A new style of crime drama—cynical, morbid, and shadow-drenched—captivated American filmgoers in the early 1940s. Film noir, as it would only later come to be known, fused the vertiginous contrasts of German Expressionist cinema with the grittiness of hardboiled detective fiction. Noir films conjured a world awash in fatalism, corruption, seduction, and alienation, populated by morally-compromised and self-destructive protagonists, crooked cops, world-weary detectives, and femmes fatales. But what is film noir? A genre, a style, a mood? And what do such films capture about the zeitgeist and cultural anxieties of the postwar American order?
In this course, we will consider the cinematic, literary, and philosophical antecedents of this stylish and cynical cinematic tradition, placing major works from films noir’s classic period (1940s-50s) in conversation with the conventions of German Expressionist film, French poetic realism, Italian neorealism, Hollywood gangster films, hardboiled crime fiction, and psychoanalysis. We will consider the vision of modern life and subjectivity that emerges from this potent cocktail of influences, paying particular attention to its acerbic account of cities, the American dream, and gender, class, and race relations. We will also examine the effect on film noir of transformations within the film industry, including the Hollywood blacklist and the decline of the studio system. Finally, we will ask how film noir was transformed and re-articulated outside the United States during its classic period. Objects of study may include film by Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard), Fritz Lang (The Big Heat), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Jules Dassin (Night and the City), Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep), Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past), and Akira Kurosawa (High and Low), as well as texts by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, Raymond Durgnat, Paul Schrader, and Sylvia Harvey, among others.
