Adam Isaac
09-15-2004, 08:18 AM
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Edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Film Noir Reader is a collection of essays and studies on the history and influence of these films. The anthology includes Paul Schrader's background notes on film noir, Paul Kerr's study of the studio economic system that turned out these low budget movies and tributes to directors (John Farrow) who labored in obscurity but whose work is now studied in film schools and dissected in film journals.
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The seminal essays in this new volume are designed to complement those of our earlier anthology and includes several pieces from the 1940s. Lloyd Shearer writes on noir in the New York Times more than year before either Nino Frank or Jean-Pierre Chartier thought of giving it a name. As the classic period wound down, Claude Chabrol writing for Cahiers du Cinéma sustained the critical discussion of film noir culminating with Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's book-length. French-language study in 1955 (see the first Film Noir Reader). Tom Flinn's 1972 piece is one of the first in depth articles on particular aspects of noir. Two years later, Stephen Farber's social analysis (and Richard Jameson's piece in Part III) appeared in a special film noir section of Film Comment in 1974. Marc Vernet's 1983 article redefines the thrust of French criticism Finally Dale Ewing "Film Noir: Style and Content." closes out Part One with a solid recapitulation of critical writing that goes all the way back to Chartier and Frank.
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A "must have" for fans of noir. The book presents itself as an encyclopedic reference, and as a guide to the main body of noir it succeeds admirably. Each entry includes production crew, cast members (identified down to bit players), shooting and release dates, plus running time, along with a brief plot synopsis and critical comment by one of the staff of contributors. Naturally, where there's controversy, it's this latter that generates the most. But agree or not, the comments are almost uniformly informative and stimulating, and a testament to the continuing vitality of noir's golden age. The appendices, however, are a more mixed bag. The categorized lists are helpful as guides, but serious rethinking should have gone into Appendix C, which comes across as a somewhat heavy-handed and murky critique of noir's available literature, rendering doubtful its value as a reference guide. Appendix E presents a compilation of "neo-noirs" or recent films in the classic mode. As a work striving for encyclopedic range, I can understand the urge to extrapolate, but it's also clear that this Third Edition just about exhausts the possibilities and I am not looking forward to another sequel. Nonetheless the work itself remains an invaluable tool for serious fans of noir everywhere, and should not be passed up.
Edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Film Noir Reader is a collection of essays and studies on the history and influence of these films. The anthology includes Paul Schrader's background notes on film noir, Paul Kerr's study of the studio economic system that turned out these low budget movies and tributes to directors (John Farrow) who labored in obscurity but whose work is now studied in film schools and dissected in film journals.
http://members.aol.com/alainsil/noir/fn2mini1.jpg
The seminal essays in this new volume are designed to complement those of our earlier anthology and includes several pieces from the 1940s. Lloyd Shearer writes on noir in the New York Times more than year before either Nino Frank or Jean-Pierre Chartier thought of giving it a name. As the classic period wound down, Claude Chabrol writing for Cahiers du Cinéma sustained the critical discussion of film noir culminating with Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's book-length. French-language study in 1955 (see the first Film Noir Reader). Tom Flinn's 1972 piece is one of the first in depth articles on particular aspects of noir. Two years later, Stephen Farber's social analysis (and Richard Jameson's piece in Part III) appeared in a special film noir section of Film Comment in 1974. Marc Vernet's 1983 article redefines the thrust of French criticism Finally Dale Ewing "Film Noir: Style and Content." closes out Part One with a solid recapitulation of critical writing that goes all the way back to Chartier and Frank.
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0879514795.01.LZZZZZZZ.gif
A "must have" for fans of noir. The book presents itself as an encyclopedic reference, and as a guide to the main body of noir it succeeds admirably. Each entry includes production crew, cast members (identified down to bit players), shooting and release dates, plus running time, along with a brief plot synopsis and critical comment by one of the staff of contributors. Naturally, where there's controversy, it's this latter that generates the most. But agree or not, the comments are almost uniformly informative and stimulating, and a testament to the continuing vitality of noir's golden age. The appendices, however, are a more mixed bag. The categorized lists are helpful as guides, but serious rethinking should have gone into Appendix C, which comes across as a somewhat heavy-handed and murky critique of noir's available literature, rendering doubtful its value as a reference guide. Appendix E presents a compilation of "neo-noirs" or recent films in the classic mode. As a work striving for encyclopedic range, I can understand the urge to extrapolate, but it's also clear that this Third Edition just about exhausts the possibilities and I am not looking forward to another sequel. Nonetheless the work itself remains an invaluable tool for serious fans of noir everywhere, and should not be passed up.