Got alot of great material to chew on from Dr. Edwards’ lecture this week! Now I’m watching “Scarlet Street”, followed by “Dark Passage”. #NoirSummer
“Ultimately, determining whether film noir is a genre, a style, or a movement begs an interesting question: what if film noir is actually a combination of all three of these ideas? What if noir was a style that flourished in a particular type of crime film and operated along the lines of a film movement. In the end, though, it is hard to prove or disprove many of the ways scholars have sought to characterize such a vast and transgressive body of films as we encounter in our viewing of films noir”.
“And this leads me to a final question at the moment: why did film noir emerge in early 1940s in the Hollywood studio system? Why then? Why not ten years earlier? Or ten years later? What was going on in Hollywood and, just as important, what was going on in the culture at large that lead filmmakers like Orson Welles, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Fritz Lang to begin staging one of the greatest creative heists the big screen has ever known? To answer these questions, we have to compile our case-files and learn more about the literary, cultural, and cinematic precursors to film noir. As we will examine in the next section, by 1940, the conditions were ripe for a new kind of Hollywood thriller.”
Learning a lot already…
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