Film Noir Reader (Limelight)
Category: Books,Humor & Entertainment,Movies
Film Noir Reader (Limelight) Details
This bountiful anthology combines all the key early writings on film noir with many newer essays, including some published here for the first time. The collection is assembled by the editors of the Third Edition of Film Noir: An Enclyclopedic Reference to the American Style, now regarded as the standard work on the subject.
Reviews
Silver and Ursini's 1996 anthology has quickly become an essential tome for students of film noir everywhere, and with very good reason. Divided into three parts - "Seminal Essays", "Case Studies" and "Noir Then and Now" - it offers a comprehensive selection of essays defining the genre in general and exploring specific instances and variations over the last 70-odd years. Even without the other volumes, this is pretty much all a college-level film student could need or desire for building a solid understanding of the genre and appreciating the central debates it's aroused. General viewers/readers, however, can probably do without the specialist jargon, arcane hair-splitting, and density of argumentation that ultimately consume any academic discipline, and the personal attacks: a large part of Silver's introduction is, astonishingly, dedicated to poleaxing other writers - quite pointedly, Marc Vernet, in whose misspelling of Silver's name Silver reads a dark tendency towards pre-judgment and other fatal flaws in Vernet's critical apparatus, such as a solipsistic arrogance that can presume to correct anomalies it does not understand. Whatever, Alan. Sorry - Alain. If you're writing your own academic essays, or enjoy probing the neuroses of disgruntled academics, then that kind of thing might be useful to you. But general readers will be much better served by one of the dozens of non-academic survey volumes, such as those by Barry Gifford (God forgive me, Alain, I know you hate him so), or, if they're feeling more adventurous, Nicholas Christopher's "Somewhere in the Night" which gives a fluent and accessible exploration of film noir by using the American city as a way into it.
