Welcome fans,
scholars, and practitioners of noir!
This website is dedicated to criticism and creative works inspired by film noir, mystery/crime writing, and hard-boiled literature. It is a nexus of innovative projects intended to bring noir fans, critics, writers and filmmakers into meaningful dialogue and debate. Ultimately, this website is part of an active workshop exploring the vast potential of noir (its past, present, and future), which we've dubbed the OuFiNoPo—an acronym standing for Workshop of Potential Film Noir. We hope you'll check out our podcasts, our book, and our current and forthcoming multimedia projects, and will contact us—and fellow Noircast contributors—with ideas for other potential noir collaborations.
- --Shannon Clute and Richard L. Edwards
Reserve a copy of Clute and Edwards' new noir book today
Available for pre-order at Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/jCePwG
In December 2011, Dartmouth College Press (University Press of New England) will release Clute and Edwards' new study of film noir, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism.This exciting book builds on crucial insights from the Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir podcasts, and draws on the work of the experimental literary group Oulipo (an acronym for "Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle," or "Workshop of Potential Literature") to investigate the extreme self-consciousness and high degree of visual punning exhibited by noir. In the process, the book proposes—and serves as a sustained demonstration of—an OuFiNoPo, or Workshop of Potential Film Noir. Part thinking-man’s fan crush, part crazily inspired remix of the most beloved of film genres, this study will help scholars and film fans alike to view film noir afresh, and achieve new insights into even the best known movies. See the full press release from Dartmouth College Press here.
Clute and Edwards have never solicited donations for their podcasts, for like all good things these podcasts are a labor of love. But they would ask you to…
PLEASE GRAB A COPY of The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism, and consider picking up other copies for all your movie-loving friends.
Episode 53: Out of the Past Act II (with Jonathan Santlofer, author of Anatomy of Fear)
OUT OF THE PAST is perhaps the most carefully structured of all films noir—a narrative divided (like protagonist Jeff Markum/Bailey) between an inescapable past and an impossible future, teetering on the slimmest hope for the present such that any action taken by its poor players tips them down into the abyss. Director Jacques Tourneur, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring perfectly synchronized their efforts on this film, creating a narrative masterpiece where every image perfectly accompanies or contrasts every line of dialogue, where the whole is so self-conscious that it forces us to view each moment through every other, creating a true mise-en-abyme. It would be as impossible for the viewer to enter into such a story as it is for the characters to escape it, if it weren't for the decision to create a "Meta" narration at exactly the halfway point of the film, allowing the viewer to sort past from present in a film that constantly blurs that distinction in order to show how lives are always lived in servitude to what comes out of the past. For all of these reasons, the film is a constant source of inspiration, and a constant obsession, for those who watch it carefully. Artist and novelist Jonathan Santlofer joins Clute and Edwards to discuss how the film has repeatedly inspired his work, and Clute and Edwards consider how the case they would make for this movie is reframed each time they reopen their investigation into its means and motives. Click here to listen to this episode
Episode 52: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with Scott McGee of Turner Classic Movies)
Appearances can be deceiving. On the surface, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is pure science fiction, the tale of seed pods from outer space that produce emotionless body doubles of each citizen in the small town of Santa Mira. Often read as an allegory of either Communism or McCarthyism, where every person who becomes "one of them" loses autonomy by willingly buying into the unthinking collective, the film in fact plumbs questions of humanity in the modern era with subtlety and nuance more common to films noir than to science fiction movies. As Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) fight to remain human, they question the mass hysteria of the era, recognize that all appearances are misleading in a mass media culture, and discuss how we lose our humanity in times of social dislocation. Director Don Siegal, screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring and producer Walter Wanger draw on their extensive experience in creating iconic films noir to craft a movie that self-consciously adopts a noir style and noir thematics whenever the stakes are high, demonstrating in the process that noir is ideally suited to addressing human questions in the years following WWII, when retaining our humanity in spite of technological progress is precisely what is in question. Click here to listen to the episode.
Noircast Special 4 Podcast: Q&A with Shannon Clute and Jared Case
Jared Case and Shannon Clute, at George Eastman House (1/20/11)
On January 20, 2011 Clute introduced the film Mildred Pierce at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, as part of their Noir Series. His talk was preceded by a Q&A with Jared Case (Head of Cataloguing and Research Center) on several noir topics: the origins of the Out of the Past podcast; certain underappreciated aspects of noir; how scholarly approaches to noir have limited what we see; a new film studies paradigm he and Richard Edwards worked out in their forthcoming book The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism, which allows them unleash and understand other narrative potentials lurking in noir. Special thanks to Jared Case for letting us repost these audio and video files.
To listen to that conversation, please visit Out of the Past website
To see that conversation, please visit these YouTube links.
The Adjustment Bureau (2011) and a Kinder, Gentler Alt-Noir Universe
*Spoiler Alert – I discuss key plot elements.
RE here:
The Adjustment Bureau (George Nolfi, 2011) is the latest Philip K. Dick "alt-noir universe" to be made into a major motion picture. Even before the film appeared in theaters, The Adjustment Bureau trailer was drenched in noir iconography (these filmmakers clearly love fedoras) and filled with noir-tinged dialogue like "you can't outrun fate." Audiences are already familiar with "universes" derived from the imagination of Philip K. Dick. His alt-noir universes have been vividly imagined in such films as Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, and Minority Report. An alt-noir universe blends and bends the conventions, iconography, and myths of science fiction with noir, creating a satisfying hybrid world. Moreover, there's a direct connection to noir's postwar period: Dick wrote the short story "The Adjustment Team" in 1954. The original story shares much in common with frequent noir themes such as the limits of free will and the capricious nature of fate, mixed with Red Scare-induced paranoia and xenophobia. Finally, Matt Damon is not playing a variant of his Bourne persona in The Adjustment Bureau. Indeed, Damon is a good choice for the lead character in an alt-noir film, having established his noir bona fides in The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella, 1999).
Noircast Special 3: The Maltese Touch of Evil Video Essay
While many scholars have focused on noir as a dark visual style, or a worldview marked by the anxieties and stark realities of modernity, few have addressed noir's high degree of self-consciousness or its profoundly quirky humor.In their new book, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism, Clute and Edwards focus on these underappreciated characteristics of noir to demonstrate how films noir frame their "intertextual" borrowings from on another and create visual puns, and how these gestures function to generate both compelling narratives and critical reflections upon those narratives.Drawing on the on the concept of "constraint" articulated by the Oulipo (a French acronym for "Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle," or "Workshop of Potential Literature"), Clute and Edwards demonstrate that noir was among the most constrained of film styles, and the constraints noir embraced gave rise to its infinite variability and unprecedented self-reflexivity—the very characteristics that have often forced scholars to bracket off noir, framing it as an exception to the otherwise tidy world of studio-era American cinema. In this video essay, Clute and Edwards use the simple constraint of run time percentage to recombine iconic moments from 31 films noir and neo-noir, and in the process create a short film that is at once a noir narrative and an investigation into the narrative constraints embraced by noir. A special thanks to Kylee Wall, editor extraordinaire, for her great editing work here.
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