Noircast.net is the online portal for all the noir projects and experiments created by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards.
Clute and Edwards met as junior faculty members at Saint Mary's College of California. Our first podcasting collaboration, Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir, came out of our shared love of film noir. Since its inception, Out of the Past has followed a consistent show format: each episode investigates a single film in relation to the body of film. We saw podcasting as a medium that would help us capture our ongoing scholarly and interdisciplinary conversations on film noir, as well as a means to share our film discussions with a broader audience of scholars, students, and fans.
Six years later, Out of the Past has received over 380,000 downloads worldwide, and it has been downloaded on every continent except Antarctica. We have created over 50 episodes of Out of the Past, and have also expanded our discussion to include other cinephiles, crime writers and film scholars such as Howard Rodman, Mike White, Eddie Muller, and Megan Abbott. Out of the Past has been written about in the Chronicle of Higher Education, cited in the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report, taught as a 'best practice in podcasting' in NITLE workshops by Bryan Alexander, and used as texts in film courses.
In 2006 Clute and Edwards began a second podcast series based on their shared interest in hard-boiled writing. Behind the Black Mask: Mystery Writers Revealed interviewed contemporary crime writers. Each podcast focused on a single recent novel by each author with an engaging and detailed discussion of the author's writing life and craft. Behind the Black Mask continued Clute and Edwards' interest in making scholarly commentary and critical analysis accessible to public audiences.
In 2008 Clute and Edwards were commissioned by Yaddo, the famous artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, to produce a twenty-episode podcast series. Those efforts resulted in Yaddocast: The Archive of the Future, and those podcasts were released in conjunction with a museum retrospective at the New York Public Library entitled "Yaddo: The Making of American Culture." Yaddocast covers the history of Yaddo and its impact on American Arts and Letters by telling the story of twenty artists associated with the retreat beginning with the first episode on Edgar Allan Poe. Other episodes highlighted Yaddo's role in the careers of Aaron Copland, Patricia Highsmith, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, among others.
In December 2011 Clute and Edwards will be publishing their first book, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism. The book will be published in December 2011 by the University Press of New England, and it is an investigation into film noir that builds on the conversations begun in Out of the Past.
More noir-related and general film projects are on the horizon, including a new open access film journal and an online database project related to their forthcoming book. Please check back with Noircast.net regularly to get updates on the projects of Clute and Edwards.
