Pulp Fiction (1994), Se7en (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), Fight Club (1999), and Memento (2001): these current films with their gritty plots, seedy characters, and dim lighting are products of a sixty-year-old film genre or, depending on whom you ask, film movement…or film style…or film mood. Beginning in 1941 with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and theoretically ending in 1958 with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, this psychologically disturbing, highly contested, inherently American brand of films known as film noir is what this course will consider. Students will screen classic noir (e.g., The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity [1944], Sunset Boulevard [1950]) as well as recent noir films, or neo-noir, such as those mentioned above. With a critical eye, they will approach the films as texts, analyzing narrative construction, character types, themes, and aesthetic styles. Moreover, so that students will understand that these films–as all films–are products of the time period in which they are created, we will place film noir (as well as neo-noir) in its historical and cultural context. Finally, students will be introduced to several critical and theoretical approaches to film noir so that they may situate their personal reactions, both formal and ideological, in a more meaningful context.

REQUIRED TEXTS AND MATERIALS

• Film Noir (FN), Andrew Spicer.
• A Short Guide to Writing about Film (SG), Timothy Corrigan.
• Additional readings including fiction, journal articles, and book chapters may be found on the course website.
• ALL FEATURE-LENGTH FILMS ARE CONSIDERED REQUIRED TEXTS AS WELL.