Class Crime And International Film Noir

Class, Crime and International Film Noir argues that, in its postwar, classical phase, this dark variant of the crime film was not just an American phenomenon. Rather, these seedy tales with their doomed heroes and heroines were popular all over the world including France, Britain, Italy and Japan.

Class, Crime and International Film Noir argues that, in its postwar, classical phase, this dark variant of the crime film was not just an American phenomenon. Rather, these seedy tales with their doomed heroes and heroines were popular all over the world including France, Britain, Italy and Japan.

Class, Crime and International Film Noir argues that, in its postwar, classical phase, this dark variant of the crime film was not just an American phenomenon. Rather, these seedy tales with their doomed heroes and heroines were popular all over the world including France, Britain, Italy and Japan.

What is film noir? With its archetypal femme fatale and private eye, its darkly-lit scenes and even darker narratives, the answer can seem obvious enough. But as Ian Brookes shows in this new study, the answer is a lot more complex than that. This book is designed to tackle those complexities in a critical introduction that takes into account the problems of straightforward definition and classification. Students will benefit from an accessible introductory text that is not just an account of what film noir is, but also an interrogation of the ways in which the term came to be applied to a disparate group of American films of the 1940s and 1950s.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

This book brings together nine original chapters to examine genre agency in East Asian cinema within the transnational context. It addresses several urgent and pertinent issues such as the distribution and exhibition practices of East Asian genre films, intra-regional creative flow of screen culture, and genre’s creative response to censorship. The volume expands the scholarly discussion of the rich heritage and fast-changing landscape of filmmaking in East Asian cinemas. Confronting the complex interaction between genres, filmic narrative and aesthetics, film history and politics, and cross-cultural translation, this book not only reevaluates genre’s role in film production, distribution, and consumption, but also tackles several under-explored areas in film studies and transnational cinema, such as the history of East Asian commercial cinema, the East Asian film industry, and cross-media and cross-market film dissemination.

A complete introduction to analyzing and enjoying a wide variety of movies, for film students and movie lovers alike Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying, Fourth Edition is a thorough overview of movie analysis designed to enlighten both students and enthusiasts, and heighten their enjoyment of films. Readers will delve into the process of thinking about movies critically and analytically, and find how doing so can greatly enhance the pleasure of watching movies. Divided roughly into two parts, the book addresses film studies within the context of the dynamics of cinema, before moving on to a broader analysis of the relationship of films to the larger social, cultural, and industrial issues informing them. This updated fourth edition includes an entirely new section devoted to a complete analysis of the film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, along with many in-depth discussions of important films such as Citizen Kane and Silence of the Lambs. The chapter on television integrates a major expansion distinguishing between television in the digital era of the convergence of the entertainment and technology industries in comparison to the era of broadcast analogue television. The final chapter places film within the current context of digital culture, globalization, and the powerful rise of China in film production and exhibition. The authors clearly present various methodologies for analyzing movies and illustrate them with detailed examples and images from a wide range of films from cult classics to big-budget, award-winning movies. This helps viewers see new things in movies and also better understand and explain why they like some better than others. Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying, Fourth Edition is ideal for film students immersed in the study of this important, contemporary medium and art form as well as students and readers who have never taken a class on cinema before. This new edition of the book also comes with a Companion Blog https://thinkingaboutmoviesblog.wordpress.com/ that the authors will update regularly with attention to films and industry developments directly related to each chapter, plus updates to readings and resources.

In 1968, Suzuki Seijun—a low-budget genre filmmaker known for movies including Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter, and Youth of the Beast—was unceremoniously fired by Nikkatsu Studios. Soon to be known as the “Suzuki Seijun Incident,” his dismissal became a cause for leftist student protestors and a burgeoning group of cinephiles to rally around. His films rapidly emerged as central to debates over politics and aesthetics in Japanese cinema. William Carroll offers a new account of Suzuki’s career that highlights the intersections of film theory, film production, cinephile culture, and politics in 1960s Japan. Carroll places Suzuki’s work between two factions that claimed him as one of their own after 1968: the New Left and its politicized theoretical practice on one hand, and the apparently apolitical cinephiles and their formalist criticism on the other. He considers how both of these strands of film theory shed light on the distinctive qualities of Suzuki’s films, and he explores how both Suzuki’s works and unheralded Japanese film theorists offer new ways of understanding world cinema. This book presents both a major reinterpretation of Suzuki’s work—which influenced directors such as John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino—and a new lens on postwar Japanese film culture and industry. Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema also includes a complete production history of Suzuki’s filmography along with never-before-discussed information about his unfinished film projects.

Explores philosophical themes and ideas inherent in classic noir and neo-noir films, establishing connections to diverse thinkers ranging from Camus to the Frankfurt School. The authors, each focusing on a different aspect of the genre, explores the philosophical underpinnings of classic films.

Airing on ABC from 1957 to 1962, Maverick appeared at a key moment in television Western history and provided a distinct alternative to the genre’s usual moralistic lawmen in its hero, Bret Maverick. A non-violent gambler and part-time con man, Maverick’s principles revolved around pleasure and not power, and he added humor, satire, and irony to the usually grim-faced Western. In this study of Maverick, author Dennis Broe details how the popular series mocked, altered, and undermined the characteristics of other popular Westerns, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. Broe highlights the contributions made by its creators, its producer, Roy Huggins, and its lead actor, James Garner, to a format that was described as “the American fairy tale.” Broe describes how Garner and Huggins struck blows against a feudal studio system that was on its last legs in cinema but was being applied even more rigidly in television. He considers Maverick as a place where multiple counter-cultural discourses converged—including Baudelaire’s Flaneur, Guy DeBord’s Situationists, and Jack Kerouc’s Beats—in a form that was acceptable to American households. Finally, Broe shows how the series’ validation of Maverick’s outside-the-law status punctured the Cold War rhetoric promoted by the “adult” Western. Broe also highlights the series’ female con women or flaneuses, who were every bit the equal of their male counterparts and added additional layers to the traditional schoolteacher/showgirl Western dichotomy. Broe demonstrates the progressive nature of Maverick as it worked to counter the traditional studio mode of production, served as a locus of counter-cultural trends, and would ultimately become the lone outpost of anti–Cold War and anti-establishment sentiments within the Western genre. Maverick fans and scholars of American television history will enjoy this close look at the classic series.

This book presents an expert analysis of the transnational aspects of Finnish cinema throughout its history. As a small nation cinema, Finnish film culture has, even at its most nationalistic, always been attached to developments in other film producing nations in terms of production and distribution as well as genres and aesthetics. Recent developments in film theory offer exciting new approaches and methodologies for the study of transnational phenomena in the field of film culture, both past and present. The authors employ a wide range of cutting edge methodologies in order to address the major issues involved in transnational approaches to film culture. Until recently, much of this research has focused on globalization and questions related to diasporic cinema, while transnational issues related to small nation film cultures have been marginalized. This study focuses on how small nation cinemas have faced the dilemma of contributing to the construction and maintenance of national culture and identity, while responding to audience tastes largely shaped by foreign cinemas. With Finland’s intriguing political placement between East and West, along with the high portion of film history preserved in Finnish archives, this thoroughly contextualized multidisciplinary analysis of Finnish film history serves as an illuminating case study of the transnational aspects of small nation cinemas.

New Approaches to Cinematic Space aims to discuss the process of creation of cinematic spaces through moving images and the subsequent interpretation of their purpose and meaning. Throughout seventeen chapters, this edited collection will attempt to identify and interpret the formal strategies used by different filmmakers to depict real or imaginary places and turn them into abstract, conceptual spaces. The contributors to this volume will specifically focus on a series of systems of representation that go beyond the mere visual reproduction of a given location to construct a network of meanings that ultimately shapes our spatial worldview.

Calamitous Corruption: The Harry Palmer LA Trilogy Book 3: The Precinct With The Golden Arm “A superbly plotted, Chandleresque historical Noir”–Lilja Sigurðardóttir, “the Queen of Scandinavian Crime Fiction,” author of the trilogy Snare, Trap, Cage and of four financial thrillers, the latest of which is Dark As Night “Private detective Harry Palmer, a distant relative of Philip Marlow and Lew Archer, takes us back to the LA of the 1940s in an exciting story with an impressive accumulation of details from the backstreets of that city” – Gunnar Staalesen, who Jo Nesbo called “the Norwegian Chandler,” writer of the Varg Veum series “Dennis Broe compels us to assert that novelists, like himself—and not just poets—are the unacknowledged legislators: for in this masterpiece, he poetically provides a scintillating dissection of capitalism, L.A. style”—Gerald Horne, historian and author of Class Struggle in Hollywood “…the seamy world of the LAPD,…the Mexican-American community in Boyle Heights…the Ku Klux Klan and the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry…combine and collide in a cleverly integrated story that will keep a reader fully engaged to the last page and beyond”–Eric Gordon, LA Progressive “An ingeniously plotted book that weaves its plots together well, and gives us another fascinating look at mid-century Los Angeles”—Ellen Clair Lamb, assistant editor Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels “The Precinct With The Golden Arm outlines an LA teeming with corruption end to end, and one–same as it ever was–not that different from the city today with many of the same problems still unresolved and thus recurring”–Crime Time In his third encounter with the seamy world of the LA power structure of the 1940s, disgraced ex-homicide detective Harry Palmer tangles with the LAPD as it attempts to shed its aura of corruption while clamping down on the Mexican American community of Boyle Heights in the wake of the Zoot Suit Rebellion. Lurking in the background is a burgeoning Big Pharma industry as these various threads interconnect and lead Harry into a maze of sex and drugs as he confronts his own tarnished past.

Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives examines the detective figure in four noir and neo-noir films: Out of the Past (1947), Notorious (1946), Vertigo (1958), and Chinatown (1974). Exploring the way that these characters each move from an initial state of reluctant passivity to one of passionate engagement with the world around them, it questions the cinematic forces required to motivate and move them. In its close examinations of each film, the book meditates on the detectives' hunts and how they interact with the cinematic apparatus that captures and presents them to an audience, and it tracks the receptive experience of these films in relation to these questions of motivation and movement.

A deep-dive into the practice and execution of contemporary television viewing.

Argues that understanding Huston’s film adaptations of literary works is essential to understanding his oeuvre as a filmmaker. John Huston as Adaptor makes the case that adaptation is the salient element in Huston’s identity as a filmmaker and that his early and deep attraction to the experience of reading informed his approach to film adaptation. Thirty-four of Huston’s thirty-seven films were adaptations of literary texts, and they stand as serious interpretations of literary works that could only be made by an astute reader of literature. Indeed, Huston asserted that a film director should be above all else a reader and that reading itself should be the intellectual and emotional basis for filmmaking. The seventeen essays in this volume not only address Huston as an adaptor, but also offer an approach to adaptation studies that has been largely overlooked. How an adaptor reads, the works to which he is drawn, and how his literary interpretations can be brought to the screen without relegating film to a subservient role are some of the issues addressed by the contributors. An introductory chapter identifies Huston as the quintessential Hollywood adaptor and argues that his skill at adaptation is the mark of his authorial signature. The chapters that follow focus on fifteen of Huston’s most important films, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), The Night of the Iguana (1964), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), and are divided into three areas: aesthetics and textuality; history and social context; and theory and psychoanalysis. By offering a more comprehensive account of the centrality of adaptation to Huston’s films, John Huston as Adaptor offers a greater understanding of Huston as a filmmaker.