Film Noir Goes Global

September 7, 2024 8:30 am. PST

Great session yesterday. I’m sorry about the Zoom glitch. I had embedded the wrong invite and some one pointed it out to me. I made a correction 20 minutes later after posting, but some of you still got the wrong link. I thought I had caught it in time.

We talked the hardboiled man vs. the transactional femme fatale, sex panics, wage labor and noir’s plot being all about escaping the mind numbing and soul killing strain of working for a living under intense surveillance and management. Get rich quick schemes abound in boom time economies and cities filled with grifters and hustlers and femmes fatales. Noir originates in Los Angeles, is identified by Parisians and then in the 1990s and 2000s moves as a style and a genre into East Asia.

The next session will be on September 7, 2024. I am traveling to Australia to give two talks in Brisbane and Melbournes. Aussies come out to see me and have a drink! Will post more details when I have them. In the meantime, I can’t link to the films because of copyright and proprietary issues, but behind the paywall are links to the slides I showed.

I got very nerdy: demand seems to be for more nerdiness, which basically means a bit of lecturing and slideshow before discussion. And for those of you who missed the session because of my tech incompetence, the slides are actually a good summary of my presentation. Feel free to ask questions in the comments to this post.

The discussion as usual was really good.

Session 2: Global Noir: Paris, Los Angeles, Harbin

Le Samourai (Jean Pierre Melville, 1967)

Devil in a Blue Dress, (Carl Franklin, 1995) based on the novel by the same by Walter Moseley

Black Coal, Thin Ice, (Diao Yinan, 2014)