Today film noir evokes the visually stylish but morally cynical black-and-white films of classic Hollywood: crime melodramas featuring down-and-out detectives, mysterious femme fatales, shady conmen, and lovers on the run. Usually, we think of film noir as an American genre: the cinematic version of hard-boiled crime fiction. But how American is it? And is noir really best categorized as a genre? Perhaps, as this course will show, it is more accurate to think of film noir as a style of art cinema introduced by displaced European auteurs who attempted to make neo-expressionist art thrillers inside the Hollywood studio system. Although the expressionist period of early German cinema lasted barely a decade (roughly the 1920s), its style, technique, and worldview survived in the work of Austro-German directors like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Rudolph Mate, who left Nazi Germany and went to Hollywood in the 1930s. Much of what is now considered classic film noir derives from the cinematic work of these expatriate European filmmakers. Stylistically indebted to an expressionist cinema that featured mystery lighting, disturbing camera angles, and gothic mise-en-scene, film noir also articulates the social alienation and political disillusionment of the European emigres who contributed so much to classic Hollywood. After a brief introduction to German expressionism (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang’s M), we will study selected noir classics like Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Rudolph Mate’s DOA, and Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat. In addition to connecting these directors and films with their European origins, the course also examines the noir films of American directors like Orson Welles and Robert Aldrich, who absorbed and extended the European influences. More than a genre, noir has become an enduring cinematic style. As Dennis Hopper has said, film noir is “every director’s favorite style.” Thus, we will consider noir not only as a thing of the past but as an enduring cinematic phenomenon, continued in neo-noirs like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.


Course Goals and Expected Learning Outcomes: to investigate questions of continuity and difference between German Expressionist cinema and American film noir in the work of expatriate German filmmakers; to explore our fascination with cinematic representations of violence, law, and sexuality; to learn how and why noir has become an enduring style; to learn to “read” film in general as an aesthetic discourse.


Teaching Style: This course emphasizes active class discussion, rather than lecture. The instructor will make numerous presentations, but students should come to class prepared to talk about the films. Each student will be asked to do an oral presentation on their self-motivated work.


Textbook: James Naremore, More than Night. Film Noir in its Contexts (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998). Additional readings from “hard-boiled” crime fiction (Cain, Chandler, etc.); background articles; film theory (photocopies).


Evaluation: class participation/self-motivated work 30%; a short written analysis of each film 30%; one take-home mid-sem 20%; final paper 20%. Attendance: more than 2 unexcused absences will lower your course grade; more than 3 will result in being dropped from the course.