Wheeler Winston Dixon
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748623990
- eISBN:
- 9780748653614
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623990.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book provides an overview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century noir and fatalist film practice from 1945 onwards. It demonstrates the ways in which American cinema has inculcated a climate of ...
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This book provides an overview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century noir and fatalist film practice from 1945 onwards. It demonstrates the ways in which American cinema has inculcated a climate of fear in our daily lives, as reinforced, starting in the 1950s, by television, and later video cassettes, and the Internet, to create, by the early twenty-first century a hypersurveillant atmosphere in which no one can avoid the barrage of images that continually assault our senses. The book begins with the return of American soldiers from World War II, ‘liberated’ from war in the Pacific by the newly created atomic bomb, which came to rule American consciousness through much of the 1950s and 1960s and then, in a newer, more small-scale way, become a fixture of terrorist hardware in the post-paranoid era of the twenty-first century. It is constructed in six chapters, each highlighting a particular ‘raising of the cinematic stakes’ in the creation of a completely immersible universe of images. The book expands the definition of noir to include numerous lesser-known works; deals with Red Scare films of the 1950s in the United States; examines the ‘dark side’ of the 1960s, or films that questioned the emerging counterculture; and explores such neo-noir films as The Last Seduction (1993), Angel Heart (1987), The Grifters (1990), Red Rock West (1993), The Usual Suspects (1995), Mulholland Drive (2001), L.A. Confidential (1997) and Memento (2000).Less
This book provides an overview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century noir and fatalist film practice from 1945 onwards. It demonstrates the ways in which American cinema has inculcated a climate of fear in our daily lives, as reinforced, starting in the 1950s, by television, and later video cassettes, and the Internet, to create, by the early twenty-first century a hypersurveillant atmosphere in which no one can avoid the barrage of images that continually assault our senses. The book begins with the return of American soldiers from World War II, ‘liberated’ from war in the Pacific by the newly created atomic bomb, which came to rule American consciousness through much of the 1950s and 1960s and then, in a newer, more small-scale way, become a fixture of terrorist hardware in the post-paranoid era of the twenty-first century. It is constructed in six chapters, each highlighting a particular ‘raising of the cinematic stakes’ in the creation of a completely immersible universe of images. The book expands the definition of noir to include numerous lesser-known works; deals with Red Scare films of the 1950s in the United States; examines the ‘dark side’ of the 1960s, or films that questioned the emerging counterculture; and explores such neo-noir films as The Last Seduction (1993), Angel Heart (1987), The Grifters (1990), Red Rock West (1993), The Usual Suspects (1995), Mulholland Drive (2001), L.A. Confidential (1997) and Memento (2000).