Book description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Flourishing in the United States during the 1940s and 50s, the bleak,
violent genre of filmmaking known as film noir reflected the attitudes
of writers and auteur directors influenced by the events of the
turbulent mid-twentieth century. Films such as Force of Evil, Night
and the City, Double Indemnity, Laura, The Big Heat, The Killers, Kiss
Me Deadly and, more recently, Chinatown and The Grifters are indelibly
American. Yet the sources of this genre were found in Germany and
France and imported to Hollywood by emigr? filmmakers, who developed
them and allowed a vibrant genre to flourish. Andrew Dickos's Street
with No Name traces the film noir genre back to its roots in German
Expressionist cinema and the French cinema of the interwar years.
Dickos describes the development of the film noir in America from 1941
through the 1970s and examines how this development expresses a modern
cinema. Dickos examines notable directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz
Lang, John Huston, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Samuel Fuller, Otto
Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, Anthony
Mann and others. He also charts the genre's influence on such
celebrated postwar French filmmakers as Jean-Pierre Melville, Fran?ois
Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard. Addressing the aesthetic, cultural,
political, and social concerns depicted in the genre, Street with No
Name demonstrates how the film noir generates a highly expressive,
raw, and violent mood as it exposes the ambiguities of modern postwar society.
""Dickos spins a good web for film noir
addicts."--Culture Vulture" --
