Shades of Noir: A Reader

by Joan Copjec (editor)

For this was the summer when, after the hiatus of the Second World War, French critics were again given the opportunity to view films from Hollywood. The films they saw, including The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity. Laura, Murder, My Sweet, and The Woman in the Window, prompted the naming and theorization of a new phenomenon: film noir.

Much of what has been written about the genre since has remained within the orbit of this preliminary assessment. While sympathetic towards the early French critics, this collection of original essays attempts to move beyond their first fascinated look. Beginning with an autonomy of that look—of the ‘poujadist‘ climate that nourished it and the imminent collapse of the Hollywood studio system that gave it its mournful inflection—Shades of Noir re-explores and calls into question the object first constructed by it. The impetus for this shift in perspective comes from the films themselves, viewed in the light of contemporary social and political concerns, and from new theoretical insights.

Several contributions analyze the re-emergence of noir in recent years, most notably in the hybrid forms produced in the 1980s by the merging of noir with science fiction and horror, for example Blade Runner and Angel Heart, and in films by black directors such as Deep Cover, Straight out of Brooklyn, A Rage in Harlem and One False Move. Other essays focus on the open urban territory in which the noir hero hides out; the office spaces in Chandler, and the palpable sense of waiting that fills empty warehouses, corridors and hotel rooms.

Finally, Shades of Noir pays renewed attention to the lethal relation between the sexes; to the femme fatale and the other women in noir. As the role of women expands, the femme fatale remains deadly, but her deadliness takes on new meanings.

Contributors: Janet Bergstrom, Joan Copjec, Elizabeth Cowie, Manthia Diawara, Frederic Jameson, Dean MacCannel, Fred Pfeil, David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, Marc Vernet, Slavoj Žižek.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Essays

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Joan Copjec is a philosopher, theorist, author, feminist, and prominent American Lacanian psychoanalyst. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University of Buffalo.

Reviews

[Laurent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent selection of essays on the 'absent cause' of film noir, focusing much less on collating a typology of genre standards than offering novel vantage points on the classical and later neo-noir texts.

Standouts are Marc Vernet's stunning dissection and complication of the typical influence of German Expressionism and detective fiction, Elizabeth Cowie's unravelling of the primary association of noir with masculinity and Dean MacCannell's curious exploration of the genre's ambivalent relationship with homelessness.

As expected, Copjec and Žižek's contributions are indispensable surveys.

[Bill Crew · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was quite a mixed bag of essays. A couple were so full of lit crit jargon as to be unreadable; most were readable but questionable in their arguments; Vernet’s opening essay was so profoundly wrongheaded it’s bizarre to me that the editor led with it. A couple of interesting nuggets kept me from a one star review.

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't have much critical theory background so two of the essays were complete gibberish to me, but this was an interesting book.

[Wendy Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorites: Joan Copjec's introduction, Fredric Jameson on Raymond Chandler, and Dean MacCannell on film noir being coterminous with the erosion of democracy and the consequent rise of urban problems.