Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir

Clute and Edwards
Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir

Each film noir weaves its own yarn of longing, corruption, and fateful decisions. In each episode of this podcast series, Clute and Edwards investigate one noir or neo-noir in detail. Following various threads of inquiry, they attempt to unravel the vast canvas of noir. More info at www.noircast.net

  1. Episode 53: Out of the Past Act II

    11/24/2011

    Episode 53: Out of the Past Act II

    OUT OF THE PAST is perhaps the most carefully structured of all films noir--a narrative divided (like protagonist Jeff Markum/Bailey) between an inescapable past and an impossible future, teetering on the slimmest hope for the present such that any action taken by its poor players tips them down into the abyss. Director Jacques Tourneur, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring perfectly synchronized their efforts on this film, creating a narrative masterpiece where every image perfectly accompanies or contrasts every line of dialogue, where the whole is so self-conscious that it forces us to view each moment through every other, creating a true mise-en- abyme. It would be as impossible for the viewer to enter into such a story as it is for the characters to escape it, if it weren't for the decision to create a "Meta" narration at exactly the halfway point of the film, allowing the viewer to sort past from present in a film that constantly blurs that distinction in order to show how lives are always lived in servitude to what comes out of the past. For all of these reasons, the film is a constant source of inspiration, and a constant obsession, for those who watch it carefully. Artist and novelist Jonathan Santlofer joins Clute and Edwards to discuss how the film has repeatedly inspired his work, and Clute and Edwards consider how the case they would make for this movie is reframed each time they reopen their investigation into its means and motives.

    46 min
  2. Noircast Special 3: The Maltese Touch of Evil Video Essay

    06/11/2011

    Noircast Special 3: The Maltese Touch of Evil Video Essay

    While many scholars have focused on noir as a dark visual style, or a worldview marked by the anxieties and stark realities of modernity, few have addressed noir's high degree of self-consciousness or its profoundly quirky humor. In their new book,The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism, Clute and Edwards focus on these underappreciated characteristics of noir to demonstrate how films noir frame their "intertextual" borrowings from on another and create visual puns, and how these gestures function to generate both compelling narratives and critical reflections upon those narratives. Drawing on the on the concept of "constraint" articulated by the Oulipo (a French acronym for "Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle," or "Workshop of Potential Literature"), Clute and Edwards demonstrate that noir was the most constrained of film styles, and the constraints noir embraced gave rise to its infinite variability and unprecedented self-reflexivity--the very characteristics that have often forced scholars to bracket off noir, framing it as an exception to the otherwise tidy world of studio-era American cinema. In this video essay, Clute and Edwards use the simple constraint of run time percentage to recombine iconic moments from 31 films noir and neo-noir, and in the process create a short film that is at once a noir narrative and an investigation into the narrative constraints embraced by noir.

    7 min
4.5
out of 5
88 Ratings

About

Each film noir weaves its own yarn of longing, corruption, and fateful decisions. In each episode of this podcast series, Clute and Edwards investigate one noir or neo-noir in detail. Following various threads of inquiry, they attempt to unravel the vast canvas of noir. More info at www.noircast.net

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