Film Noir Light and Shadow

Alain Silver

• Publisher: Limelight
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781493082308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Despite a glut of black and white filters, the digital revolution in videography has all but abandoned the art, science, beauty, and power of cinematic lighting that literally illuminated the Golden Age of motion pictures. Film Noir Light and Shadow explores an era before CGI – a time when every photon mattered and the lighting of a set served a grander purpose than simply rendering its subjects visible. Edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, the duo behind numerous critically acclaimed studies of other aspects of noir, this anthology presents a series of essays that examine the visual style of the filmmakers of cinema's classic period. Some focus on individual pictures or directors; others discuss elements of style or sub-groups of movies within the movement. All are sharply focused on what makes the noir phenomenon unique in American – and global – cinematic history. Aside from highlighting the innovative work of its editors and their late colleague Robert Porfirio, Film Noir Light and Shadow also shares its light with a bevy of contributors who have written and edited their own books on the subject – a list of luminaries that includes Sheri Chinen Biesen, Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards, Julie Grossman, Delphine Letort, Robert Miklitsch, R. Barton Palmer, Homer Pettey, Marlisa Santos, Imogen Sara Smith, and Tony Williams. As befits the topic, this volume is lavishly illustrated with 500 images that capture the richness and breadth of the classic period's imagery, making it an ideal companion for students of the genre, film historians, sprocket fiends, and the retrospectively inclined.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir
• The Gangster and Film Noir
• The Noir Title Sequence: Evolution of Style
• Rooms like Reveries: Interiors and Interiority in Film Noir
• Women’s Song and Dance Performances in Film Noir
• The Long Take and the Sequence Shot in Film Noir
• The Sequence Shot: Spatial and Temporal Articulations in The Killers
• “A gray web woven by a thousand spiders”: Dream Sequence Construction in Film Noir
• Hollywood Noir: Scripting the Death of Romance in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and In a Lonely Place (1950)
• Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)
• Welles, Toland, Aldrich, and Baroque Noir Expressionism
• Double Indemnity: A Shadowy Exemplar of Film Noir Visual Style
• Fragments of the Mirror: Hitchcock’s Noir Landscape
• Realism, Expressionism, Style: The Unsuspected (1947) and The Big Clock (1948)
• Crossfire and Homeland Insecurity
• Ida Lupino’s Television Noir
• In the Dark: The Noir Visual Style of Russell Metty
• Nothingness and Purpose: Light and Shadow in It’s a Wonderful Life
• “The Dynamism of Violent Death”: Lighting, Censorship, and Violence in Film Noir
• Nine Elements of Style in Kiss Me Deadly
• “We Couldn’t Always Stay in the Dark”: Stylistic Innovation in Richard Fleischer’s Violent Saturday
• Inscribing Film Noir’s Epitaph: Self-Consciousness and Visual Punning in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil
• Notes on Contributors