| This project examines contemporary film noir in an attempt to reevaluate the genre's historical-critical background. Within the ever-increasing number of Hollywood and independent films produced and marketed as film noir in this decade, there is a strong current of engaging films that have included complex representations of race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality. Such films address particular U.S. ideologies that pertain to apparent and elusive gradations of difference that radiate away from "norms" within the generic framework of film noir.;I propose that film noir is thought to offer the potential for critical investigations of various ideologies and practices because it has historically been used to interrogate "common sense" notions of identity, family, social difference, law and order, and democracy. Film noir has accumulated a progressive history, in part because of the significant amount of left-wing and/or progressive filmmakers who produced classic films noirs, that is unproblematically assumed to be inherent to its conventions, plots, and themes. In these ways, film noir has developed into a genre in which many filmmakers reassess the American dream of prosperity.;Kathryn Bigelow, Joel Coen, Bill Duke, and Carl Franklin have produced several exceptional neo-noirs that foreground questions of social difference and present overlooked versions of U.S. culture. Though this is not properly an auteurist study, since I do not perform a sustained study of each director's body of work, I organize each chapter around a filmmaker in order to determine the consistent or inconsistent influence of film noir on their work. While exploring these filmmakers' use of film noir, I devote equal attention to the ideological import of their films. This focus allows me to consider the narrative and the representational strategies that are at work in the films, especially those strategies that emphasize provisional, non-essentialist conceptions of identity, but that do not ignore the lived, material effects that stem from the "visible" markers of social difference. |
