This is another obsession with me, another example, along with baseball, of what I think of as intelligent popular culture, at least potentially.
Film noir fascinates me as cultural diagnosis, a critical look of a suburbanizing society that was divesting in its cities. Film noir, at least superficially, seeemed to encourage the fear of cities and the suburban urge. But, in at least some of the films, noir questioned our decisions, asking if we were sure. At the very least, much of film noir is the product of people who loved cities and who lovingly (and perhaps loathingly) filmed the decaying, abandoned parts of cities.
The other fascination I have with noir is embedded in the history of movies and cities. I spent two decades investigating, here and there, mainly for course that I taught, the many intersections of the history of movies and of cities. Eventually I became obsessed with the contrast between panoramas and labyrinths in “city flicks.” (See the Musical Mixes tab for my musical rendition of panoramas and labyrinths). The movies inherited these two ways of seeing (and thinking) from earlier image culture. But what really got me is that the earliest city flicks were often panoramas, and spoke to the potential for opening up, better understanding, and improving our cities.
The modern city, the cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote at the dawn of movie culture, deceived the citizen, “is on its guard against him, masks itself, flees, intrigues, lures him to wander its circles to the point of exhaustion.”But along came motion pictures, Benjamin continued, to promote the “heightened presence of mind” that had become essential to physical and political well-being in the metropolis. Movies utilized new modes of perception that corresponded to those “that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen.” On the one hand, the motion picture extends “our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second," Benjamin concluded, "so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.” Yet a half century later, film noir reversed all these hopeful assessments. Noir tended to picture the city as a trap, a labyrinth that seemed to prevent all escape, all improvement.
I worked on an essay on “panoramas and labyrinths” and came close to publishing it (one reviewer said yes, the other no), but never fully got my arms around the topic. I’d still say that’s true. One negative review advised me to look into “Ed” Dimenberg’s work (the diminutive struck me as prime evidence of my own outsider status in the profession, or perhaps my eclectic research interests that often took me into precincts that I knew little about). I did indeed look into (devoured) Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, an excellent and mind-bending study. Among other things, Dimendberg’s study suggests a possible connection between the supposed main theme of this website (World Series as public festival in privatizing society and film noir, as Dimendberg convincingly shows how film noir addressed many of the same issues/forces reshaping baseball at this time: racial and demographic change, flight from the city to suburbia and the Sun Belt, television and jet travel, privatization, and the like.
The link below provides a brief glimpse (classroom powerpoints in pdf format) into the rabbit hole I went down. Below that is the unpublished, unfinished essay in question.
Yes, I know, Chinatown is technically a neo-noir but what I great one. I've watched and taught the film maybe 20 times, often on hot summer nights when teaching a one week, 5.5 hours, workshop on movies and cities. I am attaching - again, I'm obsessed - a long companion commentary on the film and the powerpoint (in pdf format) that I used to teach the film (with a few intro slides on The Big Clock (a genuine noir).
An earlier post references the deep dive I did into Edward Dimendberg's splendid study of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. I recall spending an afternoon trying to make sense of, to master, something about Ann Terry's hat from the movie Phantom Lady. It's a pleasant memory and was well worth trying to master. I fell short, of course, but I'll post some of the writings I did based on this book and perhaps some powerpoints too.
You will perhaps note that I run Dimendberg through my panorama and labyrinth obsession.
Hey It's Ann Terry's Hat: My summary of the first 36 pages of Dimendberg's book.
movies go to war.pdf my summary of the next pages; I only taught selections from the text so it skips around a bit.
Spatial disorientation and walking cures.pdf Summary continued
dimendberg Centrifugal Space.pdf
dimendberg 207.259.pdf Last one.
This is where my fascination with film noir began. In the late 1980s, I was looking for a less time intensive way to teach in the summer (to.make ends meet at home and leave some time for writing - and house building). Xavier had these one-week workshops and after I read Robert Sklar's magnificent Movie-Made America, a history of Hollywood seemed like a great option.
I enlisted my good friend Bob Cotter to help me. This was, more or less, the beginning of our friendship. We taught the course for twenty-five or thirty summers but I'm thinking here about the first year. Bob was the AV guy at Xavier, not a professor, but he had a vast, vast, vast knowledge of Hollywood and an engaging, warm, tutelary spirit. That first summer (Bob always took Wednesday night to give me a bit of a break halfway through), Bob came loaded for bear, all laid out on flip charts. He was a force of nature and fascinating and toward the end of the evening he got to film noir. I guess I had heard the term but I knew nothing. What with Bob's repartee, and the clips he showed (including from Out of the Past), I was hooked.
Hollywood course 4 website.pdf : a truncated version of the syllabus.
Part One: The Democratic and Subversive Potential of Movies
Powerpoints for Part 0ne:
Part Two: Taming Movie Culture
Powerpoints for Part Two
Part Three: Hollywood on the Potamac
Powerpoints for Part Three
Part Four: Devouring its Own
Part Four powerpoints
