Film Noir, or the “Crime psychology film”, emerged in Hollywood as a new genre in the early 40’s and continued until the late 50’s. A morphing of hardboiled crime fiction with German expressionist cinematography, noir was named retroactively by French film critics in 1946 who noticed a strikingly cynical tone in post war American cinema, starkly different from an earlier one of naïve optimism.
Familiar with psychoanalytic thinking which was widely popular in Europe before the War, noir creators infused their work with themes of eroticism, sadistic violence, paranoia and moral ambiguity, deepening the air of tension and anxiety evoked by these films.
Originally shot and directed largely by European émigrés fleeing the rise of Nazism, noir has its roots in German Expressionist cinematography, marked by low key lighting, high contrast and shadows, disorienting camera angles and off kilter set designs; all of which prove as important in communicating nuanced meanings as the characters and narratives themselves.
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Course Summary
We will screen the following six classics from the noir cannon, exploring them through different psychoanalytic and cinematography lenses with the aim of gaining insight into the collective unconscious of filmmakers and audiences alike, at a point in time when nothing would ever be felt to be certain again.
Cost: $200
Register online at www.ticp.on.ca by October 9, 2015
Location: University of Toronto, Northrop Frye building room NF004, 73 Queens Park Cr. E., Toronto.
FILM DETAILS, DATES & PRESENTERS
Blue Angel (1930) – October 16th
Presenter: Keith Haartman/Dan Merkur
Marlene Dietrich/Emil Jannings
Director: Josef Von Sternberg
Laura (1944) –November 13th
Presenter: Marilyn Lerner
Dana Andrews/Gene Tierney
Director: Otto Preminger
The Third Man (1949) – January 15th, 2016
Presenter: Alan Stanbridge
Orson Welles/Joseph Cotten
Director: Carol Reed
Johnny Guitar (1954) – February 12th
Presenter: Deborah Levine
Joan Crawford/Mercedes McCambridge
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Night of the Hunter (1955) – March 25th
Presenter: Keith Haartman
Robert Mitchum/ Lillian Gish
Directed by Charles Laughton and Robert Mitchum (uncredited)
Touch of Evil (1958) – April 15th
Presenter: Art Caspary
Charlton Heston /Marlene Dietrich/Orson Welles
Directed by: Orson Welles