Neon Noir - Crimetime (original) (raw)
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The noir city of Hollywood's thrillers of the 1940s and early 1950s is a shadow realm of crime and dislocation in which benighted individuals do battle with implacable threats and temptations. 1 Often a little too conveniently framed as a symptomatic response to the cultural and social upheavals besetting the US after the Second World War-the nuclear age, the Cold War and homefront anticommunism, the adjustment to a postwar economic order-film noir's resonant scenarios of fear, persecution, and disjunction actually began to appear before the US entered the war. Film noir also inherited many of its narrative and stylistic features, and much of its urban atmosphere, from the hard-boiled pulp fiction of the interwar period (Krutnik, 1991 33-44). Looking back from the vantage-point of 1950, Raymond Chandler suggested that the postwar climate was responsible for feeding, not breeding, the 'smell of fear' generated by the pulp crime stories:
Sin City, Style, and the Status of Noir
Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez, 2015
Robert Rodriguez claims that his Sin City “translates” Frank Miller’s graphic narratives, its source texts, “directly to the screen.” Surprisingly, however, Ro- driguez’s film includes almost constant references to film noir, to film production, and to cinematic conventions – conventions Rodriguez either adheres to or throws into relief. But this overt remediation of Miller’s narrative actually mirrors Miller’s own remediation of early noir fiction. Noir, in Rodriguez’s hands, becomes more than a style or a story that might appear in various forms. It is a discourse that consists of a particular relationship between a text’s style and its structure. This discourse thus depends upon style, but “style” understood to be the particular way in which the signs will obtain in the context of a medium and its conventions. And if we can define style in this way, we can better understand the relationship between discourse and the material medium in which it presents. This article demonstrates the importance, when considering style and discourse, of investigating medium-specific methods of signification, as what a sign “means” depends on what the medium is capable of. Particularly at this moment, as investigations of narrative tend toward the cognitive processes and contextual elements involved in its reception, we would do well to bear in mind the relationships – among medium, style, and whatever histories and conventions come with them – that make up discourse, as these relationships constitute the real process of signification.
2020
This dissertation intervenes in critical debates about the aesthetic and ethical character of the contemporary literary moment by providing an in-depth case study of the evolving function of genre in the aftermath of postmodernism. It does so by examining the adoption and reinvention of the style, tropes, and themes of 1930s/40s hard-boiled crime fiction and film noir in a group of contemporary novels published between 1999 and 2013. The crux of the argument is that contemporary, post-postmodern writers turn to the noir tradition because it reflects a widespread sense of social alienation – of the estrangement of the individual from other people, from society as a whole, and even from oneself. In their reworkings of the genre, however, these contemporary authors seek ways of escaping that alienation and producing narratives of re-integration. The dissertation is divided into four chapters, each of which engages a theme appropriated from the classic noir period. The first chapter foc...
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