Customer Reviews

Shades of Noir (Haymarket)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Shades of Noir" is a collection of 10 highly academic essays on the nature of film noir, its origins, and its relevance to the culture at large, first published in 1993. The contributors are mostly academics from universities in the U.S. and Europe. In her introduction, editor Joan Copjec explains that the essays contribute different perspectives, not agreement, on what constitutes film noir. "What unites all the essays...is a strong sense of importance of the genre and of the necessity of retheorizing it." First, due to the "re-emergence of film noir in recent years". Secondly, on account of "the uneasy sense that we never adequately defined it in the first place".

Anyone who has taken a college film course will recognize the heavily Laconian and Marxist themes that run through this collection of essays as typical of film theory. You can either stomach it or you can't. The socio-economic and structuralist theorizing places these essays more in the realm of "cultural studies" than film history. The essays are extremely dense, as the intended audience is fellow academics, not the casual film noir fan. Nevertheless, they contain some interesting insights and new perspectives that are not entirely fantastical if the reader is willing to wade through it. I have to say, though, that this volume unconsciously elucidates the problem of defining film noir. Film noir has never been difficult to define. It has simply always been advantageous for academics not to define it -or to define it in whatever way suits their projects of the moment. So I guess they have left the job to us amateurs, who will make quick work of it. ;-)

The essays are as follows:

(1) "Film Noir on the Edge of Doom" by Marc Vernet. Vernet speculates about the motives of French theorists who "invented" film noir, as he denies that the film noir movement or style ever existed. This is the essay that Alain Silver fired a torrent of criticism at Vernet for in the introduction to his book "Film Noir Reader". Vernet displays an remarkable ignorance of cinematography, hard-boiled crime fiction, American film criticism, and cinema before 1940. (2) "The Synaptic Chandler" by Fredric Jameson. Analysis of the "peculiar nature of Chandler's plot construction", i.e. illogic, the "radio aesthetic" of film noir, and a Heideggerian perspective on the noir world.

(3) "Strange Pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties" by David Reid and Jane L. Walker. Primarily discusses how Woolrich's depression-era sensibility was particularly suitable to film noir and why it found an audience in the post-War 1940s. Very worthwhile for debunking the persistent claims that audiences were drawn to film noir due to "post-war depression" or disillusionment and that the femme fatale was the result of threats to masculine culture posed by women in the workplace. Compares hard-boiled fiction to the crime and adventure novels of the 1830s-1840s.

(4) "The Mystery of The Blue Gardenia" by Janet Bergstrom. Presents the production history of Fritz Lang's film, analysis, and comparison to Vera Caspary's story. I never thought "The Blue Gardenia" had much substance or that it was film noir. I still don't, but the particulars of its adaptation to film are interesting. (5) "Film Noir and Women" by Elizabeth Cowie. Attempt to "change the characterization of film noir as always a masculine film form". The roles of "duplicitous women", female protagonists, and victims. Analysis of several films, in particular Fritz Lang's "Secret Beyond the Door".

(6) "The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Private Space in Film Noir" by Joan Copjec. Starts with observation that the origin of detective fiction coincides with mid-19th century "passion for counting". The role of reason in film noir, particularly as exemplified in voice-over narration. Focus on "Double Indemnity". (7) "The Thing That Thinks: The Kantian Background of the Noir Subject" by Slavoj Zizek. Compares classic film noir to films of the 1980s that combine noir with other genres. Focus on "radical undermining of self-identity" in 1987's "Angel Heart" and 1982's "Blade Runner".

(8) "Home Fires Burning" by Fred Pfeil. The "domestication of film noir" in the neo-noir of the 1980s, focusing on the small-town domestic space of the art house "Blue Velvet" and the cyborg-as-father in the blockbuster "Terminator 2". Attributes this emphasis on nuclear family to "Reaganism". (9) "Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema" by Manthia Diawara. Race and class in black film noir, focusing on "A Rage in Harlem". (10) "Democracy's Turn: On Homeless Noir" by Dan MacCannell. Diatribe on film noir's alleged "confrontation between capitalism and democracy". The disappearances of the "actual spaces" of film noir as seedy neighborhoods were gentrified.