Liminal Noir in Classical World Cinema

✍ Scribed by Elyce Helford; Christopher Weedman (editors)

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 232
• Series: Traditions in World Cinema
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Applys a noir lens to films which defy easy generic categorization

• Revaluation of classical-era international films through focus on noir elements in films otherwise not considered film noir
• Consideration of liminality as a driving feature of film noir, including genre, cultural norm, border, and boundary crossings
• A case study approach that explores individual film examples within critical, production, and historical contexts

While few can deny its incalculable influence on popular filmmaking during and after World War II, film noir has been and remains one of the most contentious categories of cinema, involving more debates than consensus about what constitutes a noir.

This collection explores the amorphous parameters of this dark cinematic phenomenon by utilising an expanded, nuanced definition of film noir, which reaches beyond traditional conceptions of genre, style, and cycle to examine its complex international origins and emphasis on issues of liminality. Through illuminating case studies of single films from nations including Argentina, the former Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Poland, Spain, and the US, authors consider elements of genre hybridity, border crossing, boundary breaching, and other signifiers of liminality to reassess classical-era films that defy conventional generic and stylistic categorisation.

✦ Table of Contents

CONTENTS
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Traditions in World Cinema
Introduction: Liminality and the Boundaries of Film Noir
PART I. EXPOSING CULTURAL ANXIETIES
1. The Despair of the Noir Generation: Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds
2. The Fleap Being Neither Flea nor Fly: Ida Lupino’s Interrogations of Female Trauma in Never Fear
3. Running Aimlessly: Camino Cortado and Autarkic Spain
4. Race and the Noir Western: Navigating The Walking Hills
PART II. RECONCEPTUALISING NATIONAL CINEMAS
5. ‘My Mama Done Tol’ Me’: Jewish Émigré Noir, Hybridity, and Black-Jewish Relations in Blues in the Night
6. Expressionism, Existentialism, and Socialism in Scars of the Past
7. The Deadly Seduction of a Rake: British Costume Melodrama, Noir, and the ‘Othered’ Woman in The Gypsy and the Gentleman
8. Argentine Gothic-Noir Fusion in The Black Vampire
PART III. AESTHETICS AND ANTECEDENTS
9. A ‘Feeling of Suspension’: Tradition and Modernity in La Pointe Courte
10. Dostoyevsky ’58: Richard Brooks’s Brothers Karamazov as Baroque Noir
11. Men in Black: I Confess, the Hitchcock Noir, and the American Gothic
Selected Bibliography
Index