunar cycle and is named after the
storms that usually take place in March. This moon rules matters of
survival, protection of property, pets, children and keeping food
on the table. It is a practical moon that most favors the gathering
of resources and the discarding of that in life which no longer
works for you. It can also symbolize a psychological crisis that
must take place before one can heal and an emotional clearing out
of those things that hold a person back (like bad relationships and
bad jobs.)
The fourth lunar cycle in April is called the Wind Moon after the
way the wind scatters seeds for the spring. This is a moon that is
thought to most likely bring one a mate for colluding with over the
Spring and Summer. It symbolizes the divine union of the young
male and female and favors dating and new partnerships. It also
favors finding a mentor or guidance in busyness.
The fifth lunar cycle occurs in May is called the Flower moon as
this is when plants (and love too) begins to blue. It symbolizes
the reawakening of the earth from its long winter slumber and the
freedom of the mind from the chains of the subconscious. Thoughts
and dreams are easier to put into action. This is also a very
erotic moon that is also good for dating, mating and business
ventures.
The sixth lunar cycle is in June and is called the Strong Sun Moon.
This is because the moon that rises in the eastern sky strongly
reflects the opposing light emanating from the strong western sun.
This is a moon of clarity, intelligence, prosperity and culture. In
myth and lore, this moon is also seen as being metaphorically
pregnant with the fall harvest and is considered very sacred.
During this moon it is a good idea to give thanks for all that you
have.
The seventh lunar cycle in July is also known as the Blessing Moon.
This moon sheds a steady but dimmer light that heralds the arrival
of autumn. It is a time of lushness and maturity. It symbolizes the
power of the female and male when united and the sacred quality of
enduring love. It also symbolizes love for children, pets and
creativity. This is one of the best moons of the year to make a
"wish" list for what you would like to happen in the future.
The Corn Moon, also known as the August moon, is the seventh lunar
cycle of the year and symbolizes the celebration of harvest. It
also symbolizes food in general including bread as the "staff of
life", the cornucopia and full cupboards. It also symbolizes
fertility and sexual rituals that would enable the birth of human
babies in time for next spring. The Corn moon is also one of the
more powerful occult moons and good time to do magic or rituals.
The eighth lunar cycle of September is known as the Harvest Moon or
Wine Moon. In Celtic Lore it was known as the Wine moon as it
heralded the harvesting of grapes to make wine. The Harvest moon is
a time of reaping your rewards and being thankful for what you have
and what you will receive in the future. As it is a wine moon, the
best way to do this might be to give thanks with a toast.
The ninth lunar cycle in October is known as the Blood Moon. It is
named after the act of having to slaughter animals for food for the
winter and also because the moon often has a red or orange cast
during this time of night. In Celtic magic it is known as the Ivy
moon and it is the best time to do "binding magic" or to contact
one's dead ancestors. The moon marks the death of summer and the
Sun God. This is a very female oriented moon that is also thought
to be good for witchcraft and contacting the dead.
The November moon is also known as the Mourning Moon and is the
tenth moon in the solar cycle. The myth behind it is that the
Goddess is mourning the death of the solar god. It is a time of
quiet dignity, silence and contemplation. It is a celebration of
the crone and the elderly female. In some ways this is a very
practical moon that is good for healing and regeneration.
The moon that occurs in December is aptly known as the Long Nights
moon and it is associated with the Winter Solstice - the longest
night and shortest day of the year. People have been observing this
holiday for 12,000 years. It is a time of peace and hope and one of
the optimum days of the idea to practice any type of manifestation
ritual for the New Year.
Peace and light,
Blair
123-Astrology.com
PO Box 35-082, Shirley, Christchurch, NZ 8030, NEW ZEALAND
To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit:
http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?zGycDIwstMxsTBwMTIxstGa0jGxMHGzsTA==
Thursday, December 18, 2008
AEFX 3D Orbiting Lesson
Work in PNG scale and set up flat images in a 3D environment,
Line up work by eye using top view and rotate as required using 90 degree angles
Use arrows for precise setting and move layers as required.
Make a box of the objects with a base or flat for the ground plane.
Create the illusion of 3D environment and create rudimentary elements as needed.
Put together like jigsaw pieces and spend the time to set everything up.
Line up work by eye using top view and rotate as required using 90 degree angles
Use arrows for precise setting and move layers as required.
Make a box of the objects with a base or flat for the ground plane.
Create the illusion of 3D environment and create rudimentary elements as needed.
Put together like jigsaw pieces and spend the time to set everything up.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Judd Apatow
Judd Apatow · Filmmaking
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Judd Apatow
Apatow at Hollywood Life Magazine’s 7th Annual Breakthrough Awards, 2007
Born December 6, 1967 (1967-12-06) (age 41)
Syosset, New York
Occupation Film producer
Writer
Director
Nationality American
Ethnicity Jewish
Education Syosset High School
University of Southern California
Writing period 1985 – present
Genres Comedy
Notable work(s) Anchorman
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Talladega Nights
Knocked Up
Superbad
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Step Brothers
Pineapple Express
Spouse(s) Leslie Mann (m.1997)
Children Iris and Maude Apatow
Influences[show]
Adam Sandler
Official website
Judd Apatow (born December 6, 1967) is an Emmy Award winning American film producer, director, and screenwriter. He is best known for producing a distinct series of critically and commercially successful comedy films, including Anchorman (2004), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Talladega Nights (2006), Knocked Up, Superbad, (both 2007), Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers and Pineapple Express (all 2008). He is the founder of Apatow Productions, a film production company that also developed the critically acclaimed cult television series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 Career
o 2.1 Early work (1985–2003)
o 2.2 Mainstream success (2004–2007)
o 2.3 Recent projects (2008–present)
o 2.4 Upcoming projects (2009 and beyond)
o 2.5 Frequent casting
* 3 Personal life
* 4 Filmography
o 4.1 Movies
o 4.2 Other films
o 4.3 Television
* 5 References
* 6 External links
o 6.1 Interviews
[edit] Early life
Apatow was born in Syosset, New York to a Jewish family.[1] His sense of humor provided access to friends while growing up.[2] Obsessed with comedy, Apatow's childhood hero was Steve Martin.[2] He has an older brother Robert and a younger sister Mia;[2] his father was a real estate developer, and his mother worked at a comedy club in Southampton.[2]
Apatow's parents divorced when he was 12 years old. His brother Robert went to live with their grandparents whilst sister Mia moved in with their mother. Apatow went to live with his father, visiting his mother on weekends. Both parents understood and supported his obsession with comedy.[2] Apatow got his comic start while attending Syosset High School, where he hosted a program called Club Comedy on the school's 10-watt radio station WKWZ. He relied on his mother's contacts at the comedy club to gain access to the comedians;[2] during this time, he managed to interview Steve Allen, Howard Stern, Harold Ramis and John Candy, along with then-unknowns Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, Steven Wright and Garry Shandling.[3]
[edit] Career
[edit] Early work (1985–2003)
He began performing stand-up comedy at age 17, during his senior year of high school.[2] In the September 1985 issue of Laugh Factory Magazine, he is listed as an Associate Editor, New York. After graduating from high school in 1985, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in the screenwriting program at University of Southern California.[2][4] While at USC he organized and hosted a number of on-campus "Comedy Night" events featuring headliners such as Saturday Night Live performer Kevin Nealon. Apatow introduced the acts at these events with short standup routines of his own. He also began volunteering at Comic Relief and introducing comedians at the Improv.[2] Apatow dropped out of USC after two years and moved into an apartment with comedian Adam Sandler, whom he met at the Improv.[2] He also continued performing standup comedy; and he admits that although his act was well-written, he was unable to develop his own unique comedic personality.[5]
After finding little success as a performer himself, Apatow began writing jokes for others[3] including up-and-coming star Roseanne Barr.[5] He appeared on HBO's 15th Annual Young Comedians Special in 1992.[1] In 1990, Apatow met Ben Stiller outside of an Elvis Costello show, and they became friends.[2] In 1992, Apatow produced The Ben Stiller Show for Fox. Although the show was critically acclaimed and earned Apatow and the rest of the writing staff an Emmy Award, Fox canceled the show in 1993.
Apatow's manager, Jimmy Miller, introduced him to comedian Garry Shandling, who hired Apatow as a writer and producer for The Larry Sanders Show in 1993. Apatow worked on the show for five years until the show's end in 1998.[5] Apatow credits Garry Shandling as his mentor for influencing him to write comedy that is more character-driven.[5] Apatow earned six Emmy nominations for his work on Larry Sanders.
Apatow was hired to re-write Lou Holtz' script for the movie The Cable Guy, which was released in 1996. He expected the film to be a huge success, but it ultimately had a mediocre box office success and poor reviews.[6] It was during the shooting of the film, however, that Apatow met his wife, actress Leslie Mann.
Apatow's next script was entitled Making Amends and had Owen Wilson attached as a man in Alcoholics Anonymous who decides to apologize to everyone he has ever hurt. Apatow used Cameron Crowe and Crowe's movie Jerry Maguire as a role model. However, the film was never made.[6] Apatow did an uncredited rewrite of the 1998 Adam Sandler comedy The Wedding Singer.[6]
From 1999 to 2002, he produced the short-lived television series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. Both shows received critical acclaim but were canceled after a season because of low ratings; USA Today media critic Susan Wloszczyna called the shows "two of the most acclaimed TV series to ever last only one season".[7]
Apatow additionally wrote and produced 3 TV pilots that were never aired: "North Hollywood", "Sick in the Head" and "Life on Parole" (with Brent Forrester). Apatow has screened and introduced them at "The Other Network", a festival of un-aired TV pilots produced by Un-Cabaret.
[edit] Mainstream success (2004–2007)
In 2004, Apatow produced the hit comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, starring Will Ferrell and directed by Adam McKay, making his first comedy hit after a string of critically acclaimed, relatively obscure shows. In 2005, he directed and co-wrote the comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin with Steve Carell, which was nominated for best original screenplay by the Writers Guild of America.[8] The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a sleeper hit,[6] grossing $177,378,645 worldwide and making many critics' Top 10 lists for the year.[2] His film, Knocked Up, was released in June 2007 to wide critical acclaim. Apatow wrote the initial draft of the film on the set of Talladega Nights.[5] In addition to being a critical success, the film was also a commercial hit, continuing Apatow's newfound mainstream success.
In August 2007, Apatow produced the film Superbad, which was written by Seth Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg. A concept Rogen and Goldberg had created as teens, Apatow convinced Rogen to write the film as a vehicle for himself in 2000. Rogen and Goldberg finished writing the film, but were unable to find a studio interested in producing it. Apatow then enlisted Rogen and Goldberg to write Pineapple Express, a stoner action movie that he felt would be more commercial. After the success of Anchorman and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Apatow was still unable to sell both Superbad and Pineapple Express; it was only after he produced the commercial hit Talladega Nights that Sony Pictures Entertainment decided to produce both.[6] At this point, Rogen was unable to play the lead for Superbad, as he had grown too old to play the part of Seth. Subsequently, he was cast in a supporting role as a police officer and friend Jonah Hill took his role as the high school student. Apatow credits Rogen for influencing him to make his work more "outrageously dirty."[5] In August 2007, Superbad opened at #1 in the box office to critical acclaim, taking in $33 million in its opening weekend.[9] Industry insiders claimed Apatow was now a brand unto himself, creating movies geared toward older audiences, who would watch his movies even when the films delved into the teen genre.[10]
Discussing the balance his films strike between R-rated vulgarity and a more wholesome sentimentality, the writer-director explained his position as, "I like movies that are, you know, uplifting and hopeful...and I like filth!"
Apatow has helped to foster the acting careers of Steve Carell and Seth Rogen, and also tends to work with his close friends.[5] He has frequently worked with producer Shauna Robertson, whom he met on the set of Elf.[6] He reunited with Jason Segel and Amy Poehler for the 2001 Fox sitcom pilot, North Hollywood. He tries to keep a low budget on his projects and usually makes his movies about the work itself rather than using big stars.[5] After his success in film, he hired the entire writing staff from Undeclared to write movies for Apatow Productions.[5] He never fires writers and he keeps them on projects through all stages of productions.[5] Apatow is not committed to any specific studio, but his projects are typically set up at Universal and Sony.[5]
[edit] Recent projects (2008–present)
He served as producer and writer for the musician biopic spoof Walk Hard starring John C. Reilly and Jenna Fischer, which was released in December 2007. While the film received positive reviews, it was a commercial failure, having only made back half of its budget. He most recently served as producer for Drillbit Taylor starring Owen Wilson and his wife Leslie Mann and written by Seth Rogen, which opened in March 2008 to mostly negative reviews. For the rest of 2008, he served as producer for Forgetting Sarah Marshall starring former Freaks and Geeks star Jason Segel and former Veronica Mars star Kristen Bell; Step Brothers, which reunites Talladega Nights co-stars Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly; and Pineapple Express starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, both of whom starred on Freaks and Geeks. In addition, as well as serving as a co-writer for Pineapple Express, he served as co-writer for the Adam Sandler starrer You Don't Mess with the Zohan, which Sandler and Robert Smigel also co-wrote.
New York Magazine noted that [former Apatow associate] Mike White ... was "disenchanted" by Judd Apatow's later films, "objecting to the treatment of women and gay men in Apatow's recent movies", saying of Knocked Up, "At some point it starts feeling like comedy of the bullies, rather than the bullied."[11]
Apatow has claimed to strive to avoid marginalizing women in his work and to develop authentic female characters. Following many of these accusations, in a highly publicized Vanity Fair interview, lead actress Katherine Heigl admitted that though she enjoyed working with Apatow, she had a hard time enjoying Knocked Up itself, calling the movie, "a little sexist," claiming that the film "paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight." In response to accusations of sexism ... Apatow did not initially deny the validity of such accusations, saying flippantly, "I'm just shocked she [Heigl] used the word 'shrew.' I mean, what is this, the sixteen-hundreds?"[12]
[edit] Upcoming projects (2009 and beyond)
He serves as producer for the Harold Ramis-directed biblical comedy The Year One starring Jack Black and Superbad star Michael Cera, which recently wrapped filming and is set to be released June 19, 2009.
He will serve as producer on the Forgetting Sarah Marshall spin-off Get Him to the Greek, in which Russell Brand will reprise his role as notorious British rocker Aldous Snow. Jonah Hill will also star and filming is set to begin filming in the spring of 2009.
He is also set to release his third directorial feature on July 31, 2009, titled Funny People. He wrote the film by himself, and it stars Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen as a pair of standup comedians, one of whom has a terminal illness. Other co-stars include his wife Leslie Mann and Eric Bana, who was a stand up comedian in Australia before appearing in American films. The film will contain more dramatic elements than Apatow's previous directorial efforts.[13]
It was recently announced that Apatow is producing a yet-untitled comedy based around Sherlock Holmes and his partner Watson, which was written by Etan Cohen. Sacha Baron Cohen will play Holmes while Will Ferrell is set to play Watson.[14]
It has also been announced that Apatow will produce a sequel/remake to the classic 1984 Ghostbusters film.
[edit] Frequent casting
Main article: Casting in Judd Apatow films
[edit] Personal life
He admires filmmakers James L. Brooks, Hal Ashby, Robert Altman and John Cassavetes.[6] The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rejected his application for membership, even though he was sponsored by Academy Award-winning screenwriters Akiva Goldsman and Stephen Gaghan.[7] He married actress Leslie Mann, whom he met on the set of The Cable Guy and who has appeared in both The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.[15] The couple have two daughters, Maude and Iris. Both girls appeared in Knocked Up.[16] He currently resides in Los Angeles, California with his family.[2]
[edit] Filmography
[edit] Movies
Year Title Notes
1992 Crossing the Bridge Associate producer
1995 Heavyweights Writer, executive producer
1996 Celtic Pride Story, screenplay, executive producer
The Cable Guy Producer
2004 Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy Producer
Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie Producer (direct-to-dvd)
2005 Kicking & Screaming Executive producer
The 40 Year Old Virgin Director, writer, producer
Fun with Dick and Jane Story, screenplay
2006 Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby Producer
The TV Set Executive producer
2007 Knocked Up Director, writer, producer
Superbad Producer
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story Writer, producer
2008 Drillbit Taylor Producer
Forgetting Sarah Marshall Producer
You Don't Mess with the Zohan Co-Writer
Step Brothers Producer
Pineapple Express Writer (story), producer
2009 The Year One Producer (post-production)
Funny People Director, writer, producer (filming)
2010 Get Him to the Greek Producer (pre-production)
TBA Untitled Sherlock Holmes Comedy Producer (pre-production)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Judd Apatow
Apatow at Hollywood Life Magazine’s 7th Annual Breakthrough Awards, 2007
Born December 6, 1967 (1967-12-06) (age 41)
Syosset, New York
Occupation Film producer
Writer
Director
Nationality American
Ethnicity Jewish
Education Syosset High School
University of Southern California
Writing period 1985 – present
Genres Comedy
Notable work(s) Anchorman
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Talladega Nights
Knocked Up
Superbad
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Step Brothers
Pineapple Express
Spouse(s) Leslie Mann (m.1997)
Children Iris and Maude Apatow
Influences[show]
Adam Sandler
Official website
Judd Apatow (born December 6, 1967) is an Emmy Award winning American film producer, director, and screenwriter. He is best known for producing a distinct series of critically and commercially successful comedy films, including Anchorman (2004), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Talladega Nights (2006), Knocked Up, Superbad, (both 2007), Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers and Pineapple Express (all 2008). He is the founder of Apatow Productions, a film production company that also developed the critically acclaimed cult television series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 Career
o 2.1 Early work (1985–2003)
o 2.2 Mainstream success (2004–2007)
o 2.3 Recent projects (2008–present)
o 2.4 Upcoming projects (2009 and beyond)
o 2.5 Frequent casting
* 3 Personal life
* 4 Filmography
o 4.1 Movies
o 4.2 Other films
o 4.3 Television
* 5 References
* 6 External links
o 6.1 Interviews
[edit] Early life
Apatow was born in Syosset, New York to a Jewish family.[1] His sense of humor provided access to friends while growing up.[2] Obsessed with comedy, Apatow's childhood hero was Steve Martin.[2] He has an older brother Robert and a younger sister Mia;[2] his father was a real estate developer, and his mother worked at a comedy club in Southampton.[2]
Apatow's parents divorced when he was 12 years old. His brother Robert went to live with their grandparents whilst sister Mia moved in with their mother. Apatow went to live with his father, visiting his mother on weekends. Both parents understood and supported his obsession with comedy.[2] Apatow got his comic start while attending Syosset High School, where he hosted a program called Club Comedy on the school's 10-watt radio station WKWZ. He relied on his mother's contacts at the comedy club to gain access to the comedians;[2] during this time, he managed to interview Steve Allen, Howard Stern, Harold Ramis and John Candy, along with then-unknowns Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, Steven Wright and Garry Shandling.[3]
[edit] Career
[edit] Early work (1985–2003)
He began performing stand-up comedy at age 17, during his senior year of high school.[2] In the September 1985 issue of Laugh Factory Magazine, he is listed as an Associate Editor, New York. After graduating from high school in 1985, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in the screenwriting program at University of Southern California.[2][4] While at USC he organized and hosted a number of on-campus "Comedy Night" events featuring headliners such as Saturday Night Live performer Kevin Nealon. Apatow introduced the acts at these events with short standup routines of his own. He also began volunteering at Comic Relief and introducing comedians at the Improv.[2] Apatow dropped out of USC after two years and moved into an apartment with comedian Adam Sandler, whom he met at the Improv.[2] He also continued performing standup comedy; and he admits that although his act was well-written, he was unable to develop his own unique comedic personality.[5]
After finding little success as a performer himself, Apatow began writing jokes for others[3] including up-and-coming star Roseanne Barr.[5] He appeared on HBO's 15th Annual Young Comedians Special in 1992.[1] In 1990, Apatow met Ben Stiller outside of an Elvis Costello show, and they became friends.[2] In 1992, Apatow produced The Ben Stiller Show for Fox. Although the show was critically acclaimed and earned Apatow and the rest of the writing staff an Emmy Award, Fox canceled the show in 1993.
Apatow's manager, Jimmy Miller, introduced him to comedian Garry Shandling, who hired Apatow as a writer and producer for The Larry Sanders Show in 1993. Apatow worked on the show for five years until the show's end in 1998.[5] Apatow credits Garry Shandling as his mentor for influencing him to write comedy that is more character-driven.[5] Apatow earned six Emmy nominations for his work on Larry Sanders.
Apatow was hired to re-write Lou Holtz' script for the movie The Cable Guy, which was released in 1996. He expected the film to be a huge success, but it ultimately had a mediocre box office success and poor reviews.[6] It was during the shooting of the film, however, that Apatow met his wife, actress Leslie Mann.
Apatow's next script was entitled Making Amends and had Owen Wilson attached as a man in Alcoholics Anonymous who decides to apologize to everyone he has ever hurt. Apatow used Cameron Crowe and Crowe's movie Jerry Maguire as a role model. However, the film was never made.[6] Apatow did an uncredited rewrite of the 1998 Adam Sandler comedy The Wedding Singer.[6]
From 1999 to 2002, he produced the short-lived television series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. Both shows received critical acclaim but were canceled after a season because of low ratings; USA Today media critic Susan Wloszczyna called the shows "two of the most acclaimed TV series to ever last only one season".[7]
Apatow additionally wrote and produced 3 TV pilots that were never aired: "North Hollywood", "Sick in the Head" and "Life on Parole" (with Brent Forrester). Apatow has screened and introduced them at "The Other Network", a festival of un-aired TV pilots produced by Un-Cabaret.
[edit] Mainstream success (2004–2007)
In 2004, Apatow produced the hit comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, starring Will Ferrell and directed by Adam McKay, making his first comedy hit after a string of critically acclaimed, relatively obscure shows. In 2005, he directed and co-wrote the comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin with Steve Carell, which was nominated for best original screenplay by the Writers Guild of America.[8] The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a sleeper hit,[6] grossing $177,378,645 worldwide and making many critics' Top 10 lists for the year.[2] His film, Knocked Up, was released in June 2007 to wide critical acclaim. Apatow wrote the initial draft of the film on the set of Talladega Nights.[5] In addition to being a critical success, the film was also a commercial hit, continuing Apatow's newfound mainstream success.
In August 2007, Apatow produced the film Superbad, which was written by Seth Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg. A concept Rogen and Goldberg had created as teens, Apatow convinced Rogen to write the film as a vehicle for himself in 2000. Rogen and Goldberg finished writing the film, but were unable to find a studio interested in producing it. Apatow then enlisted Rogen and Goldberg to write Pineapple Express, a stoner action movie that he felt would be more commercial. After the success of Anchorman and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Apatow was still unable to sell both Superbad and Pineapple Express; it was only after he produced the commercial hit Talladega Nights that Sony Pictures Entertainment decided to produce both.[6] At this point, Rogen was unable to play the lead for Superbad, as he had grown too old to play the part of Seth. Subsequently, he was cast in a supporting role as a police officer and friend Jonah Hill took his role as the high school student. Apatow credits Rogen for influencing him to make his work more "outrageously dirty."[5] In August 2007, Superbad opened at #1 in the box office to critical acclaim, taking in $33 million in its opening weekend.[9] Industry insiders claimed Apatow was now a brand unto himself, creating movies geared toward older audiences, who would watch his movies even when the films delved into the teen genre.[10]
Discussing the balance his films strike between R-rated vulgarity and a more wholesome sentimentality, the writer-director explained his position as, "I like movies that are, you know, uplifting and hopeful...and I like filth!"
Apatow has helped to foster the acting careers of Steve Carell and Seth Rogen, and also tends to work with his close friends.[5] He has frequently worked with producer Shauna Robertson, whom he met on the set of Elf.[6] He reunited with Jason Segel and Amy Poehler for the 2001 Fox sitcom pilot, North Hollywood. He tries to keep a low budget on his projects and usually makes his movies about the work itself rather than using big stars.[5] After his success in film, he hired the entire writing staff from Undeclared to write movies for Apatow Productions.[5] He never fires writers and he keeps them on projects through all stages of productions.[5] Apatow is not committed to any specific studio, but his projects are typically set up at Universal and Sony.[5]
[edit] Recent projects (2008–present)
He served as producer and writer for the musician biopic spoof Walk Hard starring John C. Reilly and Jenna Fischer, which was released in December 2007. While the film received positive reviews, it was a commercial failure, having only made back half of its budget. He most recently served as producer for Drillbit Taylor starring Owen Wilson and his wife Leslie Mann and written by Seth Rogen, which opened in March 2008 to mostly negative reviews. For the rest of 2008, he served as producer for Forgetting Sarah Marshall starring former Freaks and Geeks star Jason Segel and former Veronica Mars star Kristen Bell; Step Brothers, which reunites Talladega Nights co-stars Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly; and Pineapple Express starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, both of whom starred on Freaks and Geeks. In addition, as well as serving as a co-writer for Pineapple Express, he served as co-writer for the Adam Sandler starrer You Don't Mess with the Zohan, which Sandler and Robert Smigel also co-wrote.
New York Magazine noted that [former Apatow associate] Mike White ... was "disenchanted" by Judd Apatow's later films, "objecting to the treatment of women and gay men in Apatow's recent movies", saying of Knocked Up, "At some point it starts feeling like comedy of the bullies, rather than the bullied."[11]
Apatow has claimed to strive to avoid marginalizing women in his work and to develop authentic female characters. Following many of these accusations, in a highly publicized Vanity Fair interview, lead actress Katherine Heigl admitted that though she enjoyed working with Apatow, she had a hard time enjoying Knocked Up itself, calling the movie, "a little sexist," claiming that the film "paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight." In response to accusations of sexism ... Apatow did not initially deny the validity of such accusations, saying flippantly, "I'm just shocked she [Heigl] used the word 'shrew.' I mean, what is this, the sixteen-hundreds?"[12]
[edit] Upcoming projects (2009 and beyond)
He serves as producer for the Harold Ramis-directed biblical comedy The Year One starring Jack Black and Superbad star Michael Cera, which recently wrapped filming and is set to be released June 19, 2009.
He will serve as producer on the Forgetting Sarah Marshall spin-off Get Him to the Greek, in which Russell Brand will reprise his role as notorious British rocker Aldous Snow. Jonah Hill will also star and filming is set to begin filming in the spring of 2009.
He is also set to release his third directorial feature on July 31, 2009, titled Funny People. He wrote the film by himself, and it stars Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen as a pair of standup comedians, one of whom has a terminal illness. Other co-stars include his wife Leslie Mann and Eric Bana, who was a stand up comedian in Australia before appearing in American films. The film will contain more dramatic elements than Apatow's previous directorial efforts.[13]
It was recently announced that Apatow is producing a yet-untitled comedy based around Sherlock Holmes and his partner Watson, which was written by Etan Cohen. Sacha Baron Cohen will play Holmes while Will Ferrell is set to play Watson.[14]
It has also been announced that Apatow will produce a sequel/remake to the classic 1984 Ghostbusters film.
[edit] Frequent casting
Main article: Casting in Judd Apatow films
[edit] Personal life
He admires filmmakers James L. Brooks, Hal Ashby, Robert Altman and John Cassavetes.[6] The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rejected his application for membership, even though he was sponsored by Academy Award-winning screenwriters Akiva Goldsman and Stephen Gaghan.[7] He married actress Leslie Mann, whom he met on the set of The Cable Guy and who has appeared in both The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.[15] The couple have two daughters, Maude and Iris. Both girls appeared in Knocked Up.[16] He currently resides in Los Angeles, California with his family.[2]
[edit] Filmography
[edit] Movies
Year Title Notes
1992 Crossing the Bridge Associate producer
1995 Heavyweights Writer, executive producer
1996 Celtic Pride Story, screenplay, executive producer
The Cable Guy Producer
2004 Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy Producer
Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie Producer (direct-to-dvd)
2005 Kicking & Screaming Executive producer
The 40 Year Old Virgin Director, writer, producer
Fun with Dick and Jane Story, screenplay
2006 Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby Producer
The TV Set Executive producer
2007 Knocked Up Director, writer, producer
Superbad Producer
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story Writer, producer
2008 Drillbit Taylor Producer
Forgetting Sarah Marshall Producer
You Don't Mess with the Zohan Co-Writer
Step Brothers Producer
Pineapple Express Writer (story), producer
2009 The Year One Producer (post-production)
Funny People Director, writer, producer (filming)
2010 Get Him to the Greek Producer (pre-production)
TBA Untitled Sherlock Holmes Comedy Producer (pre-production)
Friday, November 28, 2008
Ableton Serial Numbers
ABLETON LIVE 6.0.7- 3006-3604-3417-2FC4-C38C-88FD
OPERATOR- 3404-B10E-E829-A12C-698C-CCAE
SAMPLER- 3415-910A-78B3-B7B4-A319-DB2A
ESSENTIAL INSTRUMENT COLLECTION- 3802-1600-7A3A-66F3-4EE5-B9CC
OPERATOR- 3404-B10E-E829-A12C-698C-CCAE
SAMPLER- 3415-910A-78B3-B7B4-A319-DB2A
ESSENTIAL INSTRUMENT COLLECTION- 3802-1600-7A3A-66F3-4EE5-B9CC
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Oscar WIlde - Biography
Oscar Wilde
(1854 - 1900)
It is not so much his own neuroticism but rather the pathologically expressed moral values of the times he lived in which caused Oscar Wilde to plummet from the height of a brilliant career into the very depths.
Granted, he did have a set of eccentric parents. His father, Sir William Wilde was a noted eye and ear surgeon who had several illegitimate children from extramarital affairs. Oscar's mother, Lady Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee Wilde, was a flamboyant and unconventional woman for her time -- a poetess and a nationalist who fought for women's rights. She went by the pen-name of "Speranza".
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854, two years after the eldest son of the family, William. Because Lady Wilde had longed for a daughter as a second child, she is said to have often dressed little Oscar in girls' clothing. A daughter, Isola, was born to the family in 1858 but she died at the age of eight, which affected the twelve-year old Oscar deeply. He had been close to his little sister and he later wrote the poem Requiescat, to perpetuate her memory.
Wilde excelled at Trinity College in Dublin from 1871 to 1874, eventually winning a scholarship to Magdalene College in Oxford which he entered in 1875. The biggest influences on his development as an artist at this time were Swinburne, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. His reckless side began to manifest itself as well. It is while at Oxford that he is rumored to have contracted syphilis after a night with a female prostitute. Friends also tell of an incident in the college chapel with the visiting Prince Leopold of Belgium and his accompaniment of Mrs. Liddel and her daughter Alice (the Alice of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland) in attendance. When it was Wilde's turn to read the first lesson, he began to recite The Song of Solomon in a languorous voice. Promptly taking action to correct him, the Dean of Arts exclaimed "You have the wrong lesson Mr. Wilde. It is Deuteronomy XVI!" Oscar's associate George Thomas Atkinson, who later reported the incident in a book, commented "Poor Oscar! he was so thoroughly enjoying himself."
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." ~ Oscar Wilde ~
During 1875 - 1876 Oscar published poetry in several literary magazines. In 1876 he found himself back in Ireland when the death of his father left the family with several debts. It was there that Oscar had a brief romantic affair with a girl named Florence Balcome, who later married Bram Stoker. In 1878, Wilde continued writing poetry in earnest, and won the coveted Newdigate Prize for English poetry with Ravenna. He soon left Oxford to build himself a reputation among the literati in London.
And what a reputation he built. During the 1880's Wilde would establish himself as a writer, poet, and lecturer, but above all as a "Professor of Aesthetics". In late 1881, after publishing the volume Poems at his own expense, he began a lecture tour of the United States. A well-known Wilde anecdote states that at customs upon his entry to America, when asked if he had anything to declare, Oscar replied: "Nothing but my genius." Sporting knee-breeches, velvet coat, long hair and lace cuffs, Wilde would often give up to six lectures per week, speaking of the "Principles of Aestheticism" with a poetic grace:
...let there be no flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or brier that does not live for ever in carven arch of window or marble, no bird in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its colour, the exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more precious the preciousness of simple adornment. For the voices that have their dwelling in the sea and mountain are not the chosen music of liberty only. Other messages are there in the wonder of wind-swept heights and the majesty of silent deep--messages that, if you will listen to them, will give you the wonder of all new imagination, the treasure of all new beauty.
We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.
At a stop in Leadville, Colorado, Wilde remarked on saloon sign stating "Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.", saying it demonstrated "the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across." While in the states, Oscar also met various artists and writers, including Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The American tour, from the east to the west coast, helped establish Wilde as an expert on "matters of art and taste".
Once back in the UK in 1882, Wilde went on a short lecture tour and later spent a few months in Paris. His poem The Harlot's House could well have been inspired by a night spent with a local French prostitute. Wilde published his first major play, The Duchess of Padua, in 1883.
Wilde's witticisms soon became legendary as stories about him spread through social circles. He was seen as flamboyant, often dressing in knee breeches and lace cuffs. At a reception he reportedly greeted someone with the biting line: "Oh I'm so glad you've come! There are a hundred things I want not to say to you." At a lunch party he declared that there was no subject upon which he could not speak at a moment's notice. One man raised his glass and said "The Queen", to which Oscar replied "She is not a subject."
On May 29, 1884 Oscar married Constance Lloyd in London. Of her, he had once told a friend "...she knows I am the greatest poet, so in literature she is all right." Sons soon followed: Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886. Soon after the birth of his second son, Wilde quipped that they were thinking of calling him Nothing -- "as then it can be said that he is Nothing Wilde."
During these years Wilde worked as a journalist and reviewer, while also continuing with his other writing, poetry and plays. In 1890 he published his now well-known story The Picture of Dorian Gray. The early 1890's were the most intellectually productive and fruitful time for Wilde. Some of his most familiar plays such as Lady Windemere's Fan and Salome were written and performed upon the London stages. The controversy caused when Salome was banned for its portrayal of biblical characters, forbidden under an old rule, only heightened Wilde's reputation as a maverick.
In the summer of 1891 Wilde first met Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquis of Queensberry and an undergraduate at Oxford. His resulting relationship with Alfred, nicknamed "Bosie", was to alter the course of the rest of his life. Although Douglas later maintained that they had never committed sodomy, whispers circulated in London Society of Wilde's homosexual tendencies and practices. Over time he had grown increasingly reckless about secretive liaisons with stableboys, clerks and servants, leaving himself open to frequent blackmailing attempts. Oscar was also turning to alcohol and his friends write of often seeing him in an intoxicated state.
He lavished time, attention and money on Bosie in their affair during these years; and although Douglas' father Queensbury developed a violent and irrational hatred for Wilde, Douglas insisted on flaunting the relationship. As Bosie wrote to his mother in 1894: "You cannot do anything against the power of my affection for Oscar Wilde and his for me".
"The deep hath calm: The moon hath rest: but we / Lords of the natural world are yet our own dread enemy." ~ Wilde in 'Humanitad' ~
In 1893 Wilde produced A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, followed in 1894 by The Importance of Being Earnest and the poem The Sphinx. The obsessed Marquis of Queensberry attempted to disrupt the opening night performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, but his plans were found out. Only a few days later, Queensberry left a calling card for Wilde at a London club addressed for "Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite" [sic]. After this and other aggressive acts by the Marquis, spurred on by Bosie yet against the advice of most of his friends, Wilde filed a suit against Queensbury for criminal libel.
Wilde soon found the tables turned upon himself however as he answered charges made against him from an 1885 law which made "homosexual relations between men" illegal. The accusations didn't include Lord Douglas, but rather were based on alleged "acts of gross indecency" with several male prostitutes, with evidence gathered by detectives hired by Queensbury. On May 25, 1895 Oscar Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labor. As a friend of his stated: "I have seen many awful happenings at the Old Bailey, but to me no death sentence has ever seemed so terrible as the one Justice Wills delivered when his duty called upon him to destroy and take from the world the man who had given it so much".
The time spent in jail was the beginning of the end for Wilde. He soon declared bankruptcy and his property was auctioned off. In late 1895, his transfer from Wandsworth to Reading Gaol was to provide a traumatic experience which Wilde later wrote of:
From two o'clock till half past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform at Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at.... Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came in swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement.... For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob.
It is said that one onlooker, upon recognizing the prisoner as Oscar Wilde, stepped up to him and spat in his face. The incident affected Wilde dramatically for years afterwards when he wept at the same hour every day.
The imprisonment and hard labor consisted of a thirteen by seven foot cell with planks for a bed, and useless work designed to break the spirit. In 1896 Wilde lost legal custody of his children. When his mother died that same year, his wife Constance visited him at the jail to bring him the news. It was the last time they were to see each other before her death in 1898.
After his release in May of 1897, Wilde immediately moved to France and resumed his relationship with Lord Douglas. In 1898 He published his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, spurred by Wilde's jail-time experience of the execution of a prisoner who had slit his wife's throat.
"I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good..." ~ Oscar Wilde ~
In the years after his release Wilde's health deteriorated, and in 1900 he underwent an operation to attempt to fix middle ear problems which had been exacerbated from a fall in his prison cell. After the operation in October he remained bedridden and soon developed an abscess in the ear which led to cerebral meningitis. He died in Paris on November 30 at the age of forty-six, after being semi-comatose for days. Yet he could not leave this world without a last dose of his characteristic wit, quipping about the shabby wallpaper in his room: "One of us had to go."
After first being buried at Bagneux, his remains were moved in 1909 to Père Lachaise in Paris where a large winged stone figure adorns his grave, inscribed with lines from The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long broken urn.
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
Despite his undignified end, Wilde is enjoying a recent resurgence in popularity. Perhaps it is society's attempt to redeem itself for those who condemned this brilliant man to ruin. Wilde has been portrayed on stage and in a film biography. His An Ideal Husband was recently released as a major motion picture and a new sculpture in London was dedicated to his memory. Oscar Wilde walked the line between insider and outsider, balancing a conflicting public and private life in anti-homosexual late Victorian society -- a precarious situation which led to disaster.
(1854 - 1900)
It is not so much his own neuroticism but rather the pathologically expressed moral values of the times he lived in which caused Oscar Wilde to plummet from the height of a brilliant career into the very depths.
Granted, he did have a set of eccentric parents. His father, Sir William Wilde was a noted eye and ear surgeon who had several illegitimate children from extramarital affairs. Oscar's mother, Lady Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee Wilde, was a flamboyant and unconventional woman for her time -- a poetess and a nationalist who fought for women's rights. She went by the pen-name of "Speranza".
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854, two years after the eldest son of the family, William. Because Lady Wilde had longed for a daughter as a second child, she is said to have often dressed little Oscar in girls' clothing. A daughter, Isola, was born to the family in 1858 but she died at the age of eight, which affected the twelve-year old Oscar deeply. He had been close to his little sister and he later wrote the poem Requiescat, to perpetuate her memory.
Wilde excelled at Trinity College in Dublin from 1871 to 1874, eventually winning a scholarship to Magdalene College in Oxford which he entered in 1875. The biggest influences on his development as an artist at this time were Swinburne, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. His reckless side began to manifest itself as well. It is while at Oxford that he is rumored to have contracted syphilis after a night with a female prostitute. Friends also tell of an incident in the college chapel with the visiting Prince Leopold of Belgium and his accompaniment of Mrs. Liddel and her daughter Alice (the Alice of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland) in attendance. When it was Wilde's turn to read the first lesson, he began to recite The Song of Solomon in a languorous voice. Promptly taking action to correct him, the Dean of Arts exclaimed "You have the wrong lesson Mr. Wilde. It is Deuteronomy XVI!" Oscar's associate George Thomas Atkinson, who later reported the incident in a book, commented "Poor Oscar! he was so thoroughly enjoying himself."
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." ~ Oscar Wilde ~
During 1875 - 1876 Oscar published poetry in several literary magazines. In 1876 he found himself back in Ireland when the death of his father left the family with several debts. It was there that Oscar had a brief romantic affair with a girl named Florence Balcome, who later married Bram Stoker. In 1878, Wilde continued writing poetry in earnest, and won the coveted Newdigate Prize for English poetry with Ravenna. He soon left Oxford to build himself a reputation among the literati in London.
And what a reputation he built. During the 1880's Wilde would establish himself as a writer, poet, and lecturer, but above all as a "Professor of Aesthetics". In late 1881, after publishing the volume Poems at his own expense, he began a lecture tour of the United States. A well-known Wilde anecdote states that at customs upon his entry to America, when asked if he had anything to declare, Oscar replied: "Nothing but my genius." Sporting knee-breeches, velvet coat, long hair and lace cuffs, Wilde would often give up to six lectures per week, speaking of the "Principles of Aestheticism" with a poetic grace:
...let there be no flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or brier that does not live for ever in carven arch of window or marble, no bird in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its colour, the exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more precious the preciousness of simple adornment. For the voices that have their dwelling in the sea and mountain are not the chosen music of liberty only. Other messages are there in the wonder of wind-swept heights and the majesty of silent deep--messages that, if you will listen to them, will give you the wonder of all new imagination, the treasure of all new beauty.
We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.
At a stop in Leadville, Colorado, Wilde remarked on saloon sign stating "Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.", saying it demonstrated "the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across." While in the states, Oscar also met various artists and writers, including Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The American tour, from the east to the west coast, helped establish Wilde as an expert on "matters of art and taste".
Once back in the UK in 1882, Wilde went on a short lecture tour and later spent a few months in Paris. His poem The Harlot's House could well have been inspired by a night spent with a local French prostitute. Wilde published his first major play, The Duchess of Padua, in 1883.
Wilde's witticisms soon became legendary as stories about him spread through social circles. He was seen as flamboyant, often dressing in knee breeches and lace cuffs. At a reception he reportedly greeted someone with the biting line: "Oh I'm so glad you've come! There are a hundred things I want not to say to you." At a lunch party he declared that there was no subject upon which he could not speak at a moment's notice. One man raised his glass and said "The Queen", to which Oscar replied "She is not a subject."
On May 29, 1884 Oscar married Constance Lloyd in London. Of her, he had once told a friend "...she knows I am the greatest poet, so in literature she is all right." Sons soon followed: Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886. Soon after the birth of his second son, Wilde quipped that they were thinking of calling him Nothing -- "as then it can be said that he is Nothing Wilde."
During these years Wilde worked as a journalist and reviewer, while also continuing with his other writing, poetry and plays. In 1890 he published his now well-known story The Picture of Dorian Gray. The early 1890's were the most intellectually productive and fruitful time for Wilde. Some of his most familiar plays such as Lady Windemere's Fan and Salome were written and performed upon the London stages. The controversy caused when Salome was banned for its portrayal of biblical characters, forbidden under an old rule, only heightened Wilde's reputation as a maverick.
In the summer of 1891 Wilde first met Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquis of Queensberry and an undergraduate at Oxford. His resulting relationship with Alfred, nicknamed "Bosie", was to alter the course of the rest of his life. Although Douglas later maintained that they had never committed sodomy, whispers circulated in London Society of Wilde's homosexual tendencies and practices. Over time he had grown increasingly reckless about secretive liaisons with stableboys, clerks and servants, leaving himself open to frequent blackmailing attempts. Oscar was also turning to alcohol and his friends write of often seeing him in an intoxicated state.
He lavished time, attention and money on Bosie in their affair during these years; and although Douglas' father Queensbury developed a violent and irrational hatred for Wilde, Douglas insisted on flaunting the relationship. As Bosie wrote to his mother in 1894: "You cannot do anything against the power of my affection for Oscar Wilde and his for me".
"The deep hath calm: The moon hath rest: but we / Lords of the natural world are yet our own dread enemy." ~ Wilde in 'Humanitad' ~
In 1893 Wilde produced A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, followed in 1894 by The Importance of Being Earnest and the poem The Sphinx. The obsessed Marquis of Queensberry attempted to disrupt the opening night performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, but his plans were found out. Only a few days later, Queensberry left a calling card for Wilde at a London club addressed for "Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite" [sic]. After this and other aggressive acts by the Marquis, spurred on by Bosie yet against the advice of most of his friends, Wilde filed a suit against Queensbury for criminal libel.
Wilde soon found the tables turned upon himself however as he answered charges made against him from an 1885 law which made "homosexual relations between men" illegal. The accusations didn't include Lord Douglas, but rather were based on alleged "acts of gross indecency" with several male prostitutes, with evidence gathered by detectives hired by Queensbury. On May 25, 1895 Oscar Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labor. As a friend of his stated: "I have seen many awful happenings at the Old Bailey, but to me no death sentence has ever seemed so terrible as the one Justice Wills delivered when his duty called upon him to destroy and take from the world the man who had given it so much".
The time spent in jail was the beginning of the end for Wilde. He soon declared bankruptcy and his property was auctioned off. In late 1895, his transfer from Wandsworth to Reading Gaol was to provide a traumatic experience which Wilde later wrote of:
From two o'clock till half past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform at Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at.... Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came in swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement.... For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob.
It is said that one onlooker, upon recognizing the prisoner as Oscar Wilde, stepped up to him and spat in his face. The incident affected Wilde dramatically for years afterwards when he wept at the same hour every day.
The imprisonment and hard labor consisted of a thirteen by seven foot cell with planks for a bed, and useless work designed to break the spirit. In 1896 Wilde lost legal custody of his children. When his mother died that same year, his wife Constance visited him at the jail to bring him the news. It was the last time they were to see each other before her death in 1898.
After his release in May of 1897, Wilde immediately moved to France and resumed his relationship with Lord Douglas. In 1898 He published his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, spurred by Wilde's jail-time experience of the execution of a prisoner who had slit his wife's throat.
"I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good..." ~ Oscar Wilde ~
In the years after his release Wilde's health deteriorated, and in 1900 he underwent an operation to attempt to fix middle ear problems which had been exacerbated from a fall in his prison cell. After the operation in October he remained bedridden and soon developed an abscess in the ear which led to cerebral meningitis. He died in Paris on November 30 at the age of forty-six, after being semi-comatose for days. Yet he could not leave this world without a last dose of his characteristic wit, quipping about the shabby wallpaper in his room: "One of us had to go."
After first being buried at Bagneux, his remains were moved in 1909 to Père Lachaise in Paris where a large winged stone figure adorns his grave, inscribed with lines from The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long broken urn.
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
Despite his undignified end, Wilde is enjoying a recent resurgence in popularity. Perhaps it is society's attempt to redeem itself for those who condemned this brilliant man to ruin. Wilde has been portrayed on stage and in a film biography. His An Ideal Husband was recently released as a major motion picture and a new sculpture in London was dedicated to his memory. Oscar Wilde walked the line between insider and outsider, balancing a conflicting public and private life in anti-homosexual late Victorian society -- a precarious situation which led to disaster.
Edgar Allen Poe - Biography
Neurotic Poets
Translate:
Edgar Allan Poe
(1809 - 1849)
Personal tragedy was, unfortunately, a recurring theme throughout Edgar Allan Poe's life. Born in Boston in 1809 to actor parents, he never knew his father David Poe, who left his mother and disappeared soon after Edgar was born, then died in Virginia in 1810. His mother, who suffered from tuberculosis (then called consumption), died in Richmond, Virginia in late 1811, orphaning Edgar, his older brother William Henry, and half-sister Rosalie.
Frances Allan of Richmond convinced her wealthy merchant husband John to take the child Edgar into their home. It was here that Edgar was to be raised, with his early influences being the stories of house slaves and the tales told by skippers and sea merchants. The dead and dying would always have a strong hold over Edgar, as demonstrated by the anecdote that a six-year old Edgar was once "seized with terror" as he passed by a local graveyard, convinced that the spirits of the undead would run after him. In 1815, the family moved abroad to Scotland and then England, where they lived for five years. Poe's schoolboy experiences there added further influences to the young writer's life.
"From childhood's hour I have not been / As others were; I have not seen / As others saw; I could not bring / My passions from a common spring." ~ Poe in 'Alone' ~
Once back in Richmond, Edgar began writing poetry regularly when he was in his early teens. He fell in love with a girl named Elmira, and they eventually pledged themselves to each other. In 1826 he was sent to the University of Virginia to study law. His rich foster father, with whom Edgar had always had a tumultuous relationship, gave him a mere $100 to cover yearly expenses that probably totaled to at least $450. Under these circumstances the young man quickly fell into debt, and began gambling in an attempt to make up his losses. On top of this, Elmira's letters to him had been intercepted by both sets of parents and, having received no encouraging replies from Edgar, she was persuaded to become engaged to another man. After this, Edgar began drinking seriously, he had little resistance to alcohol and easily became violent and irrational when he drank too much.
By the end of the year, Mr. Allan pulled Edgar from the University and after loud and spiteful fights with his foster father, Edgar left home and made his way to Boston. In 1827 he published his first pamphlet of Tamerlane and Other Poems. Out of money, Poe enlisted in the army as Edgar A. Perry at the age of eighteen, stating on the application that he was twenty-two. In 1829, after his beloved foster mother died, and although he was enlisted and over age, he applied to West Point military academy with the support of his commanding officer and foster father.
Once at West Point in 1830, he soon fell into debt again. Poe also seemed the misfit -- he was older, more educated and tended to be physically weak. While at the academy, he studied the Romantic poets such as Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Colderidge, and he allowed the untrue rumor that he was a grandson of Benedict Arnold to circulate (his mother's maiden name had been Arnold). In a prank, he once used a dead and bloody gander to simulate the severed head of one of the academy's officers. Tired of West Point by the beginning of 1831, Edgar's plan to get out was to neglect his duties. In January he was tried at a court-martial for having missed drills, parades, classes and church. After his discharge, he ended up living in Baltimore with his father's sister Maria Clemm (Aunt Muddy) and her daughter, Virginia.
By 1832, Edgar began to write fiction with the idea of entering story contests. He also discovered opium. A commonly used medicine at the time, it was a stimulant that masked hunger and cold and extended sense of time. During the summer he had an amorous affair with a girl named Mary Deveraux which eventually ended, largely because of his frightening behavior when he was under the influences of alcohol or drugs. In 1833 he won a $50 literary prize from a Baltimore newspaper for his story, Ms. Found In A Bottle. This brought him his first major recognition and fame in local literary circles.
"All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream." ~ Poe in 'A Dream within a Dream' ~
John Allan died in March of 1834, leaving nothing of value to his never-adopted foster son Edgar. Poe soon added the taking of laudanum to his opium and drinking habits. In 1835 he returned to Richmond to work as an editor on the Southern Literary Messenger. Here, he also married his thirteen-year old cousin Virginia, first in a secret ceremony, and eventually in a more public one, where it was claimed on the certificate that Virginia was twenty-one years old.
After several moves and several jobs the little family, consisting of Edgar, Virginia and Muddy, ended up in Philadelphia, where Poe worked for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was during this time that Poe wrote some of his best-known stories of horror and the supernatural. He also hatched a dream to start his own magazine: The Penn Magazine, later renamed The Stylus.
At a supper party in January of 1842, Virginia was playing the harp and singing when she suddenly caught her breath and coughed violently, then blood spouted from her mouth, staining her white dress. This confirmed what Edgar had long feared: that she was suffering from the mysterious disease of consumption which had already claimed his father and his mother. This drove him to heavy drinking. During the summer of 1842, while Aunt Muddy pawned furnishings and kept the household running on charity, Virginia suffered a relapse. Poe sought out the now married Mary Deveraux's address in New York City. He waited outside her door until she came home, then accused her of not loving her husband when she arrived. A few days later, he was found wandering in the woods, dirty and disheveled.
A plan was soon drawn up to support Poe's magazine project through political contacts. His attempt to gain an appointment at the Philadelphia Custom House didn't succeed, but in 1843 he was invited to give a lecture in Washington D. C. and to be received by the president at the White House. This was perhaps the greatest opportunity of Poe's life to make a good impression and helpful allies. But within a few nights of his arrival in D. C., Poe had been persuaded to have drinks at a dinner party. This led to heavier drinking. His lecture was eventually cancelled, and when he did appear at the White House, he was drunk and made a fool of himself. With his chances for support of his magazine ruined, he returned to Philadelphia.
"I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched." ~ Poe in a letter, 1849 ~
Watching his wife Virginia slowly dying almost certainly stimulated Poe's self-destructiveness. His poem The Conqueror Worm, written during this dark period, projects the image of a destructive worm or maggot, and the decay of humankind:
But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!--it writhes!--with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the angels sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Although Poe had previously earned recognition in literary circles, nothing brought him as much fame as the publication of his poem The Raven in 1845. The poem became a national sensation within a few weeks, and was reprinted in newspapers and periodicals across the country. Unfortunately, because there was no copyright protection at that time, the reprints brought Poe not one cent, he continued to live in the poverty that ever hounded him.
Virginia continued to decline, and in January 1847 at the age of twenty-five she succumbed to her long-suffered disease. In 1848, Edgar became engaged to Sarah Helen Whitman. However, the wedding was called off two days prior because Poe, who had promised to give up alcohol as a condition of marriage, had been spotted drinking. He eventually worked his way back to Richmond where he wooed Mrs. Shelton, the now-widowed Elmira of his youth, who had promised to marry him some twenty-four years earlier. They were soon engaged and the wedding date was set for October 17, 1849.
In September, Poe left to visit friends and relatives and to look after some business, travelling toward New York City via Baltimore and Philadelphia. He never made it past Baltimore. He arrived there drunk and disappeared for a mysterious five days. He was eventually found in a delirium and taken to the hospital where he clung to life for a few more days. Edgar Allan Poe died on Sunday October 7, 1849. His last words were: "Lord help my poor soul."
In an aptly mysterious postscript to Poe's life, an anonymous visitor has brought three red roses and a bottle of cognac to Poe's grave at Westminster Church in Baltimore on the anniversary of the writer's birthday every year since 1949.
Translate:
Edgar Allan Poe
(1809 - 1849)
Personal tragedy was, unfortunately, a recurring theme throughout Edgar Allan Poe's life. Born in Boston in 1809 to actor parents, he never knew his father David Poe, who left his mother and disappeared soon after Edgar was born, then died in Virginia in 1810. His mother, who suffered from tuberculosis (then called consumption), died in Richmond, Virginia in late 1811, orphaning Edgar, his older brother William Henry, and half-sister Rosalie.
Frances Allan of Richmond convinced her wealthy merchant husband John to take the child Edgar into their home. It was here that Edgar was to be raised, with his early influences being the stories of house slaves and the tales told by skippers and sea merchants. The dead and dying would always have a strong hold over Edgar, as demonstrated by the anecdote that a six-year old Edgar was once "seized with terror" as he passed by a local graveyard, convinced that the spirits of the undead would run after him. In 1815, the family moved abroad to Scotland and then England, where they lived for five years. Poe's schoolboy experiences there added further influences to the young writer's life.
"From childhood's hour I have not been / As others were; I have not seen / As others saw; I could not bring / My passions from a common spring." ~ Poe in 'Alone' ~
Once back in Richmond, Edgar began writing poetry regularly when he was in his early teens. He fell in love with a girl named Elmira, and they eventually pledged themselves to each other. In 1826 he was sent to the University of Virginia to study law. His rich foster father, with whom Edgar had always had a tumultuous relationship, gave him a mere $100 to cover yearly expenses that probably totaled to at least $450. Under these circumstances the young man quickly fell into debt, and began gambling in an attempt to make up his losses. On top of this, Elmira's letters to him had been intercepted by both sets of parents and, having received no encouraging replies from Edgar, she was persuaded to become engaged to another man. After this, Edgar began drinking seriously, he had little resistance to alcohol and easily became violent and irrational when he drank too much.
By the end of the year, Mr. Allan pulled Edgar from the University and after loud and spiteful fights with his foster father, Edgar left home and made his way to Boston. In 1827 he published his first pamphlet of Tamerlane and Other Poems. Out of money, Poe enlisted in the army as Edgar A. Perry at the age of eighteen, stating on the application that he was twenty-two. In 1829, after his beloved foster mother died, and although he was enlisted and over age, he applied to West Point military academy with the support of his commanding officer and foster father.
Once at West Point in 1830, he soon fell into debt again. Poe also seemed the misfit -- he was older, more educated and tended to be physically weak. While at the academy, he studied the Romantic poets such as Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Colderidge, and he allowed the untrue rumor that he was a grandson of Benedict Arnold to circulate (his mother's maiden name had been Arnold). In a prank, he once used a dead and bloody gander to simulate the severed head of one of the academy's officers. Tired of West Point by the beginning of 1831, Edgar's plan to get out was to neglect his duties. In January he was tried at a court-martial for having missed drills, parades, classes and church. After his discharge, he ended up living in Baltimore with his father's sister Maria Clemm (Aunt Muddy) and her daughter, Virginia.
By 1832, Edgar began to write fiction with the idea of entering story contests. He also discovered opium. A commonly used medicine at the time, it was a stimulant that masked hunger and cold and extended sense of time. During the summer he had an amorous affair with a girl named Mary Deveraux which eventually ended, largely because of his frightening behavior when he was under the influences of alcohol or drugs. In 1833 he won a $50 literary prize from a Baltimore newspaper for his story, Ms. Found In A Bottle. This brought him his first major recognition and fame in local literary circles.
"All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream." ~ Poe in 'A Dream within a Dream' ~
John Allan died in March of 1834, leaving nothing of value to his never-adopted foster son Edgar. Poe soon added the taking of laudanum to his opium and drinking habits. In 1835 he returned to Richmond to work as an editor on the Southern Literary Messenger. Here, he also married his thirteen-year old cousin Virginia, first in a secret ceremony, and eventually in a more public one, where it was claimed on the certificate that Virginia was twenty-one years old.
After several moves and several jobs the little family, consisting of Edgar, Virginia and Muddy, ended up in Philadelphia, where Poe worked for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was during this time that Poe wrote some of his best-known stories of horror and the supernatural. He also hatched a dream to start his own magazine: The Penn Magazine, later renamed The Stylus.
At a supper party in January of 1842, Virginia was playing the harp and singing when she suddenly caught her breath and coughed violently, then blood spouted from her mouth, staining her white dress. This confirmed what Edgar had long feared: that she was suffering from the mysterious disease of consumption which had already claimed his father and his mother. This drove him to heavy drinking. During the summer of 1842, while Aunt Muddy pawned furnishings and kept the household running on charity, Virginia suffered a relapse. Poe sought out the now married Mary Deveraux's address in New York City. He waited outside her door until she came home, then accused her of not loving her husband when she arrived. A few days later, he was found wandering in the woods, dirty and disheveled.
A plan was soon drawn up to support Poe's magazine project through political contacts. His attempt to gain an appointment at the Philadelphia Custom House didn't succeed, but in 1843 he was invited to give a lecture in Washington D. C. and to be received by the president at the White House. This was perhaps the greatest opportunity of Poe's life to make a good impression and helpful allies. But within a few nights of his arrival in D. C., Poe had been persuaded to have drinks at a dinner party. This led to heavier drinking. His lecture was eventually cancelled, and when he did appear at the White House, he was drunk and made a fool of himself. With his chances for support of his magazine ruined, he returned to Philadelphia.
"I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched." ~ Poe in a letter, 1849 ~
Watching his wife Virginia slowly dying almost certainly stimulated Poe's self-destructiveness. His poem The Conqueror Worm, written during this dark period, projects the image of a destructive worm or maggot, and the decay of humankind:
But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!--it writhes!--with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the angels sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Although Poe had previously earned recognition in literary circles, nothing brought him as much fame as the publication of his poem The Raven in 1845. The poem became a national sensation within a few weeks, and was reprinted in newspapers and periodicals across the country. Unfortunately, because there was no copyright protection at that time, the reprints brought Poe not one cent, he continued to live in the poverty that ever hounded him.
Virginia continued to decline, and in January 1847 at the age of twenty-five she succumbed to her long-suffered disease. In 1848, Edgar became engaged to Sarah Helen Whitman. However, the wedding was called off two days prior because Poe, who had promised to give up alcohol as a condition of marriage, had been spotted drinking. He eventually worked his way back to Richmond where he wooed Mrs. Shelton, the now-widowed Elmira of his youth, who had promised to marry him some twenty-four years earlier. They were soon engaged and the wedding date was set for October 17, 1849.
In September, Poe left to visit friends and relatives and to look after some business, travelling toward New York City via Baltimore and Philadelphia. He never made it past Baltimore. He arrived there drunk and disappeared for a mysterious five days. He was eventually found in a delirium and taken to the hospital where he clung to life for a few more days. Edgar Allan Poe died on Sunday October 7, 1849. His last words were: "Lord help my poor soul."
In an aptly mysterious postscript to Poe's life, an anonymous visitor has brought three red roses and a bottle of cognac to Poe's grave at Westminster Church in Baltimore on the anniversary of the writer's birthday every year since 1949.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Cut Up Machine
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http://www.languageisavirus.com/cutupmachine.html
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Illustration Samples
This work is the kind that I can try to recreate
Tutorial for this is above (double click to open PDF)
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Film Noir Series
Darkness & Light Documentary
Remember angles and style of editing. Keep it simple and oblique. Strings for music. Get Wikipedia notes on the material to review.
Two silhouetted figures in The Big Combo (1955). The film's cinematographer was John Alton, the creator of many of film noir's iconic images.
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize moral ambiguity and sexual motivation. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression.
The term film noir (French for "black film"), first applied to Hollywood movies by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, was unknown to most American film industry professionals of the era. Cinema historians and critics defined the canon of film noir in retrospect; many of those involved in the making of the classic noirs later professed to be unaware of having created a distinctive type of film.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Problems of definition
* 2 The prehistory of noir
o 2.1 Literary sources
* 3 The classic period
o 3.1 Directors and the business of noir
* 4 Film noir outside the United States
* 5 Neo-noir and echoes of the classic mode
o 5.1 1960s and 1970s
o 5.2 1980s–2000s
+ 5.2.1 Psycho-noir
o 5.3 Science fiction noir
* 6 Film noir parodies
* 7 Approaches to defining noir
o 7.1 Visual style
o 7.2 Structure and narrational devices
o 7.3 Plots, characters, and settings
o 7.4 Worldview, morality, and tone
* 8 Notes
* 9 See also
* 10 References
* 11 Sources
* 12 Further reading
* 13 External links
[edit] Problems of definition
It was not until February 1973 that the New York Times first used the term, describing how the "moods and tensions" in the British private-eye parody Pulp came "out of the collective depths of the film noir".
It was not until February 1973 that the New York Times first used the term, describing how the "moods and tensions" in the British private-eye parody Pulp came "out of the collective depths of the film noir".[1]
"We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel...."[2] This is the first of many attempts to define film noir made by the French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton in their 1955 book Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953 (A Panorama of American Film Noir), the original and seminal extended treatment of the subject. They take pains to point out that not every film noir embodies all five attributes in equal measure—this one is more dreamlike, while this other is particularly brutal. The authors' caveats and repeated efforts at alternative definition have proved telling about noir's reliability as a label: in the five decades since, no definition has achieved anything close to general acceptance. The authors of most substantial considerations of film noir still find it necessary to add on to what are now innumerable attempts at definition. As Borde and Chaumeton suggest, however, the field of noir is very diverse and any generalization about it risks veering into oversimplification.
Film noirs embrace a variety of genres, from the gangster film to the police procedural to the so-called social problem picture, and evidence a variety of visual approaches, from meat-and-potatoes Hollywood mainstream to outré. While many critics refer to film noir as a genre itself, others argue that it can be no such thing. Though noir is often associated with an urban setting, for example, many classic noirs take place mainly in small towns, suburbia, rural areas, or on the open road, so setting can not be its genre determinant, as with the Western. Similarly, while the private eye and the femme fatale are character types conventionally identified with noir, the majority of film noirs feature neither, so there is no character basis for genre designation as with the gangster film. Nor does it rely on anything as evident as the monstrous or supernatural elements of the horror film, the speculative leaps of the science fiction film, or the song-and-dance routines of the musical.
A more analogous case is that of the screwball comedy, widely accepted by film historians as constituting a "genre"—the screwball is defined not by a fundamental attribute, but by a general disposition and a group of elements, some (but rarely and perhaps never all) of which are found in each of the genre's films.[3] However, because of the diversity of noir (much greater than that of the screwball comedy), certain scholars in the field, such as film historian Thomas Schatz, treat it as not a genre but a "style." Alain Silver, the most widely published American critic specializing in film noir studies, refers to it as a "cycle" and a "phenomenon," even as he argues that it has—like certain genres—a consistent set of visual and thematic codes. Other critics treat film noir as a "mood," a "movement," or a "series," or simply address a chosen set of movies from the "period." There is no consensus on the matter.
[edit] The prehistory of noir
Film noir has sources not only in cinema but other artistic media as well. The low-key lighting schemes commonly linked with the classic mode are in the tradition of chiaroscuro and tenebrism, techniques using high contrasts of light and dark developed by 15th- and 16th-century painters associated with Mannerism and the Baroque. Film noir's aesthetics are deeply influenced by German Expressionism, a cinematic movement of the 1910s and 1920s closely related to contemporaneous developments in theater, photography, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The opportunities offered by the booming Hollywood film industry and, later, the threat of growing Nazi power led to the emigration of many important film artists working in Germany who had either been directly involved in the Expressionist movement or studied with its practitioners. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Michael Curtiz brought dramatic lighting techniques and a psychologically expressive approach to mise-en-scène with them to Hollywood, where they would make some of the most famous of classic noirs. Lang's 1931 masterwork, the German M, is among the first major crime films of the sound era to join a characteristically noirish visual style with a noir-type plot, one in which the protagonist is a criminal (as are his most successful pursuers). M was also the occasion for the first star performance by Peter Lorre, who would go on to act in several formative American noirs of the classic era.
The "original" femme fatale, Marlene Dietrich, in a publicity shot for Josef von Sternberg's mordant melodrama Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel; 1930).
The "original" femme fatale, Marlene Dietrich, in a publicity shot for Josef von Sternberg's mordant melodrama Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel; 1930).
By 1931, Curtiz had already been in Hollywood for half a decade, making as many as six films a year. Movies of his such as 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) and Private Detective 62 (1933) are among the early Hollywood sound films arguably classifiable as noir. Giving Expressionist-affiliated moviemakers particularly free stylistic rein were Universal horror pictures such as Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932)—the former photographed and the latter directed by the Berlin-trained Karl Freund—and The Black Cat (1934), directed by Austrian émigré Edgar G. Ulmer. The Universal horror that comes closest to noir, both in story and sensibility, however, is The Invisible Man (1933), directed by Englishman James Whale and shot by American Carl Laemmle Jr.
The Vienna-born but largely American-raised Josef von Sternberg was directing in Hollywood at the same time. Films of his such as Shanghai Express (1932) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), with their hothouse eroticism and baroque visual style, specifically anticipate central elements of classic noir. The commercial and critical success of Sternberg's silent Underworld in 1927 was largely responsible for spurring a trend of Hollywood gangster films. Popular movies in the genre such as Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) demonstrated that there was an audience for crime dramas with morally reprehensible protagonists.
An important, and possibly influential, cinematic antecedent to classic noir was 1930s French poetic realism, with its romantic, fatalistic attitude and celebration of doomed heroes; an acknowledged influence on certain trends in noir was 1940s Italian neorealism, with its emphasis on quasi-documentary authenticity. (The Warner Bros. drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang [1932] presciently combines these sensibilities.) Director Jules Dassin of The Naked City (1948) pointed to the neorealists as inspiring his use of on-location photography with nonprofessional extras; three years earlier, The House on 92nd Street, directed by Henry Hathaway, demonstrated the parallel influence of the cinematic newsreel. A few movies now considered noir strove to depict comparatively ordinary protagonists with unspectacular lives in a manner occasionally evocative of neorealism—the most famous example is The Lost Weekend (1945), directed by Billy Wilder, yet another Vienna-born, Berlin-trained American auteur. (In turn, one of the primary influences on neorealism was the 1930 German film Menschen am Sonntag, codirected and cowritten by Siodmak, cowritten by Wilder, and codirected and produced by Ulmer.) Among those movies not themselves considered film noirs, perhaps none had a greater effect on the development of the genre than America's own Citizen Kane (1941), the landmark motion picture directed by Orson Welles. Its Sternbergian visual intricacy and complex, voiceover-driven narrative structure are echoed in dozens of classic film noirs.
[edit] Literary sources
The October 1934 issue of Black Mask featured the first appearance of the detective character whom Raymond Chandler would develop into the famous Philip Marlowe.
The October 1934 issue of Black Mask featured the first appearance of the detective character whom Raymond Chandler would develop into the famous Philip Marlowe.[4]
The primary literary influence on film noir was the hardboiled school of American detective and crime fiction, led in its early years by such writers as Dashiell Hammett (whose first novel, Red Harvest, was published in 1929) and James M. Cain (whose The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared five years later), and popularized in pulp magazines such as Black Mask. The classic film noirs The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Glass Key (1942) were based on novels by Hammett; Cain's novels provided the basis for Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Slightly Scarlet (1956; adapted from Love's Lovely Counterfeit). A decade before the classic era, a story of Hammett's was the source for the gangster melodrama City Streets (1931), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and photographed by Lee Garmes, who worked regularly with Sternberg. Wedding a style and story both with many noir characteristics, released the month before Lang's M, City Streets has a claim to being the first major film noir.
Raymond Chandler, who debuted as a novelist with The Big Sleep in 1939, soon became the most famous author of the hardboiled school. Not only were Chandler's novels turned into major noirs—Murder, My Sweet (1944; adapted from Farewell, My Lovely), The Big Sleep (1946), and Lady in the Lake (1947)—he was an important screenwriter in the genre as well, producing the scripts for Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951). Where Chandler, like Hammett, centered most of his novels and stories on the character of the private eye, Cain featured less heroic protagonists and focused more on psychological exposition than on crime solving; the Cain approach has come to be identified with a subset of the hardboiled genre dubbed "noir fiction." For much of the 1940s, one of the most prolific and successful authors of this often downbeat brand of suspense tale was Cornell Woolrich (sometimes using the pseudonyms George Hopley or William Irish). No writer's published work provided the basis for more film noirs of the classic period than Woolrich's: thirteen in all, including Black Angel (1946), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and Fear in the Night (1947).
A crucial literary source for film noir, now often overlooked, was W. R. Burnett, whose first novel to be published was Little Caesar, in 1929. It would be turned into the hit for Warner Bros. in 1931; the following year, Burnett was hired to write dialogue for Scarface, while Beast of the City was adapted from one of his stories. Some critics regard these latter two movies as film noirs, despite their early date. Burnett's characteristic narrative approach fell somewhere between that of the quintessential hardboiled writers and their noir fiction compatriots—his protagonists were often heroic in their way, a way just happening to be that of the gangster. During the classic era, his work, either as author or screenwriter, was the basis for seven movies now widely regarded as film noirs, including three of the most famous: High Sierra (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
[edit] The classic period
The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir. While City Streets and other pre-WWII crime melodramas such as Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once (1937), both directed by Fritz Lang, are considered full-fledged noir by some critics, most categorize them as "proto-noir" or in similar terms. The movie now most commonly cited as the first "true" film noir is Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), directed by Latvian-born, Soviet-trained Boris Ingster.[5] Hungarian émigré Peter Lorre, who played secondary roles in bigger-budgeted movies, was top-billed, though here too he did not play the lead. Stranger on the Third Floor was not recognized as the beginning of a trend, let alone a new genre, for many decades. Indeed, even though modestly budgeted—at the high end of the B movie scale—it still lost its studio, RKO, $56,000, almost a third of its total cost.[6] Variety found Ingster's work "too studied and when original, lacks the flare to hold attention. It's a film too arty for average audiences, and too humdrum for others."[7]
Out of the Past (1947) features many of the genre's hallmarks: a cynical private detective as the protagonist, a femme fatale, multiple flashbacks with voiceover narration, dramatic chiaroscuro photography, and a fatalistic mood leavened with provocative banter. The film stars noir icons Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer.
Out of the Past (1947) features many of the genre's hallmarks: a cynical private detective as the protagonist, a femme fatale, multiple flashbacks with voiceover narration, dramatic chiaroscuro photography, and a fatalistic mood leavened with provocative banter. The film stars noir icons Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer.
Most of the film noirs of the classic period were similarly low- and modestly budgeted features without major stars—B movies either literally or in spirit. In this production context, writers, directors, cinematographers, and other craftsmen were relatively free from typical big-picture constraints. Enforcement of the Production Code ensured that no movie character could literally get away with murder or be seen sharing a bed with anyone but a spouse; within those bounds, however, many films now identified as noir feature plot elements and dialogue that were—in some cases, still are—quite risqué. Thematically, film noirs as a group were most exceptional for the relative frequency with which they centered on women of questionable virtue—a focus that had become rare in Hollywood films after the mid-1930s and the end of the pre-Code era. The signal movie in this vein was Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder; setting the mold was Barbara Stanwyck's unforgettable femme fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson—an apparent nod to Marlene Dietrich, who had built her extraordinary career playing such characters for Sternberg. An A-level feature all the way, the movie's commercial success and seven Oscar nominations made it probably the most influential of the early noirs. A slew of now-renowned noir "bad girls" would follow, such as those played by Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946), Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946), and Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947). The iconic noir counterpart to the femme fatale, the private eye, came to the fore in movies such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, and Murder, My Sweet (1944), with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe. Other seminal noir sleuths served larger institutions, such as Dana Andrews's police detective in Laura (1944), Edmond O'Brien's insurance investigator in The Killers, and Edward G. Robinson's government agent in The Stranger (1946).
Many claim that there is a significant distinction between the noirs of the 1940s and those of the 1950s—other than the relative disappearance of the private eye as a lead character there is no consensus on how that distinction manifests, but it often comes down to a view that the later classic noirs tend to be more "extreme" in one way or another. A prime example is Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Based on a novel by Mickey Spillane, the best-selling of all the hardboiled authors, here the protagonist is a private eye, Mike Hammer. As described by Paul Schrader, "Robert Aldrich's teasing direction carries noir to its sleaziest and most perversely erotic. Hammer overturns the underworld in search of the 'great whatsit'...[which] turns out to be—joke of jokes—an exploding atomic bomb."[8] Orson Welles's baroquely styled Touch of Evil (1958) is frequently cited as the last noir of the classic period. Some scholars believe film noir never really ended, but continued to transform even as the characteristic noir visual style began to seem dated and changing production conditions led Hollywood in different directions—in this view, post-1950s films in the noir tradition are seen as part of a continuity with classic noir. A majority of critics, however, regard comparable movies made outside the classic era to be something other than genuine film noirs. They regard true film noir as belonging to a temporally and geographically limited cycle or period, treating subsequent films that evoke the classics as fundamentally different due to general shifts in moviemaking style and latter-day awareness of noir as a historical source for allusion.
During these two decades in which noir is now seen as flourishing, conventional A films, however emotionally tortuous, were ultimately expected to convey positive, reassuring messages; in terms of style, invisible camerawork and editing techniques, flattering soft lighting schemes, and deluxely trimmed sets were the rule. The makers of film noir turned all this on its head, creating sophisticated, sometimes bleak dramas tinged with mistrust, cynicism, and a sense of the absurd, in settings that were frequently either real-life urban or budget-saving minimalist, with often strikingly expressionist lighting and unsettling techniques such as wildly skewed camera angles and convoluted flashbacks. The noir style gradually influenced the mainstream—even beyond Hollywood.
[edit] Directors and the business of noir
A scene from In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray based on a novel by noir fiction writer Dorothy B. Hughes. Two of noir's defining actors, Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart, portray star-crossed lovers in the film.
A scene from In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray based on a novel by noir fiction writer Dorothy B. Hughes. Two of noir's defining actors, Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart, portray star-crossed lovers in the film.
While the inceptive noir, Stranger on the Third Floor, was a B picture directed by a virtual unknown, many of the film noirs that have earned enduring fame were A-list productions by name-brand moviemakers. Debuting as a director with The Maltese Falcon (1941), John Huston followed with the major noirs Key Largo (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Opinion is divided on the noir status of several of Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers from the era; at least four qualify by consensus: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), and The Wrong Man (1956). Otto Preminger's success with Laura (1944) made his name and helped establish 20th Century-Fox's reputation for well-appointed A noirs. Among Hollywood's most celebrated directors of the era, arguably none worked more often in a noir mode than Preminger—his other classic noirs include Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) (all for Fox) and Angel Face (1952). A half-decade after Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder made Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951), noirs that weren't so much crime dramas as satires on, respectively, Hollywood and the news media. In a Lonely Place (1950) was Nicholas Ray's breakthrough; his other noirs include his debut, They Live by Night (1948), and On Dangerous Ground (1952).
Orson Welles had notorious problems with financing, but his three film noirs were reasonably well budgeted: The Lady from Shanghai (1947) received top-level, "prestige" backing, while both The Stranger—his most conventional film—and Touch of Evil —an unmistakably personal work—were funded at levels lower but still commensurate with headlining releases. Like The Stranger, Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1945) was a production of the independent International Pictures. Lang's follow-up, Scarlet Street (1945), was one of the few classic noirs to be officially censored: filled with erotic innuendo, it was temporarily banned in Milwaukee, Atlanta, and New York State.[9] Scarlet Street was a semi-independent—cosponsored by Universal and Lang's own Diana Productions, of which the movie's costar, Joan Bennett, was the second biggest shareholder. Lang, Bennett, and her husband, Universal veteran and Diana production head Walter Wanger, would make Secret Beyond the Door (1948) in similar fashion.[10] Before he was forced abroad for political reasons, director Jules Dassin made two classic noirs that also straddled the major/independent line: Brute Force (1947) and the influential documentary-style Naked City were developed by producer Mark Hellinger, who had an "inside/outside" contract with Universal similar to Wanger's.[11] Years earlier, working at Warner Bros., Hellinger had produced three films for Raoul Walsh, the proto-noirs They Drive by Night (1940) and Manpower (1941) and the recognized classic High Sierra (1941). Walsh had no great name recognition during his half-century as a working director, but his noirs—White Heat (1949) and The Enforcer (1951) would follow—had A-list stars and are now regarded as important examples of the cycle.[12] In addition to the aforementioned, other directors associated with top-of-the-bill Hollywood film noirs include Edward Dmytryk (Murder, My Sweet [1944]; Crossfire [1947]), the first important noir director to fall prey to the industry blacklist, as well as Henry Hathaway (The Dark Corner [1946], Kiss of Death [1947]) and John Farrow (The Big Clock [1948], His Kind of Woman [1951]).
As noted above, however, most of the Hollywood films now considered classic noirs fall into the broad category of the "B movie."[13] Some were Bs in the most precise sense, produced to run on the bottom of double bills by a low-budget unit of one of the major studios or by one of the smaller, so-called Poverty Row outfits, from the relatively well-off Monogram to shakier ventures such as Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC). Jacques Tourneur had made over thirty Hollywood Bs (a few now highly regarded, most completely forgotten) before directing the A-level Out of the Past, considered by some critics the pinnacle of classic noir. Movies with budgets a step up the ladder, known as "intermediates" within the industry, might be treated as A or B pictures depending on the circumstance—Monogram created a new unit, Allied Artists, in the late 1940s to focus on this sort of production. Such films have long colloquially been referred to as B movies. Robert Wise (Born to Kill [1947], The Set-Up [1949]) and Anthony Mann (T-Men [1947], Raw Deal [1948]) each made a series of impressive intermediates, many of them noirs, before graduating to steady work on big-budget productions. Mann did some of his finest work with cinematographer John Alton, a specialist in what critic James Naremore describes as "hypnotic moments of light-in-darkness."[14] He Walked by Night (1948), shot by Alton and, though credited solely to Alfred Werker, directed in large part by Mann, demonstrates their technical mastery and exemplifies the late 1940s trend of "police procedural" crime dramas. Put out, like other Mann–Alton noirs, by the small Eagle-Lion company, it was the direct inspiration for the Dragnet series, which debuted on radio in 1949 and television in 1951.
Detour (1945) cost $117,000 to make when the biggest Hollywood studios spent around $600,000 on the average feature. But the accountants at small PRC weren't happy—it was 30% over budget.
Detour (1945) cost $117,000 to make when the biggest Hollywood studios spent around $600,000 on the average feature. But the accountants at small PRC weren't happy—it was 30% over budget.[15]
Directors such as Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street [1953], Underworld U.S.A. [1961]), Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy [1950], The Big Combo [1955]), and Phil Karlson (Kansas City Confidential [1952], The Brothers Rico [1957]) built now well-respected oeuvres largely at the B-movie/intermediate level. (Dalton Trumbo—like Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten—wrote the Gun Crazy screenplay disguised by a front while still blacklisted.) The work of others such as Felix E. Feist (The Devil Thumbs a Ride [1947], Tomorrow Is Another Day [1951]) await critical rediscovery. Edgar G. Ulmer spent almost his entire Hollywood career working at B studios—once in a while on projects that achieved intermediate status; for the most part, on unmistakable Bs. In 1945, while at PRC, he directed one of the all-time noir cult classics, Detour. Ulmer's other noirs include Strange Illusion (1945), also for PRC; Blonde Ice (1948), distributed by tiny Film Classics; and Murder Is My Beat (1955), for Allied Artists.
A number of low and modestly budgeted noirs were made by independent, often actor-owned, companies contracting with one of the larger outfits for distribution. Serving as producer, writer, director, and "star," Hugo Haas made several such films, including Pickup (1951) and The Other Woman (1954). It was in this way that accomplished noir actress Ida Lupino became the sole female director in Hollywood during the late 1940s and much of the 1950s—her best-known film is The Hitch-Hiker (1953), developed by her company, The Filmakers, with support and distribution by RKO. It is one of the seven classic film noirs produced largely outside of the major studios that have been chosen to date for the United States National Film Registry. Of the others, one was a small-studio release: Detour. Four were independent productions distributed by United Artists, the "studio without a studio": Gun Crazy; Kiss Me Deadly; D.O.A. (1950), directed by Rudolph Maté; and Sweet Smell of Success (1957), directed by Alexander Mackendrick. One was an independent distributed by MGM, the industry leader: Force of Evil (1948), directed by Abraham Polonsky and starring John Garfield, both of whom would be blacklisted in the 1950s. Independent production usually meant restricted circumstances, but not always—Sweet Smell of Success, for instance, despite the original plans of the production team, was clearly not made on the cheap, though like many other cherished A-budget noirs it might be said to have a B-movie soul.
Perhaps no director better displayed that spirit than the German-born Robert Siodmak, who had already made a score of films before his 1940 arrival in Hollywood. Working mostly on A features, he made eight movies now regarded as classic film noirs (a figure matched only by Lang and Mann). In addition to The Killers, Burt Lancaster's debut and a Hellinger/Universal coproduction, Siodmak's other important contributions to the genre include 1944's Phantom Lady (a top-of-the-line B and Woolrich adaptation), the ironically titled Christmas Holiday (1944), and Cry of the City (1948). Criss Cross (1949), with Lancaster again the lead, exemplifies how Siodmak brought the virtues of the B-movie to the A noir. In addition to the relatively looser constraints on character and message at lower budgets, the nature of B production lent itself to the noir style for directly economic reasons: dim lighting not only saved on electrical costs but helped cloak cheap sets (mist and smoke also served the cause); night shooting was often compelled by hurried production schedules; plots with obscure motivations and intriguingly elliptical transitions were sometimes the consequence of scripts written in haste, not every scene of which was there always time or money to shoot. In Criss Cross, Siodmak achieves all these effects with purpose, wrapping them around Yvonne De Carlo, playing the most understandable of femme fatales, Dan Duryea, in one of his deliciously charismatic villain roles, and Lancaster—already an established star—as an ordinary joe turned armed robber, a romantic obsessive on a one-way road to ruin.[16]
Classic-era film noirs in the National Film Registry
1940-49
The Maltese Falcon | Shadow of a Doubt | Laura | Double Indemnity | Mildred Pierce | Detour |
The Big Sleep | Notorious | Out of the Past | Force of Evil | The Naked City | White Heat
1950-58
D.O.A. | Gun Crazy | Sunset Boulevard | In a Lonely Place | The Hitch-Hiker |
Kiss Me Deadly | The Night of the Hunter | Sweet Smell of Success | Touch of Evil
[edit] Film noir outside the United States
Some critics regard classic film noir as a cycle exclusive to the United States; e.g., Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward: "With the Western, film noir shares the distinction of being an indigenous American form...a wholly American film style."[17] Others, however, regard noir as an international phenomenon.[18] Even before the beginning of the generally accepted classic period, there were movies made far from Hollywood that can be seen in retrospect as film noirs, for example, the French productions Pépé le Moko (1937), directed by Jules Duvivier, and Le Jour se lève (1939), directed by Marcel Carné.
Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows; 1958). The film features a score composed and performed by jazz musician Miles Davis.
Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows; 1958). The film features a score composed and performed by jazz musician Miles Davis.
During the classic period, there were many films produced outside the United States, particularly in France, that share elements of style, theme, and sensibility with American film noirs and may themselves be included in the genre's canon. In certain cases, the interrelationship with Hollywood noir is obvious: American-born director Jules Dassin moved to France in the early 1950s as a result of the Hollywood blacklist, and made one of the most famous French film noirs, Rififi (1955). Other well-known French films often classified as noir include Quai des Orfèvres (1947), Le Salaire de la peur (released in English-speaking countries as The Wages of Fear) (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955), all directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot; Casque d'or (1952) and Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), both directed by Jacques Becker; and Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958), directed by Louis Malle. French director Jean-Pierre Melville is widely recognized for his tragic, minimalist film noirs—Quand tu liras cette lettre (1953) and Bob le flambeur (1955), from the classic period, were followed by Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967), and Le Cercle rouge (1970).
A number of thrillers produced in Great Britain during the classic period are also frequently referred to as film noirs, including Contraband (1940) and The Small Back Room (1949), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; Brighton Rock (1947), directed by John Boulting; They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti; and Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), directed by Lewis Gilbert. Terence Fisher directed several low-budget thrillers in a noir mode for Hammer Film Productions, including The Last Page (aka Man Bait; 1952), Stolen Face (1952), and Murder by Proxy (aka Blackout; 1954). Before leaving for France, Jules Dassin had been obliged by political pressure to shoot his last English-language film of the classic noir period in Great Britain: Night and the City (1950). Though it was conceived in the United States and was not only directed by an American but also stars two American actors—Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney—it is technically a UK production, financed by 20th Century-Fox's British subsidiary. The most famous of classic British noirs is director Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), like Brighton Rock based on a Graham Greene novel. Set in Vienna immediately after World War II, it stars Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, both prominent American actors who starred in U.S. film noirs; despite being a completely British production, the movie is sometimes discussed as if it is a classic Hollywood noir.
Stray Dog (1949), directed and cowritten by Akira Kurosawa, contains many cinematographic and narrative elements associated with classic American film noir.
Stray Dog (1949), directed and cowritten by Akira Kurosawa, contains many cinematographic and narrative elements associated with classic American film noir.
Elsewhere, Italian director Luchino Visconti adapted Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice as Ossessione (1943), regarded both as one of the great noirs and a seminal film in the development of neorealism. (This was not even the first screen version of Cain's novel, having been preceded by the French Le Dernier tournant in 1939.) In Japan, the celebrated Akira Kurosawa directed several movies recognizable as film noirs, including Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), and High and Low (1963).
Among the first major neo-noir films—the term often applied to movies that consciously refer back to the classic noir tradition—was the French Tirez sur la pianiste (1960), directed by François Truffaut from a novel by one of the gloomiest of American noir fiction writers, David Goodis. Noir crime films and melodramas have been produced in many countries in the post-classic area, some of them quintessentially self-aware neo-noirs—for example, Il Conformista (1969; Italy), Der Amerikanische Freund (1977; Germany), The Element of Crime (1984; Denmark), As Tears Go By (1988; Hong Kong)—others simply sharing narrative elements and a version of the hardboiled sensibility associated with classic noir—The Castle of Sand (1974; Japan), Insomnia (1997; Norway), Croupier (1998; UK), Blind Shaft (2003; China).
[edit] Neo-noir and echoes of the classic mode
[edit] 1960s and 1970s
While it is hard to draw a line between some of the noir films of the early 1960s such as Blast of Silence (1961) and Cape Fear (1962) and the noirs of the late 1950s, new trends emerged in the post-classic era. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer, Shock Corridor (1962), directed by Samuel Fuller, and Brainstorm (1965), directed by experienced noir character actor William Conrad, all treat the theme of mental dispossession within stylistic and tonal frameworks derived from classic film noir.
In a different vein, filmmakers such as Arthur Penn (Mickey One [1964], clearly drawing inspiration from Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste and other French New Wave films), John Boorman (Point Blank [1967], similarly caught up, though in the Nouvelle vague's deeper waters), and Alan J. Pakula (Klute [1971]) directed movies that knowingly related themselves to the original film noirs, inviting audiences in on the game. Conscious acknowledgment of the classic era's conventions, as historical archetypes to be revived, rejected, or reimagined, is what puts the "neo" in neo-noir, according to many critics. Though several late classic noirs, Kiss Me Deadly in particular, were entirely self-knowing and post-traditional in conception, none that were top- or midbudgeted (like Aldrich's masterpiece) tipped its hand in a way noticeable to most audiences of the time. The first broadly popular crime drama of an unmistakable neo-noir nature was not a movie, but the TV series Peter Gunn (1958–61), created by Blake Edwards.
Neo-noir/Take 1: As car thief Michel Poiccard, aka Laszlo Kovacs, Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1960). Poiccard reveres and styles himself after Humphrey Bogart' s screen persona.
Neo-noir/Take 1: As car thief Michel Poiccard, aka Laszlo Kovacs, Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1960). Poiccard reveres and styles himself after Humphrey Bogart' s screen persona.
A manifest affiliation with noir traditions—which, by its nature, allows for different sorts of commentary on them to be inferred—can also provide the basis for explicit critiques of those traditions. The first major film to work this angle (that might be thought of as the most "neo" of "neo") was French director Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1960), which pays its literal respects to Bogart and his crime films while brandishing a bold new style for a new day. In 1973, director Robert Altman, who had worked on Peter Gunn, flipped off noir piety with The Long Goodbye. Based on the novel by Raymond Chandler, it features one of Bogart's most famous characters, but in iconoclastic fashion: Philip Marlowe, the prototypical hardboiled detective, is replayed as a hapless misfit, almost laughably out of touch with contemporary mores and morality. Where Altman's subversion of the film noir mythos was so irreverent as to anger many contemporary critics, around the same time Woody Allen was paying affectionate, at points idolatrous homage to the classic mode with Play It Again, Sam (1972).
The most acclaimed of the neo-noirs of the era was director Roman Polanski's 1974 Chinatown. Written by Robert Towne, it is set in 1930s Los Angeles, an accustomed noir locale nudged back some few years in a way that makes the pivotal loss of innocence in the story even crueler. Where Polanski and Towne raised noir to a black apogee by turning rearward, director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader brought the noir attitude crashing into the present day with Taxi Driver (1976), a cackling, bloody-minded gloss on bicentennial America. In 1978, Walter Hill wrote and directed the The Driver, a chase movie as might have been imagined by Jean-Pierre Melville in an especially abstract mood. Hill was already a central figure in 1970s noir of a more straightforward manner, having written the script for director Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), adapting a novel by pulp master Jim Thompson, as well as for two tough private eye films: an original screenplay for Hickey & Boggs (1972) and an adaptation of a novel by Ross Macdonald, the leading literary descendant of Hammett and Chandler, for The Drowning Pool (1975). Some of the strongest 1970s noirs, in fact, were unwinking remakes of the classics, "neo" mostly be default: Altman's heartbreaking Thieves Like Us (1973), based on the same source as Ray's They Live by Night, and Farewell, My Lovely (1975), the Chandler tale made classically as Murder, My Sweet, remade here with Robert Mitchum in his last notable noir role. Detective series, prevalent on American television during the period, updated the hardboiled tradition in different ways, but the show conjuring the most noir tone was a horror crossover touched with shaggy, Long Goodbye–style humor: Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–75), featuring a Chicago newspaper reporter investigating strange, usually supernatural occurrences.
[edit] 1980s–2000s
Neo-noir/Take 2: Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell, a femme fatale for the 1990s—and the ages—in the smash box-office hit Basic Instinct (1992). She is seen here in the notorious interrogation scene.
Neo-noir/Take 2: Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell, a femme fatale for the 1990s—and the ages—in the smash box-office hit Basic Instinct (1992). She is seen here in the notorious interrogation scene.
The turn of the decade brought Scorsese's black-and-white Raging Bull (cowritten by Schrader); an acknowledged masterpiece—often voted the greatest film of the 1980s in critics' polls—it is also a retreat, telling a story of a boxer's moral self-destruction that recalls in both theme and visual ambience noir dramas such as Body and Soul (1947) and Champion (1949). From 1981, the popular Body Heat, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, invokes a different set of classic noir elements, this time in a humid, erotically charged Florida setting; its success confirmed the commercial viability of neo-noir, at a time when the major Hollywood studios were becoming increasingly risk averse. The mainstreaming of neo-noir is evident in such films as Black Widow (1987), Shattered (1991), and Final Analysis (1992). Few neo-noirs have made more money or more wittily updated the tradition of the noir double-entendre than Basic Instinct (1992), directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Joe Eszterhas. Over the past twenty-five years, the big-budget auteur to work most frequently in a neo-noir mode has been Michael Mann, with the films Thief (1981), Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004), and the 1980s TV series Miami Vice and Crime Story. Mann's output exemplifies a primary strain of neo-noir, in which classic themes and tropes are revisited in a contemporary setting with an up-to-date visual style and rock- or hip hop–based musical soundtrack. Like Chinatown, its more complex predecessor, Curtis Hanson's Oscar-winning L.A. Confidential (1997), based on the James Ellroy novel, demonstrates an opposite tendency—the deliberately retro film noir; its tale of corrupt cops and femme fatales is seemingly lifted straight from a movie of 1953, the year in which it is set.
Working generally with much smaller budgets, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have created one of the most substantial film oeuvres influenced by classic noir, with movies such as Blood Simple (1984) and Fargo (1996), considered by some a supreme work in the neo-noir mode. The Coens' most recent nod to the noir tradition is The Man Who Wasn't There (2001); a black-and-white crime melodrama set in 1949, it features a scene apparently staged to mirror the one from Out of the Past pictured above. The Coens cross noir with other generic lines in the gangster drama Miller's Crossing (1990)—loosely based on the Dashiell Hammett novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key—and the comedy The Big Lebowski (1998), a tribute to Chandler and an homage to Altman's version of The Long Goodbye.
Perhaps no contemporary films better reflect the classic noir A-movie-with-a-B-movie-soul than those of director-writer Quentin Tarantino; neo-noirs of his such as Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) display a relentlessly self-reflexive, sometimes tongue-in-cheek sensibility, similar to the work of the New Wave directors and the Coens. Other movies from the era readily identifiable as neo-noir (some retro, some more au courant) include director John Dahl's Kill Me Again (1989), Red Rock West (1992), and The Last Seduction (1993); four adaptations of novels by Jim Thompson—The Kill-Off (1989), After Dark, My Sweet (1990), The Grifters (1990), and the remake of The Getaway (1994); and many more, including adaptations of the work of other major noir fiction writers: The Hot Spot (1990), from Hell Hath No Fury, by Charles Williams; Miami Blues (1990), from the novel by Charles Willeford; and Out of Sight (1998), from the novel by Elmore Leonard. On television, the series Moonlighting (1985–89) paid homage to classic noir while demonstrating an unusual appreciation of the sense of humor often found in the original cycle. Between 1983 and 1989, Mickey Spillane's hardboiled private eye Mike Hammer was played with wry gusto by Stacy Keach in a series and several stand-alone TV movies (an unsuccessful revival followed in 1997–98). The British miniseries The Singing Detective (1986), written by Dennis Potter, tells the story of a mystery writer named Philip Marlow; widely considered one of the finest neo-noirs in any medium, some critics cite it as the greatest television production of all time.
Neo-noir/Take 3: Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick (2005). The movie's characters, most of them high-school students, speak in idiosyncratic English reminiscent of noir novelists Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Neo-noir/Take 3: Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick (2005). The movie's characters, most of them high-school students, speak in idiosyncratic English reminiscent of noir novelists Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Among the leading Hollywood directors of noir during the current decade has been the British-born Christopher Nolan, with the acclaimed Memento (2000), the remake of Insomnia (2002), and his dark-toned superhero films, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). Harsh Times (2006) is written and directed by David Ayer, also the screenwriter for Training Day (2001) and, adapting a story by James Ellroy, Dark Blue (2002). The latter two update the classic noir bad-cop tale, typified by Shield for Murder (1954) and Rogue Cop (1954). In 2005, Shane Black directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, basing his screenplay in part on a crime novel by Brett Halliday, who published his first stories back in the 1920s. The film plays with an awareness not only of classic noir but also of neo-noir reflexivity itself, making it a model neo²-noir. Director Sean Penn's The Pledge (2001), though adapted from a very self-reflexive novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, plays noir comparatively straight, to devastating effect. The most commercially successful of recent neo-noirs is Sin City (2005), directed by Robert Rodriguez in extravagantly stylized black and white with the odd bit of color. The film is based on a series of comic books created by Frank Miller (credited as the movie's codirector), which are in turn openly indebted to the works of Spillane and other pulp mystery authors. Similarly, graphic novels provide the basis for Road to Perdition (2002), directed by Sam Mendes, and A History of Violence (2005), directed by David Cronenberg; the latter, according to many critics, is the neo-noir of the decade. Writer-director Rian Johnson's Brick (2005), featuring present-day high schoolers speaking a version of 1930s hardboiled argot, won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the Sundance Film Festival. The television series Veronica Mars (2004–7) also brought a youth-oriented twist to film noir.
[edit] Psycho-noir
Night club chanteuse Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini, sings the title song in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).
Night club chanteuse Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini, sings the title song in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).
The characteristic work of David Lynch combines film noir tropes with scenarios driven by disturbed characters such as the sociopathic criminal played by Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet (1986). Lost Highway (1996) and Mulholland Drive (2001) feature delusionary protagonists. The Twin Peaks cycle, both TV series (1990–91) and movie, Fire Walk with Me (1992), is built on a succession of bizarro spasms. This Lynchian mode has come to be grouped with other noir-influenced films sharing similarly skewed centers of interest as "psycho-noir." Two of the earliest examples after Blue Velvet are literary adaptations directed by David Cronenberg, Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash (1996).
Director David Fincher followed the noir science fiction of Alien³ (1992) and the immensely successful neo-noir Se7en (1995) with a film that earns much greater regard today than it did on original release, the psycho-noir Fight Club (1999). Nolan's Memento, as well as his debut feature, the British Following (1998), may both be classified as psycho-noir. The torments of The Machinist (2004), directed by Brad Anderson, evoke both Fight Club and Memento. In the first decade of the new millennium, Park Chan-wook of South Korea has been the most prominent director to work regularly in a psycho-noir mode—a current of noir that can be traced back through Taxi Driver, through Brainstorm, through White Heat, all the way to Stranger on the Third Floor and further still, to Fritz Lang's original M.
[edit] Science fiction noir
Harrison Ford as detective Rick Deckard in Blade Runner (1982). As with many classic film noirs, the story is set in a rainy version of Los Angeles.
Harrison Ford as detective Rick Deckard in Blade Runner (1982). As with many classic film noirs, the story is set in a rainy version of Los Angeles.
In the post-classic era, the most significant trend in noir crossovers has involved science fiction. In Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), Lemmy Caution is the name of the old-school private eye in the city of tomorrow. The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972) centers on another implacable investigator and an amnesiac named Welles. Soylent Green (1973), the first major American example, portrays a dystopian, near-future world via a self-evidently noir detection plot; starring Charlton Heston (the lead in Touch of Evil), it also features classic noir standbys Joseph Cotten, Edward G. Robinson, and Whit Bissell. The movie was directed by Richard Fleischer, who two decades before had directed several strong B noirs, including Armored Car Robbery (1950) and The Narrow Margin (1952).
The cynical and stylish perspective of classic film noir had a formative effect on the cyberpunk genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1980s; the movie most directly influential on cyberpunk was Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, which pays clear and evocative homage to the classic noir mode (Scott would subsequently direct the poignant noir crime melodrama Someone to Watch Over Me [1987]). Scholar Jamaluddin Bin Aziz has observed how "the shadow of Philip Marlowe lingers on" in such other "future noir" films as Twelve Monkeys (1995), Dark City (1998), and Minority Report (2002).[19] The hero is the target of investigation in Gattaca (1997), which fuses film noir motifs with a scenario indebted to Brave New World. The Thirteenth Floor (1999), like Blade Runner, is an explicit homage to classic noir, in this case involving speculations about virtual reality. Science fiction, noir, and animation are brought together in the Japanese films Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), both directed by Mamoru Oshii, and the short A Detective Story (2003), set in the Matrix universe.
[edit] Film noir parodies
Film noir has been parodied many times, in many manners. In 1945, Danny Kaye starred in what appears to be the first intentional film noir parody, Wonder Man.[20] That same year, Deanna Durbin was the singing lead in the comedic noir Lady on a Train, which makes fun of Woolrich-brand wistful miserablism. Bob Hope inaugurated the private-eye noir parody with My Favorite Brunette (1947), playing a baby photographer who is mistaken for an ironfisted detective.[20] The Big Steal (1949), directed by Don Siegel, and His Kind of Woman, are both clear examples of the classic film noir parodying itself.[21] The "Girl Hunt" ballet in Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (1953) is a ten-minute distillation of—and play on—noir in dance.[22] The Cheap Detective (1978), starring Peter Falk, is a broad parody of several films, including the Bogart classics The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Carl Reiner's "cut and paste" noir farce, the black-and-white Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), is a well known example of the obviously comedic latter-day parodies. Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) develops a noir plot set in 1940s L.A. around a host of cartoon characters.
"Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man." Robert De Niro as neo-noir anti-hero Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976).
"Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man." Robert De Niro as neo-noir anti-hero Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976).
Noir parodies come in darker tones as well. Murder by Contract (1958), directed by Irving Lerner, is an eighty-one-minute-long deadpan joke on noir, with a denouement as bleak as any of the movies it kids.[23] An ultra-low-budget Columbia Pictures production, it may qualify as the first intentional example of what is now called a neo-noir film; it certainly seems to have been a source of inspiration for Melville's Le Samouraï and Scorsese's Taxi Driver.[23] One of the quintessential 1970s neo-noirs,[24] Taxi Driver caustically deconstructs the "dark" crime film, taking it to an absurd extreme and then offering a conclusion that manages to mock every possible anticipated ending—triumphant, tragic, artfully ambivalent—while being each, all at once.[25] Flirting with splatter status even more brazenly, the Coens' Blood Simple is both an exacting pastiche and an exaggeration of classic noir.[26] Adapted by director Robinson Devor from a novel by Charles Willeford, The Woman Chaser (1999) sends up not just the noir mode but the entire Hollywood filmmaking process,[27] with seemingly each shot staged as the visual equivalent of a Marlowe wisecrack—funny, but it smarts.
In other media, the television series Sledge Hammer! (1986–88) lampoons noir, along with Dirty Harry, capital punishment, and anything else available. Sesame Street (1969–curr.) occasionally casts Kermit the Frog as a private eye; the sketches refer to some of the typical motifs of noir movies, in particular the voiceover. Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion features the recurring character Guy Noir, a hardboiled detective whose adventures always wander into farce (Guy also appears in the Altman-directed film based on Keillor's show). Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger has trod the same not-so-mean streets, both on radio and in comedy albums. Cartoons such as Garfield's Babes and Bullets (1989) and comic strip characters such as Tracer Bullet of Calvin and Hobbes have parodied both film noir and the kindred hardboiled tradition—one of the sources from which film noir sprang and which it now overshadows.[28]
[edit] Approaches to defining noir
The history of film noir criticism has seen fundamental questions become matters of controversy unusually intense for such a field. Where aesthetic debates tend to concentrate on the quality and meaning of specific artworks and the intentions and influences of their creators, in film noir, the debates are regularly much broader. Four large questions may be identified, two of them addressed at the beginning of this article:
Some consider Vertigo (1958) a noir on the basis of plot and tone and various motifs. Others say the combination of color and the specificity of director Alfred Hitchcock's vision exclude it from the category.
Some consider Vertigo (1958) a noir on the basis of plot and tone and various motifs. Others say the combination of color and the specificity of director Alfred Hitchcock's vision exclude it from the category.
* What defines film noir?
* What sort of category is it?
A third question applies at a more specific level, but is sweeping:
* Which movies qualify as film noirs?
This article refers to movies from the classic period as "film noir" if there is a critical consensus supporting that designation. That consensus is almost never complete and is in many cases provisional: The Lost Weekend and The Night of the Hunter, for instance, are now routinely referred to as film noirs, but they were seldom considered as such a quarter-century ago. The process is ongoing: today, a growing number of critics refer to Suspicion (1941), directed by Hitchcock, and Casablanca (1942), directed by Curtiz, as film noirs. Outside of the classic period, consensus is much rarer—movies are considered as noir herein if a substantial number of critics have discussed them as such. In order to decide which films are noir (and which are not), many critics refer to a set of elements they see as marking examples of the mode. This leads to a fourth major point of controversy in the field, one that overlaps with all those noted above:
* What are the identifying characteristics of film noirs?
For instance, some critics insist that a film noir, to be authentic, must have a bleak conclusion (e.g., Criss Cross or D.O.A.), but many acknowledged classics of the genre have clearly happy endings (e.g., Stranger on the Third Floor, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and The Dark Corner), while the tone of many other noir denouements is ambivalent, in a variety of ways. The ambition of this section, then, can be no more than modest: it is an attempt to survey those characteristics most often cited by critics as representative of classic film noirs. As diverse as that set of movies is, the diversity of films from outside the classic period that have been discussed as noir is so great that any similar survey would be impractical; however, those classic noir identifying marks often referenced in neo-noirs—however frequently or seldom they actually appeared in the original films—are noted as are certain signal trends of the latter-day mode.1
[edit] Visual style
Shadows of window blinds fall upon private eye Jake Gittes, performed by Jack Nicholson, in Chinatown (1974).
Shadows of window blinds fall upon private eye Jake Gittes, performed by Jack Nicholson, in Chinatown (1974).
Film noirs tended to use low-key lighting schemes producing stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterning. The shadows of Venetian blinds or banister rods, cast upon an actor, a wall, or an entire set, are an iconic visual in film noir and had already become a cliché well before the neo-noir era. Characters' faces may be partially or wholly obscured by darkness—a relative rarity in conventional Hollywood moviemaking. While black-and-white cinematography is considered by many to be one of the essential attributes of classic noir, color films such as Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Niagara (1953), Slightly Scarlet, and Vertigo (1958) are regarded as noir by varying numbers of critics.
Film noir is also known for its use of Dutch angles, low-angle shots, and wide-angle lenses. Other devices of disorientation relatively common in film noir include shots of people reflected in one or more mirrors, shots through curved or frosted glass or other distorting objects (such as during the strangulation scene in Strangers on a Train), and special effects sequences of a sometimes bizarre nature. Beginning in the late 1940s, location shooting—often involving night-for-night sequences—became increasingly frequent in noir.
In an analysis of the visual approach of Kiss Me Deadly, a late and self-consciously stylized example of classic noir, critic Alain Silver describes how cinematographic choices emphasize the story's themes and mood. In one scene, the characters, seen through a "confusion of angular shapes," thus appear "caught in a tangible vortex or enclosed in a trap." Silver makes a case for how "[s]ide light is used...to reflect character ambivalence," while shots of characters in which they are lit from below "conform to a convention of visual expression which associates shadows cast upward of the face with the unnatural and ominous."[29]
[edit] Structure and narrational devices
Film noirs tend to have unusually convoluted story lines, frequently involving flashbacks, flashforwards, and other techniques that disrupt and sometimes obscure the narrative sequence. Voiceover narration—most characteristically by the protagonist, less frequently by a secondary character or by an unseen, omniscient narrator—is sometimes used as a structuring device. Both flashbacks and voiceover narration are today often used in movies looking to quickly establish their neo-noir bona fides. Bold experiments in cinematic storytelling were sometimes attempted in noir: Lady in the Lake, for example, is shot entirely from the point of view of protagonist Philip Marlowe; the face of star (and director) Robert Montgomery is seen only in mirrors. The Chase (1946) takes oneirism and fatalism as the basis for its fantastical narrative system, redolent of certain horror stories, but with little precedent in the context of a putatively realistic genre. In their different ways, both Sunset Boulevard and D.O.A. are tales told by dead men. Latter-day noir has been in the forefront of structural experimentation in popular cinema, as exemplified by such films as Pulp Fiction and Memento.
[edit] Plots, characters, and settings
Crime, usually murder, is an element of almost all film noirs; in addition to standard-issue greed, jealousy is frequently the criminal motivation. A crime investigation—by a private eye, a police detective (sometimes acting alone), or a concerned amateur—is the most prevalent, but far from dominant, basic plot. In other common plots the protagonists are implicated in heists or con games, or in murderous conspiracies often involving adulterous affairs. False suspicions and accusations of crime are frequent plot elements, as are betrayals and double-crosses. Amnesia is far more common in film noir than in real life, and cigarette smoking can seem virtually mandatory.
Pursued (1947): A Western adopting noir style, or a film noir set in the Wild West?
Pursued (1947): A Western adopting noir style, or a film noir set in the Wild West?
Film noirs tend to revolve around heroes who are more flawed and morally questionable than the norm, often fall guys of one sort or another. The characteristic heroes of noir are described by many critics as "alienated"; in the words of Silver and Ward, "filled with existential bitterness."[30] Certain archetypal characters appear in many film noirs—hardboiled detectives, femmes fatales, corrupt policemen, jealous husbands, intrepid claims adjusters, and down-and-out writers. As can be observed in many movies of an overtly neo-noir nature, the private eye and the femme fatale are the character types with which film noir has come to be most identified, but only a minority of movies now regarded as classic noir feature either. For example, of the nineteen National Film Registry noirs, in only four does the star play a private eye: The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly. Just two others readily qualify as detective stories: Laura and Touch of Evil.
Film noir is often associated with an urban setting, and a few cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, in particular—are the location of many of the classic films. In the eyes of many critics, the city is presented in noir as a "labyrinth" or "maze." Bars, lounges, nightclubs, and gambling dens are frequently the scene of action. The climaxes of a substantial number of film noirs take place in visually complex, often industrial settings, such as refineries, factories, trainyards, power plants—most famously the explosive conclusion of White Heat. In the popular (and, frequently enough, critical) imagination, in noir it is always night and it always rains.
A substantial trend within latter-day noir—dubbed "film soleil" by critic D. K. Holm—heads in precisely the opposite direction, with tales of deception, seduction, and corruption exploiting bright, sun-baked settings, stereotypically the desert or open water, to caustic effect. Significant predecessors from the classic and early post-classic eras include The Lady from Shanghai; the Robert Ryan vehicle Inferno (1953); the French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, Plein soleil (Purple Noon in the U.S., better rendered elsewhere as Blazing Sun or Full Sun; 1960); and director Don Siegel's version of The Killers (1964). The tendency was at its peak during the late 1980s and 1990s, with films such as Dead Calm (1989); After Dark, My Sweet; The Hot Spot; Delusion (1991); and Red Rock West, and TV's Miami Vice, which premiered in 1984 and turned increasingly mordant over its five-year run.
[edit] Worldview, morality, and tone
Film noir is often described as essentially pessimistic. The noir stories that are regarded as most characteristic tell of people trapped in unwanted situations (which, in general, they did not cause but are responsible for exacerbating), striving against random, uncaring fate, and frequently doomed. The movies are seen as depicting a world that is inherently corrupt. Classic film noir has been associated by many critics with the American social landscape of the era—in particular, with a sense of heightened anxiety and alienation that is said to have followed World War II. Nicholas Christopher's opinion is representative: "it is as if the war, and the social eruptions in its aftermath, unleashed demons that had been bottled up in the national psyche."[31] Film noirs, especially those of the 1950s and the height of the Red Scare, are often said to reflect cultural paranoia; Kiss Me Deadly is the noir most frequently marshaled as evidence for this claim.
"You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go." "A lot depends on who's in the saddle." Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep.
"You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go." "A lot depends on who's in the saddle." Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep.
Rather than focusing on simple "black and white" decisions, film noirs tend to pose moral quandaries that are unusually ambiguous and relative—at least within the context of Hollywood cinema. Characters that do pursue goals based on clear-cut moral standards may be more than willing to let the "ends justify the means." For example, the investigator hero of The Stranger, obsessed with tracking down a Nazi war criminal, places other people in mortal danger in order to capture his target. Whereas the Production Code obliged almost all classic noirs to see that steadfast virtue was ultimately rewarded and vice, in the absence of shame and redemption, severely punished (however dramatically incredible the final rendering of mandatory justice might be), a substantial number of latter-day noirs flout such conventions; in their very different ways, the conclusions of Chinatown and The Hot Spot provide two clear examples.
The tone of film noir is generally regarded as downbeat; some critics experience it as darker still—"overwhelmingly black," according to Robert Ottoson.[32] Influential critic (and filmmaker) Paul Schrader wrote in a seminal 1972 essay that "film noir is defined by tone," a tone he seems to perceive as "hopeless."[33] In describing the adaptation of Double Indemnity, leading noir analyst Foster Hirsch describes the "requisite hopeless tone" achieved by the filmmakers, which appears to characterize his view of noir as a whole.[34] On the other hand, definitive film noirs such as The Big Sleep, The Lady from Shanghai, and Double Indemnity itself are famed for their hardboiled repartee, often imbued with sexual innuendo and self-reflexive humor—notes of another tone.
[edit] Notes
Note 1: Opinion is also divided on the English plural of film noir. In the French from which the term derives, the plural is films noirs. Some English speakers prefer films noir, while film noirs is the most common formulation. The latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, acknowledging all three styles as acceptable, gives as the preferred spelling film noirs.
[edit] See also
* List of film noir
[edit] References
1. ^ Greenspun (1973), p. 32.
2. ^ Borde and Chaumeton (2002), p. 2.
3. ^ See Dancyger and Rush (2002), p. 68, for a detailed comparison of screwball comedy and film noir.
4. ^ See Jim Doherty's essay on Carmady at the Thrilling Detective website for a detailed analysis of the private eye character who appears in "The Finger Man."
5. ^ See, e.g., Lyons (2000), p. 36 ("RKO is usually cited as having produced the first true film noir, Stranger on the Third Floor"); Server (1998), p. 158 ("Often credited as the 'first' film noir"); Porfirio (1980), p. 269 ("the first true film noir").
6. ^ Biesen (2005), p. 33.
7. ^ Variety (1940).
8. ^ Schrader (1972), p. 61.
9. ^ Bernstein (1995).
10. ^ McGilligan (1997), pp. 314–317.
11. ^ Schatz (1998), pp. 354–358.
12. ^ See, e.g., entries on individual films in (Silver & Ward 1992, pp. 97–98, 125–126, 311–312).
13. ^ See Naremore (1998), pp. 140–155, on "B Pictures versus Intermediates."
14. ^ Naremore (1998), p. 173.
15. ^ Erickson (2004), p. 26.
16. ^ Clarens (1980), pp. 200–202; Walker (1992), pp. 139–145.
17. ^ Silver and Ward (1992), p. 1.
18. ^ See Palmer (2004), pp. 267–268, for a representative discussion of film noir as an international phenomenon.
19. ^ Aziz (2005), section "Future Noir and Postmodernism : The Irony Begins."
20. ^ a b Silver and Ward (1992), p. 332.
21. ^ Pym, John, ed. (2004), Time Out Film Guide (3rd ed.), Time Out Publishing, pp. 121, 575-576, ISBN 1904978215
22. ^ Richardson, Carl (1992), Autopsy: An Element of Realism in Film Noir, The Scarecrow Press, p. 120, ISBN 0810824965
23. ^ a b Naremore (2008), p. 158 ("One of the earliest and best examples was Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract...which later exerted a strong influence on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. A deadpan black comedy about the American Dream....")
24. ^ See, e.g.,
Horwath, Alexander; Elsaesser, Thomas & King, Noel, eds. (2004), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, Amsterdam University Press, p. 98, ISBN 9053566317 , and
Conard, Mark T. (2007), The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, University Press of Kentuck, p. 2, ISBN 0813124220
25. ^ See, e.g., Kolker (2000), pp. 238–241.
26. ^ Hunter, Stephen (1995), Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem, Bancroft Press, p. 7, ISBN 0963537644
27. ^ The New York Times Film Reviews 1999-2000, Routledge, 2001, p. 158, ISBN 0415936969
28. ^ Irwin, John T (2006), Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir, JHU Press, p. xii, ISBN 0801884357, "...hard-boiled fiction of the thirties and forties prepared the audience and provided the material for... those movies that initiated the American film noir genre, whose black-and-white cycle lasted for twenty years and produced some three hundred films."
29. ^ Silver (1995), pp. 219, 222.
30. ^ Silver and Ward (1992), p. 6.
31. ^ Christopher (1997), p. 37.
32. ^ Ottoson (1981), p. 1.
33. ^ Schrader (1972), p. 54. For characterization of definitive tone as "hopeless," see pp. 53 ("the tone more hopeless") and 57 ("a fatalistic, hopeless mood").
34. ^ Hirsch (2001), p. 7. Hirsch subsequently states, "In character types, mood [emphasis added], themes, and visual composition, Double Indemnity offer[s] a lexicon of noir stylistics" (p. 8).
[edit] Sources
* Aziz, Jamaluddin Bin (2005). "Future Noir," chap. in "Transgressing Women: Investigating Space and the Body in Contemporary Noir Thrillers." Ph. D. dissertation, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University (chapter available online).
* Bernstein, Matthew (1995). “A Tale of Three Cities: The Banning of Scarlet Street,” Cinema Journal 35, no. 1.
* Biesen, Sheri Chinen (2005). Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-8217-6
* Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton (2002 [1955]). A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, trans. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books. ISBN 0-87286-412-X
* Cameron, Ian, ed. (1993). The Book of Film Noir. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-0589-4
* Christopher, Nicholas (1997). Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-684-82803-0
* Clarens, Carlos (1980). Crime Movies: An Illustrated History. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-01262-X
* Dancyger, Ken, and Jeff Rush (2002). Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules. Boston et al.: Focal Press. ISBN 0-240-80477-5
* Erickson, Glenn (2004). "Fate Seeks the Loser: Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour" (collected in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader 4).
* Gorman, Ed, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. (1998). The Big Book of Noir. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-0574-4
* Greenspun, Roger (1973). "Mike Hodges's 'Pulp' Opens; A Private Eye Parody Is Parody of Itself," New York Times, February 9.
* Hirsch, Foster (2001). The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. New York: Da Capo. ISBN 0-306-81039-5
* Kolker, Robert (2000). A Cinema of Loneliness, 3d ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512350-6
* Lyons, Arthur (2000). Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir. New York: Da Capo. ISBN 0-306-80996-6
* McGilligan, Patrick (1997). Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York and London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19375-7
* Naremore, James (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21294-0
* Ottoson, Robert (1981). A Reference Guide to the American Film Noir: 1940–1958. Metuchen, N.J., and London: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-1363-7
* Palmer, R. Barton (2004). "The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The Example of Film Noir," in A Companion To Literature And Film, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (pp. 258–277). Maiden, Mass., Oxford, and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-23053-X
* Porfirio, Robert (1980). "Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)" (collected in Silver and Ward, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference).
* Schatz, Thomas (1998 [1996]). The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, new ed. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19596-2
* Schrader, Paul (1972). "Notes on Film Noir," Film Comment 8, no. 1 (collected in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader [1]).
* Server, Lee (1998). "The Black List: Essential Film Noir" (collected in Gorman et al., The Big Book of Noir).
* Silver, Alain (1995). "Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style," rev. ver. (collected in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader [1]; available online).
* Silver, Alain, and James Ursini (and Robert Porfirio—vol. 3), eds. (2004 [1996–2004]). Film Noir Reader, vols. 1–4. Pompton Plains, N.J.: Limelight Editions (introductions to vols. 1 and 2 and selected essays available online).
* Silver, Alain & Ward, Elizabeth, eds. (1992), Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (3rd ed.), Overlook Press, ISBN 0-87951-479-5
* "Variety staff" (anon.) (1940). "Stranger on the Third Floor" [review], Variety, January 1 (excerpted online).
* Walker, Michael (1992). "Robert Siodmak" (collected in Cameron, The Book of Film Noir).
[edit] Further reading
* Chopra-Gant, Mike (2005). Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir. London: IB Tauris. ISBN 1-85043-838-2
* Cochran, David (2000). America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-813-4
* Copjec, Joan, ed. (1993). Shades of Noir. London and New York: Verso. ISBN 0-86091-625-1
* Dimendberg, Edward (2004). Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01314-X
* Durgnat, Raymond (1970). "Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir," Cinema 6/7 (collected in Gorman et al., The Big Book of Noir, and Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader [1]).
* Hannsberry, Karen Burroughs (1998). Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0429-9
* Hannsberry, Karen Burroughs (2003). Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1484-7
* Holm, D. K. (2005). Film Soleil. Harpenden, UK: Pocket Essentials. ISBN 1-904048-50-1
* Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. (1998). Women in Film Noir, new ed. London: British Film Institute. ISBN 0-85170-666-5
* Keaney, Michael F. (2003). Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era, 1940–1959. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1547-9
* Martin, Richard (1999). Mean Streets and Raging Bulls: The Legacy of Film Noir in Contemporary American Cinema. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow. ISBN 0-8108-3642-4
* Mason, Fran (2002). American Gangster Cinema: From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave. ISBN 0-333-67452-9
* McArthur, Colin (1972). Underworld U.S.A. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-01953-4
* Muller, Eddie (1998). Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York: St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-18076-4
* Neale, Steve (2000). Genre and Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-02606-7
* Palmer, R. Barton (1994). Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir. New York: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-9335-6
* Palmer, R. Barton, ed. (1996). Perspectives on Film Noir. New York: G.K. Hall. ISBN 0-8161-1601-6
* Rabinowitz, Paula (2002). Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-11481-8
* Schatz, Thomas (1997). Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN 0-684-19151-2
* Selby, Spencer (1984). Dark City: The Film Noir. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-89950-103-6
* Shadoian, Jack (2003). Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, 2d ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514291-8
* Silver, Alain, and James Ursini (1999). The Noir Style. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press. ISBN 0-87951-722-0
* Spicer, Andrew (2002). Film Noir. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. ISBN 0-582-43712-1
* Telotte, J. P. (1989). Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06056-3
* Tuska, Jon (1984). Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective. Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23045-5
[edit] External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Film noir
* The Noir Zone Contains details of over 1000 films noir and classic movies
* All-Time 100 Movies Time magazine's noir-heavy list includes a single TV production, The Singing Detective, among its 100 picks
* Classic Noir Online comprehensive survey of over 700 noir titles, with links to actors and directors
* Film Noir Q&A-style essay by leading noir critic-historian Eddie Muller; part of the GreenCine website
* Film Noir: A Bibliography of Materials holdings of the UC Berkeley Library
* Film Noir: An Introduction essay with links to discussions of ten important noirs; part of Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture
* Film Noir Foundation educational resource addressing the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of film noir
* Film Noir Studies writings by John Blaser, with film noir glossary, timeline, and noir-related media
* Le Film Policier Noir extensive discussion (in English) of French noir by Yuri German; part of the Hard-Boiled Mysteries website
* A Guide to Film Noir Genre ten deadeye bullet points from Roger Ebert
* An Introduction to Neo-Noir essay by Lee Horsley
* The Noir Thriller: Introduction excerpt from 2001 book by Lee Horsley
* Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir podcast close readings of many classic noirs by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards
Remember angles and style of editing. Keep it simple and oblique. Strings for music. Get Wikipedia notes on the material to review.
Two silhouetted figures in The Big Combo (1955). The film's cinematographer was John Alton, the creator of many of film noir's iconic images.
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize moral ambiguity and sexual motivation. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression.
The term film noir (French for "black film"), first applied to Hollywood movies by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, was unknown to most American film industry professionals of the era. Cinema historians and critics defined the canon of film noir in retrospect; many of those involved in the making of the classic noirs later professed to be unaware of having created a distinctive type of film.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Problems of definition
* 2 The prehistory of noir
o 2.1 Literary sources
* 3 The classic period
o 3.1 Directors and the business of noir
* 4 Film noir outside the United States
* 5 Neo-noir and echoes of the classic mode
o 5.1 1960s and 1970s
o 5.2 1980s–2000s
+ 5.2.1 Psycho-noir
o 5.3 Science fiction noir
* 6 Film noir parodies
* 7 Approaches to defining noir
o 7.1 Visual style
o 7.2 Structure and narrational devices
o 7.3 Plots, characters, and settings
o 7.4 Worldview, morality, and tone
* 8 Notes
* 9 See also
* 10 References
* 11 Sources
* 12 Further reading
* 13 External links
[edit] Problems of definition
It was not until February 1973 that the New York Times first used the term, describing how the "moods and tensions" in the British private-eye parody Pulp came "out of the collective depths of the film noir".
It was not until February 1973 that the New York Times first used the term, describing how the "moods and tensions" in the British private-eye parody Pulp came "out of the collective depths of the film noir".[1]
"We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel...."[2] This is the first of many attempts to define film noir made by the French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton in their 1955 book Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953 (A Panorama of American Film Noir), the original and seminal extended treatment of the subject. They take pains to point out that not every film noir embodies all five attributes in equal measure—this one is more dreamlike, while this other is particularly brutal. The authors' caveats and repeated efforts at alternative definition have proved telling about noir's reliability as a label: in the five decades since, no definition has achieved anything close to general acceptance. The authors of most substantial considerations of film noir still find it necessary to add on to what are now innumerable attempts at definition. As Borde and Chaumeton suggest, however, the field of noir is very diverse and any generalization about it risks veering into oversimplification.
Film noirs embrace a variety of genres, from the gangster film to the police procedural to the so-called social problem picture, and evidence a variety of visual approaches, from meat-and-potatoes Hollywood mainstream to outré. While many critics refer to film noir as a genre itself, others argue that it can be no such thing. Though noir is often associated with an urban setting, for example, many classic noirs take place mainly in small towns, suburbia, rural areas, or on the open road, so setting can not be its genre determinant, as with the Western. Similarly, while the private eye and the femme fatale are character types conventionally identified with noir, the majority of film noirs feature neither, so there is no character basis for genre designation as with the gangster film. Nor does it rely on anything as evident as the monstrous or supernatural elements of the horror film, the speculative leaps of the science fiction film, or the song-and-dance routines of the musical.
A more analogous case is that of the screwball comedy, widely accepted by film historians as constituting a "genre"—the screwball is defined not by a fundamental attribute, but by a general disposition and a group of elements, some (but rarely and perhaps never all) of which are found in each of the genre's films.[3] However, because of the diversity of noir (much greater than that of the screwball comedy), certain scholars in the field, such as film historian Thomas Schatz, treat it as not a genre but a "style." Alain Silver, the most widely published American critic specializing in film noir studies, refers to it as a "cycle" and a "phenomenon," even as he argues that it has—like certain genres—a consistent set of visual and thematic codes. Other critics treat film noir as a "mood," a "movement," or a "series," or simply address a chosen set of movies from the "period." There is no consensus on the matter.
[edit] The prehistory of noir
Film noir has sources not only in cinema but other artistic media as well. The low-key lighting schemes commonly linked with the classic mode are in the tradition of chiaroscuro and tenebrism, techniques using high contrasts of light and dark developed by 15th- and 16th-century painters associated with Mannerism and the Baroque. Film noir's aesthetics are deeply influenced by German Expressionism, a cinematic movement of the 1910s and 1920s closely related to contemporaneous developments in theater, photography, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The opportunities offered by the booming Hollywood film industry and, later, the threat of growing Nazi power led to the emigration of many important film artists working in Germany who had either been directly involved in the Expressionist movement or studied with its practitioners. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Michael Curtiz brought dramatic lighting techniques and a psychologically expressive approach to mise-en-scène with them to Hollywood, where they would make some of the most famous of classic noirs. Lang's 1931 masterwork, the German M, is among the first major crime films of the sound era to join a characteristically noirish visual style with a noir-type plot, one in which the protagonist is a criminal (as are his most successful pursuers). M was also the occasion for the first star performance by Peter Lorre, who would go on to act in several formative American noirs of the classic era.
The "original" femme fatale, Marlene Dietrich, in a publicity shot for Josef von Sternberg's mordant melodrama Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel; 1930).
The "original" femme fatale, Marlene Dietrich, in a publicity shot for Josef von Sternberg's mordant melodrama Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel; 1930).
By 1931, Curtiz had already been in Hollywood for half a decade, making as many as six films a year. Movies of his such as 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) and Private Detective 62 (1933) are among the early Hollywood sound films arguably classifiable as noir. Giving Expressionist-affiliated moviemakers particularly free stylistic rein were Universal horror pictures such as Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932)—the former photographed and the latter directed by the Berlin-trained Karl Freund—and The Black Cat (1934), directed by Austrian émigré Edgar G. Ulmer. The Universal horror that comes closest to noir, both in story and sensibility, however, is The Invisible Man (1933), directed by Englishman James Whale and shot by American Carl Laemmle Jr.
The Vienna-born but largely American-raised Josef von Sternberg was directing in Hollywood at the same time. Films of his such as Shanghai Express (1932) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), with their hothouse eroticism and baroque visual style, specifically anticipate central elements of classic noir. The commercial and critical success of Sternberg's silent Underworld in 1927 was largely responsible for spurring a trend of Hollywood gangster films. Popular movies in the genre such as Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) demonstrated that there was an audience for crime dramas with morally reprehensible protagonists.
An important, and possibly influential, cinematic antecedent to classic noir was 1930s French poetic realism, with its romantic, fatalistic attitude and celebration of doomed heroes; an acknowledged influence on certain trends in noir was 1940s Italian neorealism, with its emphasis on quasi-documentary authenticity. (The Warner Bros. drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang [1932] presciently combines these sensibilities.) Director Jules Dassin of The Naked City (1948) pointed to the neorealists as inspiring his use of on-location photography with nonprofessional extras; three years earlier, The House on 92nd Street, directed by Henry Hathaway, demonstrated the parallel influence of the cinematic newsreel. A few movies now considered noir strove to depict comparatively ordinary protagonists with unspectacular lives in a manner occasionally evocative of neorealism—the most famous example is The Lost Weekend (1945), directed by Billy Wilder, yet another Vienna-born, Berlin-trained American auteur. (In turn, one of the primary influences on neorealism was the 1930 German film Menschen am Sonntag, codirected and cowritten by Siodmak, cowritten by Wilder, and codirected and produced by Ulmer.) Among those movies not themselves considered film noirs, perhaps none had a greater effect on the development of the genre than America's own Citizen Kane (1941), the landmark motion picture directed by Orson Welles. Its Sternbergian visual intricacy and complex, voiceover-driven narrative structure are echoed in dozens of classic film noirs.
[edit] Literary sources
The October 1934 issue of Black Mask featured the first appearance of the detective character whom Raymond Chandler would develop into the famous Philip Marlowe.
The October 1934 issue of Black Mask featured the first appearance of the detective character whom Raymond Chandler would develop into the famous Philip Marlowe.[4]
The primary literary influence on film noir was the hardboiled school of American detective and crime fiction, led in its early years by such writers as Dashiell Hammett (whose first novel, Red Harvest, was published in 1929) and James M. Cain (whose The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared five years later), and popularized in pulp magazines such as Black Mask. The classic film noirs The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Glass Key (1942) were based on novels by Hammett; Cain's novels provided the basis for Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Slightly Scarlet (1956; adapted from Love's Lovely Counterfeit). A decade before the classic era, a story of Hammett's was the source for the gangster melodrama City Streets (1931), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and photographed by Lee Garmes, who worked regularly with Sternberg. Wedding a style and story both with many noir characteristics, released the month before Lang's M, City Streets has a claim to being the first major film noir.
Raymond Chandler, who debuted as a novelist with The Big Sleep in 1939, soon became the most famous author of the hardboiled school. Not only were Chandler's novels turned into major noirs—Murder, My Sweet (1944; adapted from Farewell, My Lovely), The Big Sleep (1946), and Lady in the Lake (1947)—he was an important screenwriter in the genre as well, producing the scripts for Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951). Where Chandler, like Hammett, centered most of his novels and stories on the character of the private eye, Cain featured less heroic protagonists and focused more on psychological exposition than on crime solving; the Cain approach has come to be identified with a subset of the hardboiled genre dubbed "noir fiction." For much of the 1940s, one of the most prolific and successful authors of this often downbeat brand of suspense tale was Cornell Woolrich (sometimes using the pseudonyms George Hopley or William Irish). No writer's published work provided the basis for more film noirs of the classic period than Woolrich's: thirteen in all, including Black Angel (1946), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and Fear in the Night (1947).
A crucial literary source for film noir, now often overlooked, was W. R. Burnett, whose first novel to be published was Little Caesar, in 1929. It would be turned into the hit for Warner Bros. in 1931; the following year, Burnett was hired to write dialogue for Scarface, while Beast of the City was adapted from one of his stories. Some critics regard these latter two movies as film noirs, despite their early date. Burnett's characteristic narrative approach fell somewhere between that of the quintessential hardboiled writers and their noir fiction compatriots—his protagonists were often heroic in their way, a way just happening to be that of the gangster. During the classic era, his work, either as author or screenwriter, was the basis for seven movies now widely regarded as film noirs, including three of the most famous: High Sierra (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
[edit] The classic period
The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir. While City Streets and other pre-WWII crime melodramas such as Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once (1937), both directed by Fritz Lang, are considered full-fledged noir by some critics, most categorize them as "proto-noir" or in similar terms. The movie now most commonly cited as the first "true" film noir is Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), directed by Latvian-born, Soviet-trained Boris Ingster.[5] Hungarian émigré Peter Lorre, who played secondary roles in bigger-budgeted movies, was top-billed, though here too he did not play the lead. Stranger on the Third Floor was not recognized as the beginning of a trend, let alone a new genre, for many decades. Indeed, even though modestly budgeted—at the high end of the B movie scale—it still lost its studio, RKO, $56,000, almost a third of its total cost.[6] Variety found Ingster's work "too studied and when original, lacks the flare to hold attention. It's a film too arty for average audiences, and too humdrum for others."[7]
Out of the Past (1947) features many of the genre's hallmarks: a cynical private detective as the protagonist, a femme fatale, multiple flashbacks with voiceover narration, dramatic chiaroscuro photography, and a fatalistic mood leavened with provocative banter. The film stars noir icons Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer.
Out of the Past (1947) features many of the genre's hallmarks: a cynical private detective as the protagonist, a femme fatale, multiple flashbacks with voiceover narration, dramatic chiaroscuro photography, and a fatalistic mood leavened with provocative banter. The film stars noir icons Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer.
Most of the film noirs of the classic period were similarly low- and modestly budgeted features without major stars—B movies either literally or in spirit. In this production context, writers, directors, cinematographers, and other craftsmen were relatively free from typical big-picture constraints. Enforcement of the Production Code ensured that no movie character could literally get away with murder or be seen sharing a bed with anyone but a spouse; within those bounds, however, many films now identified as noir feature plot elements and dialogue that were—in some cases, still are—quite risqué. Thematically, film noirs as a group were most exceptional for the relative frequency with which they centered on women of questionable virtue—a focus that had become rare in Hollywood films after the mid-1930s and the end of the pre-Code era. The signal movie in this vein was Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder; setting the mold was Barbara Stanwyck's unforgettable femme fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson—an apparent nod to Marlene Dietrich, who had built her extraordinary career playing such characters for Sternberg. An A-level feature all the way, the movie's commercial success and seven Oscar nominations made it probably the most influential of the early noirs. A slew of now-renowned noir "bad girls" would follow, such as those played by Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946), Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946), and Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947). The iconic noir counterpart to the femme fatale, the private eye, came to the fore in movies such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, and Murder, My Sweet (1944), with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe. Other seminal noir sleuths served larger institutions, such as Dana Andrews's police detective in Laura (1944), Edmond O'Brien's insurance investigator in The Killers, and Edward G. Robinson's government agent in The Stranger (1946).
Many claim that there is a significant distinction between the noirs of the 1940s and those of the 1950s—other than the relative disappearance of the private eye as a lead character there is no consensus on how that distinction manifests, but it often comes down to a view that the later classic noirs tend to be more "extreme" in one way or another. A prime example is Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Based on a novel by Mickey Spillane, the best-selling of all the hardboiled authors, here the protagonist is a private eye, Mike Hammer. As described by Paul Schrader, "Robert Aldrich's teasing direction carries noir to its sleaziest and most perversely erotic. Hammer overturns the underworld in search of the 'great whatsit'...[which] turns out to be—joke of jokes—an exploding atomic bomb."[8] Orson Welles's baroquely styled Touch of Evil (1958) is frequently cited as the last noir of the classic period. Some scholars believe film noir never really ended, but continued to transform even as the characteristic noir visual style began to seem dated and changing production conditions led Hollywood in different directions—in this view, post-1950s films in the noir tradition are seen as part of a continuity with classic noir. A majority of critics, however, regard comparable movies made outside the classic era to be something other than genuine film noirs. They regard true film noir as belonging to a temporally and geographically limited cycle or period, treating subsequent films that evoke the classics as fundamentally different due to general shifts in moviemaking style and latter-day awareness of noir as a historical source for allusion.
During these two decades in which noir is now seen as flourishing, conventional A films, however emotionally tortuous, were ultimately expected to convey positive, reassuring messages; in terms of style, invisible camerawork and editing techniques, flattering soft lighting schemes, and deluxely trimmed sets were the rule. The makers of film noir turned all this on its head, creating sophisticated, sometimes bleak dramas tinged with mistrust, cynicism, and a sense of the absurd, in settings that were frequently either real-life urban or budget-saving minimalist, with often strikingly expressionist lighting and unsettling techniques such as wildly skewed camera angles and convoluted flashbacks. The noir style gradually influenced the mainstream—even beyond Hollywood.
[edit] Directors and the business of noir
A scene from In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray based on a novel by noir fiction writer Dorothy B. Hughes. Two of noir's defining actors, Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart, portray star-crossed lovers in the film.
A scene from In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray based on a novel by noir fiction writer Dorothy B. Hughes. Two of noir's defining actors, Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart, portray star-crossed lovers in the film.
While the inceptive noir, Stranger on the Third Floor, was a B picture directed by a virtual unknown, many of the film noirs that have earned enduring fame were A-list productions by name-brand moviemakers. Debuting as a director with The Maltese Falcon (1941), John Huston followed with the major noirs Key Largo (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Opinion is divided on the noir status of several of Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers from the era; at least four qualify by consensus: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), and The Wrong Man (1956). Otto Preminger's success with Laura (1944) made his name and helped establish 20th Century-Fox's reputation for well-appointed A noirs. Among Hollywood's most celebrated directors of the era, arguably none worked more often in a noir mode than Preminger—his other classic noirs include Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) (all for Fox) and Angel Face (1952). A half-decade after Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder made Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951), noirs that weren't so much crime dramas as satires on, respectively, Hollywood and the news media. In a Lonely Place (1950) was Nicholas Ray's breakthrough; his other noirs include his debut, They Live by Night (1948), and On Dangerous Ground (1952).
Orson Welles had notorious problems with financing, but his three film noirs were reasonably well budgeted: The Lady from Shanghai (1947) received top-level, "prestige" backing, while both The Stranger—his most conventional film—and Touch of Evil —an unmistakably personal work—were funded at levels lower but still commensurate with headlining releases. Like The Stranger, Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1945) was a production of the independent International Pictures. Lang's follow-up, Scarlet Street (1945), was one of the few classic noirs to be officially censored: filled with erotic innuendo, it was temporarily banned in Milwaukee, Atlanta, and New York State.[9] Scarlet Street was a semi-independent—cosponsored by Universal and Lang's own Diana Productions, of which the movie's costar, Joan Bennett, was the second biggest shareholder. Lang, Bennett, and her husband, Universal veteran and Diana production head Walter Wanger, would make Secret Beyond the Door (1948) in similar fashion.[10] Before he was forced abroad for political reasons, director Jules Dassin made two classic noirs that also straddled the major/independent line: Brute Force (1947) and the influential documentary-style Naked City were developed by producer Mark Hellinger, who had an "inside/outside" contract with Universal similar to Wanger's.[11] Years earlier, working at Warner Bros., Hellinger had produced three films for Raoul Walsh, the proto-noirs They Drive by Night (1940) and Manpower (1941) and the recognized classic High Sierra (1941). Walsh had no great name recognition during his half-century as a working director, but his noirs—White Heat (1949) and The Enforcer (1951) would follow—had A-list stars and are now regarded as important examples of the cycle.[12] In addition to the aforementioned, other directors associated with top-of-the-bill Hollywood film noirs include Edward Dmytryk (Murder, My Sweet [1944]; Crossfire [1947]), the first important noir director to fall prey to the industry blacklist, as well as Henry Hathaway (The Dark Corner [1946], Kiss of Death [1947]) and John Farrow (The Big Clock [1948], His Kind of Woman [1951]).
As noted above, however, most of the Hollywood films now considered classic noirs fall into the broad category of the "B movie."[13] Some were Bs in the most precise sense, produced to run on the bottom of double bills by a low-budget unit of one of the major studios or by one of the smaller, so-called Poverty Row outfits, from the relatively well-off Monogram to shakier ventures such as Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC). Jacques Tourneur had made over thirty Hollywood Bs (a few now highly regarded, most completely forgotten) before directing the A-level Out of the Past, considered by some critics the pinnacle of classic noir. Movies with budgets a step up the ladder, known as "intermediates" within the industry, might be treated as A or B pictures depending on the circumstance—Monogram created a new unit, Allied Artists, in the late 1940s to focus on this sort of production. Such films have long colloquially been referred to as B movies. Robert Wise (Born to Kill [1947], The Set-Up [1949]) and Anthony Mann (T-Men [1947], Raw Deal [1948]) each made a series of impressive intermediates, many of them noirs, before graduating to steady work on big-budget productions. Mann did some of his finest work with cinematographer John Alton, a specialist in what critic James Naremore describes as "hypnotic moments of light-in-darkness."[14] He Walked by Night (1948), shot by Alton and, though credited solely to Alfred Werker, directed in large part by Mann, demonstrates their technical mastery and exemplifies the late 1940s trend of "police procedural" crime dramas. Put out, like other Mann–Alton noirs, by the small Eagle-Lion company, it was the direct inspiration for the Dragnet series, which debuted on radio in 1949 and television in 1951.
Detour (1945) cost $117,000 to make when the biggest Hollywood studios spent around $600,000 on the average feature. But the accountants at small PRC weren't happy—it was 30% over budget.
Detour (1945) cost $117,000 to make when the biggest Hollywood studios spent around $600,000 on the average feature. But the accountants at small PRC weren't happy—it was 30% over budget.[15]
Directors such as Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street [1953], Underworld U.S.A. [1961]), Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy [1950], The Big Combo [1955]), and Phil Karlson (Kansas City Confidential [1952], The Brothers Rico [1957]) built now well-respected oeuvres largely at the B-movie/intermediate level. (Dalton Trumbo—like Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten—wrote the Gun Crazy screenplay disguised by a front while still blacklisted.) The work of others such as Felix E. Feist (The Devil Thumbs a Ride [1947], Tomorrow Is Another Day [1951]) await critical rediscovery. Edgar G. Ulmer spent almost his entire Hollywood career working at B studios—once in a while on projects that achieved intermediate status; for the most part, on unmistakable Bs. In 1945, while at PRC, he directed one of the all-time noir cult classics, Detour. Ulmer's other noirs include Strange Illusion (1945), also for PRC; Blonde Ice (1948), distributed by tiny Film Classics; and Murder Is My Beat (1955), for Allied Artists.
A number of low and modestly budgeted noirs were made by independent, often actor-owned, companies contracting with one of the larger outfits for distribution. Serving as producer, writer, director, and "star," Hugo Haas made several such films, including Pickup (1951) and The Other Woman (1954). It was in this way that accomplished noir actress Ida Lupino became the sole female director in Hollywood during the late 1940s and much of the 1950s—her best-known film is The Hitch-Hiker (1953), developed by her company, The Filmakers, with support and distribution by RKO. It is one of the seven classic film noirs produced largely outside of the major studios that have been chosen to date for the United States National Film Registry. Of the others, one was a small-studio release: Detour. Four were independent productions distributed by United Artists, the "studio without a studio": Gun Crazy; Kiss Me Deadly; D.O.A. (1950), directed by Rudolph Maté; and Sweet Smell of Success (1957), directed by Alexander Mackendrick. One was an independent distributed by MGM, the industry leader: Force of Evil (1948), directed by Abraham Polonsky and starring John Garfield, both of whom would be blacklisted in the 1950s. Independent production usually meant restricted circumstances, but not always—Sweet Smell of Success, for instance, despite the original plans of the production team, was clearly not made on the cheap, though like many other cherished A-budget noirs it might be said to have a B-movie soul.
Perhaps no director better displayed that spirit than the German-born Robert Siodmak, who had already made a score of films before his 1940 arrival in Hollywood. Working mostly on A features, he made eight movies now regarded as classic film noirs (a figure matched only by Lang and Mann). In addition to The Killers, Burt Lancaster's debut and a Hellinger/Universal coproduction, Siodmak's other important contributions to the genre include 1944's Phantom Lady (a top-of-the-line B and Woolrich adaptation), the ironically titled Christmas Holiday (1944), and Cry of the City (1948). Criss Cross (1949), with Lancaster again the lead, exemplifies how Siodmak brought the virtues of the B-movie to the A noir. In addition to the relatively looser constraints on character and message at lower budgets, the nature of B production lent itself to the noir style for directly economic reasons: dim lighting not only saved on electrical costs but helped cloak cheap sets (mist and smoke also served the cause); night shooting was often compelled by hurried production schedules; plots with obscure motivations and intriguingly elliptical transitions were sometimes the consequence of scripts written in haste, not every scene of which was there always time or money to shoot. In Criss Cross, Siodmak achieves all these effects with purpose, wrapping them around Yvonne De Carlo, playing the most understandable of femme fatales, Dan Duryea, in one of his deliciously charismatic villain roles, and Lancaster—already an established star—as an ordinary joe turned armed robber, a romantic obsessive on a one-way road to ruin.[16]
Classic-era film noirs in the National Film Registry
1940-49
The Maltese Falcon | Shadow of a Doubt | Laura | Double Indemnity | Mildred Pierce | Detour |
The Big Sleep | Notorious | Out of the Past | Force of Evil | The Naked City | White Heat
1950-58
D.O.A. | Gun Crazy | Sunset Boulevard | In a Lonely Place | The Hitch-Hiker |
Kiss Me Deadly | The Night of the Hunter | Sweet Smell of Success | Touch of Evil
[edit] Film noir outside the United States
Some critics regard classic film noir as a cycle exclusive to the United States; e.g., Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward: "With the Western, film noir shares the distinction of being an indigenous American form...a wholly American film style."[17] Others, however, regard noir as an international phenomenon.[18] Even before the beginning of the generally accepted classic period, there were movies made far from Hollywood that can be seen in retrospect as film noirs, for example, the French productions Pépé le Moko (1937), directed by Jules Duvivier, and Le Jour se lève (1939), directed by Marcel Carné.
Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows; 1958). The film features a score composed and performed by jazz musician Miles Davis.
Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows; 1958). The film features a score composed and performed by jazz musician Miles Davis.
During the classic period, there were many films produced outside the United States, particularly in France, that share elements of style, theme, and sensibility with American film noirs and may themselves be included in the genre's canon. In certain cases, the interrelationship with Hollywood noir is obvious: American-born director Jules Dassin moved to France in the early 1950s as a result of the Hollywood blacklist, and made one of the most famous French film noirs, Rififi (1955). Other well-known French films often classified as noir include Quai des Orfèvres (1947), Le Salaire de la peur (released in English-speaking countries as The Wages of Fear) (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955), all directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot; Casque d'or (1952) and Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), both directed by Jacques Becker; and Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958), directed by Louis Malle. French director Jean-Pierre Melville is widely recognized for his tragic, minimalist film noirs—Quand tu liras cette lettre (1953) and Bob le flambeur (1955), from the classic period, were followed by Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967), and Le Cercle rouge (1970).
A number of thrillers produced in Great Britain during the classic period are also frequently referred to as film noirs, including Contraband (1940) and The Small Back Room (1949), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; Brighton Rock (1947), directed by John Boulting; They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti; and Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), directed by Lewis Gilbert. Terence Fisher directed several low-budget thrillers in a noir mode for Hammer Film Productions, including The Last Page (aka Man Bait; 1952), Stolen Face (1952), and Murder by Proxy (aka Blackout; 1954). Before leaving for France, Jules Dassin had been obliged by political pressure to shoot his last English-language film of the classic noir period in Great Britain: Night and the City (1950). Though it was conceived in the United States and was not only directed by an American but also stars two American actors—Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney—it is technically a UK production, financed by 20th Century-Fox's British subsidiary. The most famous of classic British noirs is director Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), like Brighton Rock based on a Graham Greene novel. Set in Vienna immediately after World War II, it stars Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, both prominent American actors who starred in U.S. film noirs; despite being a completely British production, the movie is sometimes discussed as if it is a classic Hollywood noir.
Stray Dog (1949), directed and cowritten by Akira Kurosawa, contains many cinematographic and narrative elements associated with classic American film noir.
Stray Dog (1949), directed and cowritten by Akira Kurosawa, contains many cinematographic and narrative elements associated with classic American film noir.
Elsewhere, Italian director Luchino Visconti adapted Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice as Ossessione (1943), regarded both as one of the great noirs and a seminal film in the development of neorealism. (This was not even the first screen version of Cain's novel, having been preceded by the French Le Dernier tournant in 1939.) In Japan, the celebrated Akira Kurosawa directed several movies recognizable as film noirs, including Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), and High and Low (1963).
Among the first major neo-noir films—the term often applied to movies that consciously refer back to the classic noir tradition—was the French Tirez sur la pianiste (1960), directed by François Truffaut from a novel by one of the gloomiest of American noir fiction writers, David Goodis. Noir crime films and melodramas have been produced in many countries in the post-classic area, some of them quintessentially self-aware neo-noirs—for example, Il Conformista (1969; Italy), Der Amerikanische Freund (1977; Germany), The Element of Crime (1984; Denmark), As Tears Go By (1988; Hong Kong)—others simply sharing narrative elements and a version of the hardboiled sensibility associated with classic noir—The Castle of Sand (1974; Japan), Insomnia (1997; Norway), Croupier (1998; UK), Blind Shaft (2003; China).
[edit] Neo-noir and echoes of the classic mode
[edit] 1960s and 1970s
While it is hard to draw a line between some of the noir films of the early 1960s such as Blast of Silence (1961) and Cape Fear (1962) and the noirs of the late 1950s, new trends emerged in the post-classic era. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer, Shock Corridor (1962), directed by Samuel Fuller, and Brainstorm (1965), directed by experienced noir character actor William Conrad, all treat the theme of mental dispossession within stylistic and tonal frameworks derived from classic film noir.
In a different vein, filmmakers such as Arthur Penn (Mickey One [1964], clearly drawing inspiration from Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste and other French New Wave films), John Boorman (Point Blank [1967], similarly caught up, though in the Nouvelle vague's deeper waters), and Alan J. Pakula (Klute [1971]) directed movies that knowingly related themselves to the original film noirs, inviting audiences in on the game. Conscious acknowledgment of the classic era's conventions, as historical archetypes to be revived, rejected, or reimagined, is what puts the "neo" in neo-noir, according to many critics. Though several late classic noirs, Kiss Me Deadly in particular, were entirely self-knowing and post-traditional in conception, none that were top- or midbudgeted (like Aldrich's masterpiece) tipped its hand in a way noticeable to most audiences of the time. The first broadly popular crime drama of an unmistakable neo-noir nature was not a movie, but the TV series Peter Gunn (1958–61), created by Blake Edwards.
Neo-noir/Take 1: As car thief Michel Poiccard, aka Laszlo Kovacs, Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1960). Poiccard reveres and styles himself after Humphrey Bogart' s screen persona.
Neo-noir/Take 1: As car thief Michel Poiccard, aka Laszlo Kovacs, Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1960). Poiccard reveres and styles himself after Humphrey Bogart' s screen persona.
A manifest affiliation with noir traditions—which, by its nature, allows for different sorts of commentary on them to be inferred—can also provide the basis for explicit critiques of those traditions. The first major film to work this angle (that might be thought of as the most "neo" of "neo") was French director Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1960), which pays its literal respects to Bogart and his crime films while brandishing a bold new style for a new day. In 1973, director Robert Altman, who had worked on Peter Gunn, flipped off noir piety with The Long Goodbye. Based on the novel by Raymond Chandler, it features one of Bogart's most famous characters, but in iconoclastic fashion: Philip Marlowe, the prototypical hardboiled detective, is replayed as a hapless misfit, almost laughably out of touch with contemporary mores and morality. Where Altman's subversion of the film noir mythos was so irreverent as to anger many contemporary critics, around the same time Woody Allen was paying affectionate, at points idolatrous homage to the classic mode with Play It Again, Sam (1972).
The most acclaimed of the neo-noirs of the era was director Roman Polanski's 1974 Chinatown. Written by Robert Towne, it is set in 1930s Los Angeles, an accustomed noir locale nudged back some few years in a way that makes the pivotal loss of innocence in the story even crueler. Where Polanski and Towne raised noir to a black apogee by turning rearward, director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader brought the noir attitude crashing into the present day with Taxi Driver (1976), a cackling, bloody-minded gloss on bicentennial America. In 1978, Walter Hill wrote and directed the The Driver, a chase movie as might have been imagined by Jean-Pierre Melville in an especially abstract mood. Hill was already a central figure in 1970s noir of a more straightforward manner, having written the script for director Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), adapting a novel by pulp master Jim Thompson, as well as for two tough private eye films: an original screenplay for Hickey & Boggs (1972) and an adaptation of a novel by Ross Macdonald, the leading literary descendant of Hammett and Chandler, for The Drowning Pool (1975). Some of the strongest 1970s noirs, in fact, were unwinking remakes of the classics, "neo" mostly be default: Altman's heartbreaking Thieves Like Us (1973), based on the same source as Ray's They Live by Night, and Farewell, My Lovely (1975), the Chandler tale made classically as Murder, My Sweet, remade here with Robert Mitchum in his last notable noir role. Detective series, prevalent on American television during the period, updated the hardboiled tradition in different ways, but the show conjuring the most noir tone was a horror crossover touched with shaggy, Long Goodbye–style humor: Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–75), featuring a Chicago newspaper reporter investigating strange, usually supernatural occurrences.
[edit] 1980s–2000s
Neo-noir/Take 2: Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell, a femme fatale for the 1990s—and the ages—in the smash box-office hit Basic Instinct (1992). She is seen here in the notorious interrogation scene.
Neo-noir/Take 2: Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell, a femme fatale for the 1990s—and the ages—in the smash box-office hit Basic Instinct (1992). She is seen here in the notorious interrogation scene.
The turn of the decade brought Scorsese's black-and-white Raging Bull (cowritten by Schrader); an acknowledged masterpiece—often voted the greatest film of the 1980s in critics' polls—it is also a retreat, telling a story of a boxer's moral self-destruction that recalls in both theme and visual ambience noir dramas such as Body and Soul (1947) and Champion (1949). From 1981, the popular Body Heat, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, invokes a different set of classic noir elements, this time in a humid, erotically charged Florida setting; its success confirmed the commercial viability of neo-noir, at a time when the major Hollywood studios were becoming increasingly risk averse. The mainstreaming of neo-noir is evident in such films as Black Widow (1987), Shattered (1991), and Final Analysis (1992). Few neo-noirs have made more money or more wittily updated the tradition of the noir double-entendre than Basic Instinct (1992), directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Joe Eszterhas. Over the past twenty-five years, the big-budget auteur to work most frequently in a neo-noir mode has been Michael Mann, with the films Thief (1981), Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004), and the 1980s TV series Miami Vice and Crime Story. Mann's output exemplifies a primary strain of neo-noir, in which classic themes and tropes are revisited in a contemporary setting with an up-to-date visual style and rock- or hip hop–based musical soundtrack. Like Chinatown, its more complex predecessor, Curtis Hanson's Oscar-winning L.A. Confidential (1997), based on the James Ellroy novel, demonstrates an opposite tendency—the deliberately retro film noir; its tale of corrupt cops and femme fatales is seemingly lifted straight from a movie of 1953, the year in which it is set.
Working generally with much smaller budgets, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have created one of the most substantial film oeuvres influenced by classic noir, with movies such as Blood Simple (1984) and Fargo (1996), considered by some a supreme work in the neo-noir mode. The Coens' most recent nod to the noir tradition is The Man Who Wasn't There (2001); a black-and-white crime melodrama set in 1949, it features a scene apparently staged to mirror the one from Out of the Past pictured above. The Coens cross noir with other generic lines in the gangster drama Miller's Crossing (1990)—loosely based on the Dashiell Hammett novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key—and the comedy The Big Lebowski (1998), a tribute to Chandler and an homage to Altman's version of The Long Goodbye.
Perhaps no contemporary films better reflect the classic noir A-movie-with-a-B-movie-soul than those of director-writer Quentin Tarantino; neo-noirs of his such as Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) display a relentlessly self-reflexive, sometimes tongue-in-cheek sensibility, similar to the work of the New Wave directors and the Coens. Other movies from the era readily identifiable as neo-noir (some retro, some more au courant) include director John Dahl's Kill Me Again (1989), Red Rock West (1992), and The Last Seduction (1993); four adaptations of novels by Jim Thompson—The Kill-Off (1989), After Dark, My Sweet (1990), The Grifters (1990), and the remake of The Getaway (1994); and many more, including adaptations of the work of other major noir fiction writers: The Hot Spot (1990), from Hell Hath No Fury, by Charles Williams; Miami Blues (1990), from the novel by Charles Willeford; and Out of Sight (1998), from the novel by Elmore Leonard. On television, the series Moonlighting (1985–89) paid homage to classic noir while demonstrating an unusual appreciation of the sense of humor often found in the original cycle. Between 1983 and 1989, Mickey Spillane's hardboiled private eye Mike Hammer was played with wry gusto by Stacy Keach in a series and several stand-alone TV movies (an unsuccessful revival followed in 1997–98). The British miniseries The Singing Detective (1986), written by Dennis Potter, tells the story of a mystery writer named Philip Marlow; widely considered one of the finest neo-noirs in any medium, some critics cite it as the greatest television production of all time.
Neo-noir/Take 3: Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick (2005). The movie's characters, most of them high-school students, speak in idiosyncratic English reminiscent of noir novelists Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Neo-noir/Take 3: Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick (2005). The movie's characters, most of them high-school students, speak in idiosyncratic English reminiscent of noir novelists Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Among the leading Hollywood directors of noir during the current decade has been the British-born Christopher Nolan, with the acclaimed Memento (2000), the remake of Insomnia (2002), and his dark-toned superhero films, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). Harsh Times (2006) is written and directed by David Ayer, also the screenwriter for Training Day (2001) and, adapting a story by James Ellroy, Dark Blue (2002). The latter two update the classic noir bad-cop tale, typified by Shield for Murder (1954) and Rogue Cop (1954). In 2005, Shane Black directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, basing his screenplay in part on a crime novel by Brett Halliday, who published his first stories back in the 1920s. The film plays with an awareness not only of classic noir but also of neo-noir reflexivity itself, making it a model neo²-noir. Director Sean Penn's The Pledge (2001), though adapted from a very self-reflexive novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, plays noir comparatively straight, to devastating effect. The most commercially successful of recent neo-noirs is Sin City (2005), directed by Robert Rodriguez in extravagantly stylized black and white with the odd bit of color. The film is based on a series of comic books created by Frank Miller (credited as the movie's codirector), which are in turn openly indebted to the works of Spillane and other pulp mystery authors. Similarly, graphic novels provide the basis for Road to Perdition (2002), directed by Sam Mendes, and A History of Violence (2005), directed by David Cronenberg; the latter, according to many critics, is the neo-noir of the decade. Writer-director Rian Johnson's Brick (2005), featuring present-day high schoolers speaking a version of 1930s hardboiled argot, won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the Sundance Film Festival. The television series Veronica Mars (2004–7) also brought a youth-oriented twist to film noir.
[edit] Psycho-noir
Night club chanteuse Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini, sings the title song in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).
Night club chanteuse Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini, sings the title song in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).
The characteristic work of David Lynch combines film noir tropes with scenarios driven by disturbed characters such as the sociopathic criminal played by Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet (1986). Lost Highway (1996) and Mulholland Drive (2001) feature delusionary protagonists. The Twin Peaks cycle, both TV series (1990–91) and movie, Fire Walk with Me (1992), is built on a succession of bizarro spasms. This Lynchian mode has come to be grouped with other noir-influenced films sharing similarly skewed centers of interest as "psycho-noir." Two of the earliest examples after Blue Velvet are literary adaptations directed by David Cronenberg, Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash (1996).
Director David Fincher followed the noir science fiction of Alien³ (1992) and the immensely successful neo-noir Se7en (1995) with a film that earns much greater regard today than it did on original release, the psycho-noir Fight Club (1999). Nolan's Memento, as well as his debut feature, the British Following (1998), may both be classified as psycho-noir. The torments of The Machinist (2004), directed by Brad Anderson, evoke both Fight Club and Memento. In the first decade of the new millennium, Park Chan-wook of South Korea has been the most prominent director to work regularly in a psycho-noir mode—a current of noir that can be traced back through Taxi Driver, through Brainstorm, through White Heat, all the way to Stranger on the Third Floor and further still, to Fritz Lang's original M.
[edit] Science fiction noir
Harrison Ford as detective Rick Deckard in Blade Runner (1982). As with many classic film noirs, the story is set in a rainy version of Los Angeles.
Harrison Ford as detective Rick Deckard in Blade Runner (1982). As with many classic film noirs, the story is set in a rainy version of Los Angeles.
In the post-classic era, the most significant trend in noir crossovers has involved science fiction. In Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), Lemmy Caution is the name of the old-school private eye in the city of tomorrow. The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972) centers on another implacable investigator and an amnesiac named Welles. Soylent Green (1973), the first major American example, portrays a dystopian, near-future world via a self-evidently noir detection plot; starring Charlton Heston (the lead in Touch of Evil), it also features classic noir standbys Joseph Cotten, Edward G. Robinson, and Whit Bissell. The movie was directed by Richard Fleischer, who two decades before had directed several strong B noirs, including Armored Car Robbery (1950) and The Narrow Margin (1952).
The cynical and stylish perspective of classic film noir had a formative effect on the cyberpunk genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1980s; the movie most directly influential on cyberpunk was Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, which pays clear and evocative homage to the classic noir mode (Scott would subsequently direct the poignant noir crime melodrama Someone to Watch Over Me [1987]). Scholar Jamaluddin Bin Aziz has observed how "the shadow of Philip Marlowe lingers on" in such other "future noir" films as Twelve Monkeys (1995), Dark City (1998), and Minority Report (2002).[19] The hero is the target of investigation in Gattaca (1997), which fuses film noir motifs with a scenario indebted to Brave New World. The Thirteenth Floor (1999), like Blade Runner, is an explicit homage to classic noir, in this case involving speculations about virtual reality. Science fiction, noir, and animation are brought together in the Japanese films Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), both directed by Mamoru Oshii, and the short A Detective Story (2003), set in the Matrix universe.
[edit] Film noir parodies
Film noir has been parodied many times, in many manners. In 1945, Danny Kaye starred in what appears to be the first intentional film noir parody, Wonder Man.[20] That same year, Deanna Durbin was the singing lead in the comedic noir Lady on a Train, which makes fun of Woolrich-brand wistful miserablism. Bob Hope inaugurated the private-eye noir parody with My Favorite Brunette (1947), playing a baby photographer who is mistaken for an ironfisted detective.[20] The Big Steal (1949), directed by Don Siegel, and His Kind of Woman, are both clear examples of the classic film noir parodying itself.[21] The "Girl Hunt" ballet in Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (1953) is a ten-minute distillation of—and play on—noir in dance.[22] The Cheap Detective (1978), starring Peter Falk, is a broad parody of several films, including the Bogart classics The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Carl Reiner's "cut and paste" noir farce, the black-and-white Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), is a well known example of the obviously comedic latter-day parodies. Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) develops a noir plot set in 1940s L.A. around a host of cartoon characters.
"Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man." Robert De Niro as neo-noir anti-hero Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976).
"Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man." Robert De Niro as neo-noir anti-hero Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976).
Noir parodies come in darker tones as well. Murder by Contract (1958), directed by Irving Lerner, is an eighty-one-minute-long deadpan joke on noir, with a denouement as bleak as any of the movies it kids.[23] An ultra-low-budget Columbia Pictures production, it may qualify as the first intentional example of what is now called a neo-noir film; it certainly seems to have been a source of inspiration for Melville's Le Samouraï and Scorsese's Taxi Driver.[23] One of the quintessential 1970s neo-noirs,[24] Taxi Driver caustically deconstructs the "dark" crime film, taking it to an absurd extreme and then offering a conclusion that manages to mock every possible anticipated ending—triumphant, tragic, artfully ambivalent—while being each, all at once.[25] Flirting with splatter status even more brazenly, the Coens' Blood Simple is both an exacting pastiche and an exaggeration of classic noir.[26] Adapted by director Robinson Devor from a novel by Charles Willeford, The Woman Chaser (1999) sends up not just the noir mode but the entire Hollywood filmmaking process,[27] with seemingly each shot staged as the visual equivalent of a Marlowe wisecrack—funny, but it smarts.
In other media, the television series Sledge Hammer! (1986–88) lampoons noir, along with Dirty Harry, capital punishment, and anything else available. Sesame Street (1969–curr.) occasionally casts Kermit the Frog as a private eye; the sketches refer to some of the typical motifs of noir movies, in particular the voiceover. Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion features the recurring character Guy Noir, a hardboiled detective whose adventures always wander into farce (Guy also appears in the Altman-directed film based on Keillor's show). Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger has trod the same not-so-mean streets, both on radio and in comedy albums. Cartoons such as Garfield's Babes and Bullets (1989) and comic strip characters such as Tracer Bullet of Calvin and Hobbes have parodied both film noir and the kindred hardboiled tradition—one of the sources from which film noir sprang and which it now overshadows.[28]
[edit] Approaches to defining noir
The history of film noir criticism has seen fundamental questions become matters of controversy unusually intense for such a field. Where aesthetic debates tend to concentrate on the quality and meaning of specific artworks and the intentions and influences of their creators, in film noir, the debates are regularly much broader. Four large questions may be identified, two of them addressed at the beginning of this article:
Some consider Vertigo (1958) a noir on the basis of plot and tone and various motifs. Others say the combination of color and the specificity of director Alfred Hitchcock's vision exclude it from the category.
Some consider Vertigo (1958) a noir on the basis of plot and tone and various motifs. Others say the combination of color and the specificity of director Alfred Hitchcock's vision exclude it from the category.
* What defines film noir?
* What sort of category is it?
A third question applies at a more specific level, but is sweeping:
* Which movies qualify as film noirs?
This article refers to movies from the classic period as "film noir" if there is a critical consensus supporting that designation. That consensus is almost never complete and is in many cases provisional: The Lost Weekend and The Night of the Hunter, for instance, are now routinely referred to as film noirs, but they were seldom considered as such a quarter-century ago. The process is ongoing: today, a growing number of critics refer to Suspicion (1941), directed by Hitchcock, and Casablanca (1942), directed by Curtiz, as film noirs. Outside of the classic period, consensus is much rarer—movies are considered as noir herein if a substantial number of critics have discussed them as such. In order to decide which films are noir (and which are not), many critics refer to a set of elements they see as marking examples of the mode. This leads to a fourth major point of controversy in the field, one that overlaps with all those noted above:
* What are the identifying characteristics of film noirs?
For instance, some critics insist that a film noir, to be authentic, must have a bleak conclusion (e.g., Criss Cross or D.O.A.), but many acknowledged classics of the genre have clearly happy endings (e.g., Stranger on the Third Floor, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and The Dark Corner), while the tone of many other noir denouements is ambivalent, in a variety of ways. The ambition of this section, then, can be no more than modest: it is an attempt to survey those characteristics most often cited by critics as representative of classic film noirs. As diverse as that set of movies is, the diversity of films from outside the classic period that have been discussed as noir is so great that any similar survey would be impractical; however, those classic noir identifying marks often referenced in neo-noirs—however frequently or seldom they actually appeared in the original films—are noted as are certain signal trends of the latter-day mode.1
[edit] Visual style
Shadows of window blinds fall upon private eye Jake Gittes, performed by Jack Nicholson, in Chinatown (1974).
Shadows of window blinds fall upon private eye Jake Gittes, performed by Jack Nicholson, in Chinatown (1974).
Film noirs tended to use low-key lighting schemes producing stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterning. The shadows of Venetian blinds or banister rods, cast upon an actor, a wall, or an entire set, are an iconic visual in film noir and had already become a cliché well before the neo-noir era. Characters' faces may be partially or wholly obscured by darkness—a relative rarity in conventional Hollywood moviemaking. While black-and-white cinematography is considered by many to be one of the essential attributes of classic noir, color films such as Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Niagara (1953), Slightly Scarlet, and Vertigo (1958) are regarded as noir by varying numbers of critics.
Film noir is also known for its use of Dutch angles, low-angle shots, and wide-angle lenses. Other devices of disorientation relatively common in film noir include shots of people reflected in one or more mirrors, shots through curved or frosted glass or other distorting objects (such as during the strangulation scene in Strangers on a Train), and special effects sequences of a sometimes bizarre nature. Beginning in the late 1940s, location shooting—often involving night-for-night sequences—became increasingly frequent in noir.
In an analysis of the visual approach of Kiss Me Deadly, a late and self-consciously stylized example of classic noir, critic Alain Silver describes how cinematographic choices emphasize the story's themes and mood. In one scene, the characters, seen through a "confusion of angular shapes," thus appear "caught in a tangible vortex or enclosed in a trap." Silver makes a case for how "[s]ide light is used...to reflect character ambivalence," while shots of characters in which they are lit from below "conform to a convention of visual expression which associates shadows cast upward of the face with the unnatural and ominous."[29]
[edit] Structure and narrational devices
Film noirs tend to have unusually convoluted story lines, frequently involving flashbacks, flashforwards, and other techniques that disrupt and sometimes obscure the narrative sequence. Voiceover narration—most characteristically by the protagonist, less frequently by a secondary character or by an unseen, omniscient narrator—is sometimes used as a structuring device. Both flashbacks and voiceover narration are today often used in movies looking to quickly establish their neo-noir bona fides. Bold experiments in cinematic storytelling were sometimes attempted in noir: Lady in the Lake, for example, is shot entirely from the point of view of protagonist Philip Marlowe; the face of star (and director) Robert Montgomery is seen only in mirrors. The Chase (1946) takes oneirism and fatalism as the basis for its fantastical narrative system, redolent of certain horror stories, but with little precedent in the context of a putatively realistic genre. In their different ways, both Sunset Boulevard and D.O.A. are tales told by dead men. Latter-day noir has been in the forefront of structural experimentation in popular cinema, as exemplified by such films as Pulp Fiction and Memento.
[edit] Plots, characters, and settings
Crime, usually murder, is an element of almost all film noirs; in addition to standard-issue greed, jealousy is frequently the criminal motivation. A crime investigation—by a private eye, a police detective (sometimes acting alone), or a concerned amateur—is the most prevalent, but far from dominant, basic plot. In other common plots the protagonists are implicated in heists or con games, or in murderous conspiracies often involving adulterous affairs. False suspicions and accusations of crime are frequent plot elements, as are betrayals and double-crosses. Amnesia is far more common in film noir than in real life, and cigarette smoking can seem virtually mandatory.
Pursued (1947): A Western adopting noir style, or a film noir set in the Wild West?
Pursued (1947): A Western adopting noir style, or a film noir set in the Wild West?
Film noirs tend to revolve around heroes who are more flawed and morally questionable than the norm, often fall guys of one sort or another. The characteristic heroes of noir are described by many critics as "alienated"; in the words of Silver and Ward, "filled with existential bitterness."[30] Certain archetypal characters appear in many film noirs—hardboiled detectives, femmes fatales, corrupt policemen, jealous husbands, intrepid claims adjusters, and down-and-out writers. As can be observed in many movies of an overtly neo-noir nature, the private eye and the femme fatale are the character types with which film noir has come to be most identified, but only a minority of movies now regarded as classic noir feature either. For example, of the nineteen National Film Registry noirs, in only four does the star play a private eye: The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly. Just two others readily qualify as detective stories: Laura and Touch of Evil.
Film noir is often associated with an urban setting, and a few cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, in particular—are the location of many of the classic films. In the eyes of many critics, the city is presented in noir as a "labyrinth" or "maze." Bars, lounges, nightclubs, and gambling dens are frequently the scene of action. The climaxes of a substantial number of film noirs take place in visually complex, often industrial settings, such as refineries, factories, trainyards, power plants—most famously the explosive conclusion of White Heat. In the popular (and, frequently enough, critical) imagination, in noir it is always night and it always rains.
A substantial trend within latter-day noir—dubbed "film soleil" by critic D. K. Holm—heads in precisely the opposite direction, with tales of deception, seduction, and corruption exploiting bright, sun-baked settings, stereotypically the desert or open water, to caustic effect. Significant predecessors from the classic and early post-classic eras include The Lady from Shanghai; the Robert Ryan vehicle Inferno (1953); the French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, Plein soleil (Purple Noon in the U.S., better rendered elsewhere as Blazing Sun or Full Sun; 1960); and director Don Siegel's version of The Killers (1964). The tendency was at its peak during the late 1980s and 1990s, with films such as Dead Calm (1989); After Dark, My Sweet; The Hot Spot; Delusion (1991); and Red Rock West, and TV's Miami Vice, which premiered in 1984 and turned increasingly mordant over its five-year run.
[edit] Worldview, morality, and tone
Film noir is often described as essentially pessimistic. The noir stories that are regarded as most characteristic tell of people trapped in unwanted situations (which, in general, they did not cause but are responsible for exacerbating), striving against random, uncaring fate, and frequently doomed. The movies are seen as depicting a world that is inherently corrupt. Classic film noir has been associated by many critics with the American social landscape of the era—in particular, with a sense of heightened anxiety and alienation that is said to have followed World War II. Nicholas Christopher's opinion is representative: "it is as if the war, and the social eruptions in its aftermath, unleashed demons that had been bottled up in the national psyche."[31] Film noirs, especially those of the 1950s and the height of the Red Scare, are often said to reflect cultural paranoia; Kiss Me Deadly is the noir most frequently marshaled as evidence for this claim.
"You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go." "A lot depends on who's in the saddle." Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep.
"You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go." "A lot depends on who's in the saddle." Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep.
Rather than focusing on simple "black and white" decisions, film noirs tend to pose moral quandaries that are unusually ambiguous and relative—at least within the context of Hollywood cinema. Characters that do pursue goals based on clear-cut moral standards may be more than willing to let the "ends justify the means." For example, the investigator hero of The Stranger, obsessed with tracking down a Nazi war criminal, places other people in mortal danger in order to capture his target. Whereas the Production Code obliged almost all classic noirs to see that steadfast virtue was ultimately rewarded and vice, in the absence of shame and redemption, severely punished (however dramatically incredible the final rendering of mandatory justice might be), a substantial number of latter-day noirs flout such conventions; in their very different ways, the conclusions of Chinatown and The Hot Spot provide two clear examples.
The tone of film noir is generally regarded as downbeat; some critics experience it as darker still—"overwhelmingly black," according to Robert Ottoson.[32] Influential critic (and filmmaker) Paul Schrader wrote in a seminal 1972 essay that "film noir is defined by tone," a tone he seems to perceive as "hopeless."[33] In describing the adaptation of Double Indemnity, leading noir analyst Foster Hirsch describes the "requisite hopeless tone" achieved by the filmmakers, which appears to characterize his view of noir as a whole.[34] On the other hand, definitive film noirs such as The Big Sleep, The Lady from Shanghai, and Double Indemnity itself are famed for their hardboiled repartee, often imbued with sexual innuendo and self-reflexive humor—notes of another tone.
[edit] Notes
Note 1: Opinion is also divided on the English plural of film noir. In the French from which the term derives, the plural is films noirs. Some English speakers prefer films noir, while film noirs is the most common formulation. The latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, acknowledging all three styles as acceptable, gives as the preferred spelling film noirs.
[edit] See also
* List of film noir
[edit] References
1. ^ Greenspun (1973), p. 32.
2. ^ Borde and Chaumeton (2002), p. 2.
3. ^ See Dancyger and Rush (2002), p. 68, for a detailed comparison of screwball comedy and film noir.
4. ^ See Jim Doherty's essay on Carmady at the Thrilling Detective website for a detailed analysis of the private eye character who appears in "The Finger Man."
5. ^ See, e.g., Lyons (2000), p. 36 ("RKO is usually cited as having produced the first true film noir, Stranger on the Third Floor"); Server (1998), p. 158 ("Often credited as the 'first' film noir"); Porfirio (1980), p. 269 ("the first true film noir").
6. ^ Biesen (2005), p. 33.
7. ^ Variety (1940).
8. ^ Schrader (1972), p. 61.
9. ^ Bernstein (1995).
10. ^ McGilligan (1997), pp. 314–317.
11. ^ Schatz (1998), pp. 354–358.
12. ^ See, e.g., entries on individual films in (Silver & Ward 1992, pp. 97–98, 125–126, 311–312).
13. ^ See Naremore (1998), pp. 140–155, on "B Pictures versus Intermediates."
14. ^ Naremore (1998), p. 173.
15. ^ Erickson (2004), p. 26.
16. ^ Clarens (1980), pp. 200–202; Walker (1992), pp. 139–145.
17. ^ Silver and Ward (1992), p. 1.
18. ^ See Palmer (2004), pp. 267–268, for a representative discussion of film noir as an international phenomenon.
19. ^ Aziz (2005), section "Future Noir and Postmodernism : The Irony Begins."
20. ^ a b Silver and Ward (1992), p. 332.
21. ^ Pym, John, ed. (2004), Time Out Film Guide (3rd ed.), Time Out Publishing, pp. 121, 575-576, ISBN 1904978215
22. ^ Richardson, Carl (1992), Autopsy: An Element of Realism in Film Noir, The Scarecrow Press, p. 120, ISBN 0810824965
23. ^ a b Naremore (2008), p. 158 ("One of the earliest and best examples was Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract...which later exerted a strong influence on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. A deadpan black comedy about the American Dream....")
24. ^ See, e.g.,
Horwath, Alexander; Elsaesser, Thomas & King, Noel, eds. (2004), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, Amsterdam University Press, p. 98, ISBN 9053566317 , and
Conard, Mark T. (2007), The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, University Press of Kentuck, p. 2, ISBN 0813124220
25. ^ See, e.g., Kolker (2000), pp. 238–241.
26. ^ Hunter, Stephen (1995), Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem, Bancroft Press, p. 7, ISBN 0963537644
27. ^ The New York Times Film Reviews 1999-2000, Routledge, 2001, p. 158, ISBN 0415936969
28. ^ Irwin, John T (2006), Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir, JHU Press, p. xii, ISBN 0801884357, "...hard-boiled fiction of the thirties and forties prepared the audience and provided the material for... those movies that initiated the American film noir genre, whose black-and-white cycle lasted for twenty years and produced some three hundred films."
29. ^ Silver (1995), pp. 219, 222.
30. ^ Silver and Ward (1992), p. 6.
31. ^ Christopher (1997), p. 37.
32. ^ Ottoson (1981), p. 1.
33. ^ Schrader (1972), p. 54. For characterization of definitive tone as "hopeless," see pp. 53 ("the tone more hopeless") and 57 ("a fatalistic, hopeless mood").
34. ^ Hirsch (2001), p. 7. Hirsch subsequently states, "In character types, mood [emphasis added], themes, and visual composition, Double Indemnity offer[s] a lexicon of noir stylistics" (p. 8).
[edit] Sources
* Aziz, Jamaluddin Bin (2005). "Future Noir," chap. in "Transgressing Women: Investigating Space and the Body in Contemporary Noir Thrillers." Ph. D. dissertation, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University (chapter available online).
* Bernstein, Matthew (1995). “A Tale of Three Cities: The Banning of Scarlet Street,” Cinema Journal 35, no. 1.
* Biesen, Sheri Chinen (2005). Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-8217-6
* Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton (2002 [1955]). A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, trans. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books. ISBN 0-87286-412-X
* Cameron, Ian, ed. (1993). The Book of Film Noir. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-0589-4
* Christopher, Nicholas (1997). Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-684-82803-0
* Clarens, Carlos (1980). Crime Movies: An Illustrated History. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-01262-X
* Dancyger, Ken, and Jeff Rush (2002). Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules. Boston et al.: Focal Press. ISBN 0-240-80477-5
* Erickson, Glenn (2004). "Fate Seeks the Loser: Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour" (collected in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader 4).
* Gorman, Ed, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. (1998). The Big Book of Noir. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-0574-4
* Greenspun, Roger (1973). "Mike Hodges's 'Pulp' Opens; A Private Eye Parody Is Parody of Itself," New York Times, February 9.
* Hirsch, Foster (2001). The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. New York: Da Capo. ISBN 0-306-81039-5
* Kolker, Robert (2000). A Cinema of Loneliness, 3d ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512350-6
* Lyons, Arthur (2000). Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir. New York: Da Capo. ISBN 0-306-80996-6
* McGilligan, Patrick (1997). Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York and London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19375-7
* Naremore, James (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21294-0
* Ottoson, Robert (1981). A Reference Guide to the American Film Noir: 1940–1958. Metuchen, N.J., and London: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-1363-7
* Palmer, R. Barton (2004). "The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The Example of Film Noir," in A Companion To Literature And Film, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (pp. 258–277). Maiden, Mass., Oxford, and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-23053-X
* Porfirio, Robert (1980). "Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)" (collected in Silver and Ward, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference).
* Schatz, Thomas (1998 [1996]). The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, new ed. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19596-2
* Schrader, Paul (1972). "Notes on Film Noir," Film Comment 8, no. 1 (collected in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader [1]).
* Server, Lee (1998). "The Black List: Essential Film Noir" (collected in Gorman et al., The Big Book of Noir).
* Silver, Alain (1995). "Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style," rev. ver. (collected in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader [1]; available online).
* Silver, Alain, and James Ursini (and Robert Porfirio—vol. 3), eds. (2004 [1996–2004]). Film Noir Reader, vols. 1–4. Pompton Plains, N.J.: Limelight Editions (introductions to vols. 1 and 2 and selected essays available online).
* Silver, Alain & Ward, Elizabeth, eds. (1992), Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (3rd ed.), Overlook Press, ISBN 0-87951-479-5
* "Variety staff" (anon.) (1940). "Stranger on the Third Floor" [review], Variety, January 1 (excerpted online).
* Walker, Michael (1992). "Robert Siodmak" (collected in Cameron, The Book of Film Noir).
[edit] Further reading
* Chopra-Gant, Mike (2005). Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir. London: IB Tauris. ISBN 1-85043-838-2
* Cochran, David (2000). America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-813-4
* Copjec, Joan, ed. (1993). Shades of Noir. London and New York: Verso. ISBN 0-86091-625-1
* Dimendberg, Edward (2004). Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01314-X
* Durgnat, Raymond (1970). "Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir," Cinema 6/7 (collected in Gorman et al., The Big Book of Noir, and Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader [1]).
* Hannsberry, Karen Burroughs (1998). Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0429-9
* Hannsberry, Karen Burroughs (2003). Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1484-7
* Holm, D. K. (2005). Film Soleil. Harpenden, UK: Pocket Essentials. ISBN 1-904048-50-1
* Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. (1998). Women in Film Noir, new ed. London: British Film Institute. ISBN 0-85170-666-5
* Keaney, Michael F. (2003). Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era, 1940–1959. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1547-9
* Martin, Richard (1999). Mean Streets and Raging Bulls: The Legacy of Film Noir in Contemporary American Cinema. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow. ISBN 0-8108-3642-4
* Mason, Fran (2002). American Gangster Cinema: From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave. ISBN 0-333-67452-9
* McArthur, Colin (1972). Underworld U.S.A. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-01953-4
* Muller, Eddie (1998). Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York: St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-18076-4
* Neale, Steve (2000). Genre and Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-02606-7
* Palmer, R. Barton (1994). Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir. New York: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-9335-6
* Palmer, R. Barton, ed. (1996). Perspectives on Film Noir. New York: G.K. Hall. ISBN 0-8161-1601-6
* Rabinowitz, Paula (2002). Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-11481-8
* Schatz, Thomas (1997). Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN 0-684-19151-2
* Selby, Spencer (1984). Dark City: The Film Noir. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-89950-103-6
* Shadoian, Jack (2003). Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, 2d ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514291-8
* Silver, Alain, and James Ursini (1999). The Noir Style. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press. ISBN 0-87951-722-0
* Spicer, Andrew (2002). Film Noir. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. ISBN 0-582-43712-1
* Telotte, J. P. (1989). Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06056-3
* Tuska, Jon (1984). Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective. Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23045-5
[edit] External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Film noir
* The Noir Zone Contains details of over 1000 films noir and classic movies
* All-Time 100 Movies Time magazine's noir-heavy list includes a single TV production, The Singing Detective, among its 100 picks
* Classic Noir Online comprehensive survey of over 700 noir titles, with links to actors and directors
* Film Noir Q&A-style essay by leading noir critic-historian Eddie Muller; part of the GreenCine website
* Film Noir: A Bibliography of Materials holdings of the UC Berkeley Library
* Film Noir: An Introduction essay with links to discussions of ten important noirs; part of Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture
* Film Noir Foundation educational resource addressing the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of film noir
* Film Noir Studies writings by John Blaser, with film noir glossary, timeline, and noir-related media
* Le Film Policier Noir extensive discussion (in English) of French noir by Yuri German; part of the Hard-Boiled Mysteries website
* A Guide to Film Noir Genre ten deadeye bullet points from Roger Ebert
* An Introduction to Neo-Noir essay by Lee Horsley
* The Noir Thriller: Introduction excerpt from 2001 book by Lee Horsley
* Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir podcast close readings of many classic noirs by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards
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