heroes and villains in the sci-fi neo-noir. Schrader echoes Raymond Durgnat's sentiment that "film noir is not a genre" so much as it is a cinematic expression of "tone and mood" (8). However, film noir does tend to typically focus on these forces that are internal and external to the main characters -- whipping in and out of them to such a degree that the ending lines of Touch of Evil reverberate through virtually every well-made film noir and neo-noir: "He was some kind of man." The lesson that noir teaches is exactly that: the more one looks, the more inscrutable and impossible… Continue Reading...
rooted in the American Society, and also give them insight into how such ills can be fought (Flory, 2000, p. 28).
Film noir can be criticized in two major perspectives, either formalist or content-based. Formalist criticism normally dwells on the formal bits of film noir, the sexualization of brutality, the non-realistic lighting, the characterization of intelligence agents, the crooked elements and femmes fatales, so as to portray stabilization of the male line, and destabilization of the matriarchy. Formalist criticism relates the byname noir to some distorted form of a woman. It is no wonder that women, criminals and intelligence agents in film noir are black, simply by taking ambiguous positions that… Continue Reading...
the zeitgeist of the era. Building on the tradition of film noir and its romantic depictions of criminal underworlds, Chinatown is unique in its use of an unreliable narrator: the audience does not necessarily know the truth and is thus deprived of the treat of dramatic irony. Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist is almost the opposite, as the audience knows fully well the realities of Jews living in Nazi Europe. Both films are dark, sociological, and to a lesser degree political, and both offer sweeping and visually poignant narratives.
One of the main themes Chinatown and The Pianist share in… Continue Reading...
