Description
[Contemporary] Film Noir, a French term meaning "black film," has become a term employed to reference the period of the American crime film (the 1940s and 1950s) and as descriptive of a film genre. Film noir echoed the changing attitudes toward gender, definitions of evil, concepts of the family, psychoanalytical descriptions of behavior, etc., in American society after World War II. In recent film history, we have seen an insurgence of films, which can, and have been, described as having noirish characteristics. Some are termed as Neo-Noir or The New Noir. We will view movies that exhibit such characteristics but are not part of the historical genre of film noir. Candidates for selection will be Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva, David Mamet's The House of Games, Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential et. al. The instructor will lecture on each film, drawing attention to how the film reflects filmmaking at the time of its production, its social context, interpretat