Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made ... more Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce… What is new is not that it is a commodity, but that today it deliberately admits it is one; that art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumption goods constitutes the charm of novelty." Theodor Adorno "Insert the work as an original fact in the process of liberation, place it first at the service of life itself, ahead of art: dissolve aesthetics in the life of society: only in this way, as Fanon said can decolonization become possible and culture, cinema, and beautyat least, what is of greatest importance to us-become our culture, our films, and our sense of beauty.
Classic Film Noir, as this study argues, was, at least in its post-war phase, a global phenomenon... more Classic Film Noir, as this study argues, was, at least in its post-war phase, a global phenomenon in which a set of strikingly similar social, political, economic, and aesthetic conditions gave rise to an aesthetic representation of a hoped-for change not only in the United States, but across the world. When that change did not occur, the form became a lament for a lost opportunity and a critique of the return of the old order. Much has happened in-between, including a more dominant role for what has been termed neo-noir as a recognized genre, particularly in the United States but also in the world as a whole. This acceptance of the form has sometimes, because of the dominance of Hollywood, acted as simply a means not of critiquing global power, but of promoting and maintaining US cultural hegemony.
astute analysis of the buildup of the police state (the prison-industrial complex, police seizure... more astute analysis of the buildup of the police state (the prison-industrial complex, police seizure of assets, the rollback of civil rights, etc.) as a means of managing an increasingly disenfranchised working class. At times, however, these analyses have adopted the framework of the power structure in discussing "crime" and "criminals," and have de-emphasized the ways in which some forms of "crime" may also be about resistance to corporate power. This period witnessed the emergence of organized crime as an increasingly global corporate (and state sanctioned) entity in areas such as the drug traffic. In turn, analysis tended to adopt the framework of "crime" as a problem and then suggested its own ways of contesting the established need for dealing with that problem, instead of questioning the entire framework in which the problem was defined. This was not always the case on the part of progressives. In the mid-1940s in Hollywood, a series of fi...
After the war, the Labour Government headed by Clement Attlee, 1945–51, claimed to be clearing a ... more After the war, the Labour Government headed by Clement Attlee, 1945–51, claimed to be clearing a path to socialism, to a truly equal society, and a sharing of wealth. That government did institute much of what later came to be called The Welfare State; public housing, cradle-to-grave health insurance, and nearly full employment. However, it also clamped down on workers’ dissent in the wake of imposed mandatory wage levels and bans on striking; stifled dissent of its policies in general, which did little to change a rigid class system; and pursued an aggressive imperial foreign policy, barely distinguishable from the Conservatives. When they came to power for the remainder of the 1950s, the Conservatives increased the repression, furthering the ‘mild McCarthyism’ that had, in fact, been instituted under the Labour Government.
What do Jean Gabin, Stanley Baker, Silvana Mangano and Toshiro Mifune have in common? This book w... more What do Jean Gabin, Stanley Baker, Silvana Mangano and Toshiro Mifune have in common? This book will argue that all four actors, in their participation in a form defined as International Film Noir, played characters who fell afoul of the law and who represented working- and middle-class frustration and dissatisfaction at the way the post-war world was being organized. Until now film noir has been almost solely considered an American phenomenon, consisting, in its classical phase, of dark, seedy, low-budget crime films of the 1940s where the criminal everyman, and woman, was the center of attention. In the contemporary era, noir is recognized as a global form, albeit one that has migrated out from the Hollywood center to the periphery, with other countries and regions (in the present particularly prominent are Mediterranean and Scandinavian noir) adapting the Hollywood form to their own uses. Noir is acknowledged as having international roots in 1920s German Expressionism and 1930s F...
Of all the post-war situations in which noir flourished (the United States, Britain, Italy) Japan... more Of all the post-war situations in which noir flourished (the United States, Britain, Italy) Japan’s presented the clearest moment in terms of the stark alignment of class forces. What was at first an outbreak of grassroots democracy, as unions encouraged by the US Occupation burgeoned, ultimately gave way to a repression, spearheaded by the US government and Japanese business interests. This repression led, by way of a communist witch hunt justified by the Cold War that made HUAC look tame, to a restoration of the pre-war power of the now more centralized conglomerates (the zaibatsu). As in the United States, the film industry was at the center of both the labor organizing and of the repression that followed. One of the most militant unions was the Toho Studio union which, like the Confederation of Studio Unions in Hollywood, halted production at Japan’s major studio for almost a year, before US planes and tanks helped force the end of the strike.
The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth... more The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era’s last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood’s awkward adolescence during which the company town’s many competing subcultures -- celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients – came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War.
List of Figures Foreword Preface: On Symbolic Misery and Its Attenuation (And the Crime Film) Ack... more List of Figures Foreword Preface: On Symbolic Misery and Its Attenuation (And the Crime Film) Acknowledgements Introduction: Global Fugitives: Outside the Law and the Cold War 'Consensus' 1. Un greve, sanglant et poetic (A Strike, Bloody and Poetic): French Film Noir and the Defeat of the Popular Front 2. The Revolution That Wasn't: Black Markets, Ressentiment, and Survival in Postwar British Film Noir 3. The Wintering of the Italian Spring: From Neorealism to Film Noir via Verdi 4. Occupy the Zaibatsu: Postwar Japanese Film Noir: From Democracy to the (Re)Appearance of the (Old) New Order Conclusion: Mediterranean Noir: Sunlight Gleaming Off a Battered .45 Appendix Bibliography Endnotes Index?
Broe, Dennis. "Fox and Its Friends: Global Commodification and the New Cold War." In Focus: The M... more Broe, Dennis. "Fox and Its Friends: Global Commodification and the New Cold War." In Focus: The Media and the New Cold War. 43.4 (summer 2004): 97-101. Broe, Dennis, ed.
French film noir is generally understood to be derived from, commenting upon, and rewriting the A... more French film noir is generally understood to be derived from, commenting upon, and rewriting the American movement, with the major works coming in the late 1950s and 1960s, at precisely the moment when American noir was declining.1 ‘To be authentic roman noir [the crime novel] — and consequently film noir — had to be American’ is the way Robin Buss (1994, p. 13) presents the impulse in post-war France in the most comprehensive study of the form. This chapter, though, will instead claim that ‘authentic film noir’ is French; that the end of what is generally referred to as poetic realism constituted the beginning of film noir as it was subsequently developed in post-war Hollywood. Both moments were leftist formations that registered first, the defeat of the French Popular Front, and then in the United States the defeat of both the New Deal (the American Popular Front) and, more crucially, of the post-war strike wave, which, like the earlier French wave of strikes from 1936–38, erupted ...
Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made ... more Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce… What is new is not that it is a commodity, but that today it deliberately admits it is one; that art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumption goods constitutes the charm of novelty." Theodor Adorno "Insert the work as an original fact in the process of liberation, place it first at the service of life itself, ahead of art: dissolve aesthetics in the life of society: only in this way, as Fanon said can decolonization become possible and culture, cinema, and beautyat least, what is of greatest importance to us-become our culture, our films, and our sense of beauty.
Classic Film Noir, as this study argues, was, at least in its post-war phase, a global phenomenon... more Classic Film Noir, as this study argues, was, at least in its post-war phase, a global phenomenon in which a set of strikingly similar social, political, economic, and aesthetic conditions gave rise to an aesthetic representation of a hoped-for change not only in the United States, but across the world. When that change did not occur, the form became a lament for a lost opportunity and a critique of the return of the old order. Much has happened in-between, including a more dominant role for what has been termed neo-noir as a recognized genre, particularly in the United States but also in the world as a whole. This acceptance of the form has sometimes, because of the dominance of Hollywood, acted as simply a means not of critiquing global power, but of promoting and maintaining US cultural hegemony.
astute analysis of the buildup of the police state (the prison-industrial complex, police seizure... more astute analysis of the buildup of the police state (the prison-industrial complex, police seizure of assets, the rollback of civil rights, etc.) as a means of managing an increasingly disenfranchised working class. At times, however, these analyses have adopted the framework of the power structure in discussing "crime" and "criminals," and have de-emphasized the ways in which some forms of "crime" may also be about resistance to corporate power. This period witnessed the emergence of organized crime as an increasingly global corporate (and state sanctioned) entity in areas such as the drug traffic. In turn, analysis tended to adopt the framework of "crime" as a problem and then suggested its own ways of contesting the established need for dealing with that problem, instead of questioning the entire framework in which the problem was defined. This was not always the case on the part of progressives. In the mid-1940s in Hollywood, a series of fi...
After the war, the Labour Government headed by Clement Attlee, 1945–51, claimed to be clearing a ... more After the war, the Labour Government headed by Clement Attlee, 1945–51, claimed to be clearing a path to socialism, to a truly equal society, and a sharing of wealth. That government did institute much of what later came to be called The Welfare State; public housing, cradle-to-grave health insurance, and nearly full employment. However, it also clamped down on workers’ dissent in the wake of imposed mandatory wage levels and bans on striking; stifled dissent of its policies in general, which did little to change a rigid class system; and pursued an aggressive imperial foreign policy, barely distinguishable from the Conservatives. When they came to power for the remainder of the 1950s, the Conservatives increased the repression, furthering the ‘mild McCarthyism’ that had, in fact, been instituted under the Labour Government.
What do Jean Gabin, Stanley Baker, Silvana Mangano and Toshiro Mifune have in common? This book w... more What do Jean Gabin, Stanley Baker, Silvana Mangano and Toshiro Mifune have in common? This book will argue that all four actors, in their participation in a form defined as International Film Noir, played characters who fell afoul of the law and who represented working- and middle-class frustration and dissatisfaction at the way the post-war world was being organized. Until now film noir has been almost solely considered an American phenomenon, consisting, in its classical phase, of dark, seedy, low-budget crime films of the 1940s where the criminal everyman, and woman, was the center of attention. In the contemporary era, noir is recognized as a global form, albeit one that has migrated out from the Hollywood center to the periphery, with other countries and regions (in the present particularly prominent are Mediterranean and Scandinavian noir) adapting the Hollywood form to their own uses. Noir is acknowledged as having international roots in 1920s German Expressionism and 1930s F...
Of all the post-war situations in which noir flourished (the United States, Britain, Italy) Japan... more Of all the post-war situations in which noir flourished (the United States, Britain, Italy) Japan’s presented the clearest moment in terms of the stark alignment of class forces. What was at first an outbreak of grassroots democracy, as unions encouraged by the US Occupation burgeoned, ultimately gave way to a repression, spearheaded by the US government and Japanese business interests. This repression led, by way of a communist witch hunt justified by the Cold War that made HUAC look tame, to a restoration of the pre-war power of the now more centralized conglomerates (the zaibatsu). As in the United States, the film industry was at the center of both the labor organizing and of the repression that followed. One of the most militant unions was the Toho Studio union which, like the Confederation of Studio Unions in Hollywood, halted production at Japan’s major studio for almost a year, before US planes and tanks helped force the end of the strike.
The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth... more The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era’s last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood’s awkward adolescence during which the company town’s many competing subcultures -- celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients – came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War.
List of Figures Foreword Preface: On Symbolic Misery and Its Attenuation (And the Crime Film) Ack... more List of Figures Foreword Preface: On Symbolic Misery and Its Attenuation (And the Crime Film) Acknowledgements Introduction: Global Fugitives: Outside the Law and the Cold War 'Consensus' 1. Un greve, sanglant et poetic (A Strike, Bloody and Poetic): French Film Noir and the Defeat of the Popular Front 2. The Revolution That Wasn't: Black Markets, Ressentiment, and Survival in Postwar British Film Noir 3. The Wintering of the Italian Spring: From Neorealism to Film Noir via Verdi 4. Occupy the Zaibatsu: Postwar Japanese Film Noir: From Democracy to the (Re)Appearance of the (Old) New Order Conclusion: Mediterranean Noir: Sunlight Gleaming Off a Battered .45 Appendix Bibliography Endnotes Index?
Broe, Dennis. "Fox and Its Friends: Global Commodification and the New Cold War." In Focus: The M... more Broe, Dennis. "Fox and Its Friends: Global Commodification and the New Cold War." In Focus: The Media and the New Cold War. 43.4 (summer 2004): 97-101. Broe, Dennis, ed.
French film noir is generally understood to be derived from, commenting upon, and rewriting the A... more French film noir is generally understood to be derived from, commenting upon, and rewriting the American movement, with the major works coming in the late 1950s and 1960s, at precisely the moment when American noir was declining.1 ‘To be authentic roman noir [the crime novel] — and consequently film noir — had to be American’ is the way Robin Buss (1994, p. 13) presents the impulse in post-war France in the most comprehensive study of the form. This chapter, though, will instead claim that ‘authentic film noir’ is French; that the end of what is generally referred to as poetic realism constituted the beginning of film noir as it was subsequently developed in post-war Hollywood. Both moments were leftist formations that registered first, the defeat of the French Popular Front, and then in the United States the defeat of both the New Deal (the American Popular Front) and, more crucially, of the post-war strike wave, which, like the earlier French wave of strikes from 1936–38, erupted ...
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