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In 1974 Alain Silver queried the Indiana University Press and was offered a contract to produce a volume on film noir for the Cinema One Series. When two collaborators dropped out of that project, the offer lost a lot of its lustre. Shortly thereafter, an excerpt from Alain's book-length study of the samurai film appeared in Film Comment. In retrospect, it should have been clear that such an undertaking at a time when very few of the titles of the classic period were available on demand--and then only via rentals of 16mm prints--would have to rely too heavily on the memories of the editors and contributors. When the deal was struck in the Santa Monica living room of Elizabeth Ward, who became the editor in charge of research, no one realized how monumental a task it would be. Before it was finished, the index cards that Elizabeth used to compile filmographic, bibliographic, and other details numbered 16,000. The typescript of the book's index alone was over 300 pages long. The main text was almost ten times as many pages, created by diverse hands, few of whom has access to IBM Selectrics, with a melange of Pica and Elite fonts and mostly triple-spaced to permit room for revisions and redactions that were so heavy in places, it was remarkable that a typesetter could decipher them.

Most scholars and critics have generally seen film noir as an American genre, emphasizing the fact that noir films have hailed from the classic Hollywood industry, or in the case of neo-noir, from the post-classical Hollywood cinema. Essentially, the perspectives of these scholars focus on the American contexts surrounding the films. This chapter examines films noir produced by two major film industries in Asia, the Hong Kong and South Korean cinemas which have been the most prolific in fashioning and transforming the noir tendency for their respective Asian contexts. The chapter sets out to understand the contexts of these motion pictures including detective and gangster genre films produced over the last ten years or so. The chapter thus follows the imperative on contextuality established in American scholarship of noir. Film noir in the Asian contexts (a darker than dark sensibility and an overwhelming urge towards violence) may be seen as alternative reactions to the American contexts of noir criticism.

Matthew Carter offers an in-depth examination of Delmer Daves’ Jubal. He contextualises the film within both the Western and Hollywood more generally and argues that, both formally and thematically, it and other prominent Westerns of the time are more closely aligned with film noir than is generally acknowledged to be the case. Applying a psychoanalytical-informed feminist analysis that considers the ideological intent of Jubal’s use of the femme fatale, he evaluates its critical-, or, counter-ideological capacity. From such a reading, he argues that the film’s narrative focus on repressed sexual desires and on the plight of the main female protagonist provides enough material to justify Jubal as constituting a critique of the excesses of patriarchal power.

Critically acclaimed as a milestone of Spanish cinema, Surcos (Furrows, J.A. Nieves Conde, 1951) is the film that single-handedly revolutionized Spanish cinema by introducing the spirit of Neorealism and Film Noir. Through a comparative analysis of the famous boarding sequence of Citizen Kane and few examples from Roberto Rossellini’s early films, this chapter argues that the film’s apparent appropriation of Italian neorealism and also Film Noir and, particularly, its internal strife between its progressive neorealist aesthetic and its fascist message, comes into sharper focus when seen through the lens of kitsch aesthetics. Despite its neorealist and noir appearance, Surcos is in fact a kitsch film that encapsulates Spanish fascist ideology even more insidiously than the previous ones precisely by not being an overtly propagandistic film.

Jessica Jones’ trajectory primarily concerns gendered sociopolitical issues —including rape, rape culture, and patriarchal oppression. The show uses signifiers of film noir such as dark visual stylization, psychological representation, disturbed and obsessive sexuality, and complex gender politics as a way to critique the entrenched values of the white American elite. Jessica Jones depicts and engages with perceived threats to masculine identity such as invading and colonizing aliens from other worlds and super-powered beings on Earth who threaten conventionally understood ideas of “humanity”.

Chinatown, a landmark of the New Hollywood, successfully recreates and revises the classic film noir milieu. Setting the film in the Los Angeles of the late nineteen-thirties, the aptness of such a setting for the United States of the nineteen-seventies is intentionally suggested. But the film’s creation of such a noir tonality is so successful that it raises the question of whether the unambiguous and profound evil present in the film suggests a world gone wrong—so wrong that no “right” action in such a world is conceivable. This chapter will examine what it would mean to suggest the wrongness of an entire way of life, what is responsible for such wrongness, and what it suggests about the possibility (or impossibility) of any right action in such a world.

This chapter explores Juan José Campanella and his Oscar winning El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes 2009). Unlike the other transnational auteurs focused upon in the book, he has not followed an initial critical and commercial domestic success (El hijo de la novia) with deterritorialized feature films outside of Argentina (although he has worked in US television). However, like the transnational auteurs he has been the object of analyses that criticize the mainstream ‘commercial’ forms and venues (transnational conglomerates) he works in and question the national credentials of his filmmaking. Arguing against a critical hierarchy that rates the features of art cinema (the New Argentine Cinema) above those of a commercial cinema, the chapter explores how in El secreto de sus ojos Campanella uses genre film to engage with the legacy of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ with the period directly before it and also with the contemporary moment. This chapter argues that Campanella’s manipulation of melodrama and film noir are an effective means to self-consciously stage the past and also pose key issues of historical memory and accountability of the crimes committed during Argentina’s Dirty War.