Noircast Specials

Noircast Special #1: Kill Me Like You Mean It (A Conversation with the Stolen Chair Theater Company):

A roundtable discussion with the director, playwright, and lead actors of The Stolen Chair Theatre Company's off-Broadway play "Kill Me Like You Mean It." Inspired by film noir and the theatre of the absurd, the play is an artful mash-up that demonstrates how dark is the heart of absurdist theatre, and how absurd are the conventions of noir. This podcast--part interview, part radio drama--should please fans of film noir and mystery fiction alike."
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Noircast Special #2: Alternative Noir Publications:

This episode features interviews with the creators of three alternative noir publications: Tee Morris, founder of podiobooks (www.podiobooks.com) and author of the fantasy-hardboiled podiobook "Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword;” Kevin Burton Smith, creator of the superlative "Thrilling Detective" website and ezine (www.thrillingdetective.com); Seth Harwood, author of the podiobook "Jack Wakes Up" starring movie-star one-hit-wonder and ex-drug-addict Jack Palms.
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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 Litterature Potentielle," or "Workshop of Potential Literature"), Clute and Edwards demonstrate that noir was 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.

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Noircast Special #4: Q and A with Shannon Clute and Jared Case:

On January 20, 2024 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 question and answer session with Jared Case (Head of Cataloguing and Research Center) on several noir topics: the origins of the Out of the Past podcast series; 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.

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Noircast Special #5: L.A. Noire The Collected Stories: A Conversation with Jonathan Santlofer:

Clute and Edwards are joined by L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories editor Jonathan Santlofer, a hard-boiled writer and artist extraordinaire. Santlofer discusses the particular challenges and rewards of bringing together a short story collection for a video game production company from tight deadlines to restrictions on spoilers and the need for publishers of all media to put story first in this brave new era when the medium and the target audience grow ever harder to define. A fascinating conversation for all fans of videogames, hard-boiled fiction and things noir.

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Clute and Edwards, 2005-2012