One may rightly ask why there should be another bibliography on film noir. Doesn't every book ever published on the subject include a bibliography? Though true with few exceptions, the bibliographies one finds in book-length treatments of film noir often tend to be lists of works cited within the volume at hand, rather than exhaustive bibliographies on the subject. In addition, film noir, while steeped in war and postwar malaise and anxiety, continues to attract scholarly commentary, as the form--or genre--retains a place on our screens and persists in resonating with contemporary culture and its own deep-rooted concerns. As a result, older bibliographies are incommensurate, and even the indispensable "Annual Bibliography of Film Studies" produced for Post Script by J. P. Telotte cannot by itself serve scholars delving into film noir. In a fifteen-year span from 2004 to 2018, Telotte's work only lists seventy-two of the 260 citations found here published within that date range.
Now a word about what can be found below. The publication range is far from arbitrary. I list three articles published in 1946, before the term film noir had even made it across the Atlantic. That fact notwithstanding, critics and scholars had noticed the new dark cinema coming from Hollywood, and referred to it at the time with terms like "cynical," "hard-boiled," or "tough." So scholarly writing on the "crime melodrama" or "murder thriller" had begun by 1946. As interest increased in the new and ill-defined form, so publishing activity increased. No fewer than twenty articles are cited herein from 1986 alone. And in 2019, the closing year of this bibliography's range of inclusion, twenty-six published articles are cited on the subject from journals around the world. Scholarly interest in film noir continues well into the new millennium, but I find great value in the scholarship from the entire seventy-four-year range of this bibliography, and am personally impressed with the earlier articles from the era before streaming services, DVDs, or even videocassettes when it was a challenge just to see a noir film by any means.
The bibliography is generally limited to articles found in sources considered to be academic journals, with a few exceptions from trade publications or popular magazines when content warranted inclusion. All listed items either deal with individual noir films from the classic period (roughly World War II to the late 1950s) or touch on film noir as a genre, style, movement, cycle, or cross-generic form. Many entries on the list, in fact, directly address the argument over which of these categories is most apt to encompass or even define film noir. Also included are articles about films and categories from the period that intersect with film noir or exhibit noir aspects but are debatable with regard to their credentials, such as film gris, the woman's film, semi-documentary or docu-noir films, social problem films, and boxing films. The reader will even find a small number on noir Westerns. Inclusions of this kind are intended to help fuel continued argument about those films that cinephiles often consider as integral to the classic noir cycle.
Though found in publications from around the world, all articles listed are in English, and all are about American film noir and Hollywood productions. Some of the items cited here have been reprinted in various collections, such as the noteworthy Film Noir Reader series edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini and published by Limelight Editions, but the citations below only refer to the original journal publications. Books, theses, and dissertations are not listed in this bibliography, nor are essays that were originally published in books. No blogs or web pages are included here, though some original print journals have converted to online only publication and access in recent years.
Many of the articles included are interdisciplinary in nature--some strikingly so--leading to the appearance of a handful of surprising journal inclusions for a bibliography on film noir (Cartographic Journal, Public Health Reports, even Biblical Interpretation, to name only three). Such efforts serve to remind us of the imaginative reach of the noir phenomenon. Articles related to the period and the people of film noir on such topics as the HUAC hearings, the Hollywood Ten, the blacklist, or the Production Code are included only when they make specific reference to noir films or the noir cycle. Articles on neo-noir films or related movements are included only when they deal in comparative terms with noir films from the classic period. Straightforward film reviews are rarely included in this bibliography unless they have provided special commentaries that might enhance the larger conversation on film noir. Interviews with directors or screenwriters are included only if the personnel were interviewed about their work on specific noir films.
Sufficient information is included to enable the reader to find desired articles with relative ease in a variety of ways. If one has access to an academic library, its shelves and databases should prove to be home for many articles on the list. If there is no access to an academic library, some of the items on the list can be found online, and in most locales they can be obtained via interlibrary loan through a public library. While the sheer size of this bibliography prohibited annotations, a majority of the articles' titles express the gist of their contents. For any article title that might leave the reader in the dark, I have included an extremely brief description of its contents in brackets following the complete citation. Of the 625 total listed citations, 225 include such descriptive notes.
The goal of this project was to assemble a useful tool for film noir scholarship. Subsets from this list should prove fertile ground for other annotated bibliographies, and the reader is encouraged to break this list apart for such projects. I feel that similar bibliographies of theses and dissertations on film noir should also prove welcome additions to the literature, as should parallel lists of work on European film noir and the neo-noir. Certainly, so much has been published on the broader subject in recent decades that a compendium of such noir bibliographies would only benefit future scholarship. My hope is that this one effort contributes to building that larger scholarly apparatus, and that it proves useful to the active and vibrant community engaged in the study of film noir.
Link to the Internet page:
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/IN+A+LONELY+JOURNAL%3A+A+SELECTED+BIBLIOGRAPHY+OF+SCHOLARLY+ARTICLES+ON...-a0661839434
Responses