Hey, good news! It looks like "shit" is no longer redacted by the board's censor--perhaps it's moved on to Fiji just like Dark Marc...

Here is the rest of the thread (primarily some back-and-forth between Mike Kuhns and myself...

Re: The "TOUGH SH*T" film noir festival per the Noir-o-Meter
Posted by Mike Kuhns on 2/23/2018, 8:25 pm, in reply to "The "TOUGH SH*T" film noir festival per the Noir-o-Meter"

Back in the '80s and '90s, the author Phil Hardy edited hefty encyclopedias of various film genres---Westerns, Horror, Science Fiction, and Gangster Films. The last, in 1998, was THE OVERLOOK FILM ENCYCLOPEDIA: THE GANGSTER FILM. Therein he expressed an intent to follow it with an ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM NOIR.

The book was comprehensive enough that it included any number of films that are traditionally considered noir. I wondered at the time what an encyclopedia of noir would look like since he'd included so many noir films in the gangster encyclopedia. He didn't like to repeat himself, so you don't find the same film included in both the horror and science fiction books, even though some films could be considered either one or both.

Mr. Hardy died in 2014, evidently never having compiled the encyclopedia of noir. So we'll never know how he could have built a credible noir encyclopedia without including many of the films from the gangster film book, like THE KILLERS, OUT OF THE PAST, CRY OF THE CITY, RAW DEAL, CRISS CROSS, GUN CRAZY, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, etc.

Re: The "TOUGH SH*T" film noir festival per the Noir-o-Meter
Posted by Don Malcolm on 2/24/2018, 9:26 am, in reply to "Re: The "TOUGH SH*T" film noir festival per the Noir-o-Meter"

It would have been interesting indeed to see what Hardy would have included. But my recollection of the gangster volume (which is down at the office right now and so not immediately accessible) was that some of the inclusions you note seemed like a stretch in their own right. Criminal lovers on the run--GUN CRAZY--in a "gangster" encyclopedia?

So much of the typologizing gets in the way of assessing the films in terms of how they use the various noir elements, because they focus on one or two features of the film, whether they be narrative or visual, and create ersatz "sub-genres" from them. What's interesting about the "TOUGH SH*T" list is that it covers so many story sub-types within what one might initially think would be the same basic set of situations. And such a result should buttress the notion that fuels the noir-o-meter: that noir is a stylistic continuum rather than a genre.

Re: The "TOUGH SH*T" film noir festival per the Noir-o-Meter
Posted by Mike Kuhns on 2/24/2018, 4:26 pm, in reply to "Re: The "TOUGH SH*T" film noir festival per the Noir-o-Meter"

"noir is a stylistic continuum rather than a genre"

I believe you're correct. Many noir films might fall within a category such as "crime drama" but certainly not all of them.

Re: The "TOUGH SH*T" film noir festival per the Noir-o-Meter
Posted by Don Malcolm on 2/24/2018, 9:14 pm, in reply to "Re: The "TOUGH SH*T" film noir festival per the Noir-o-Meter"

"Blood melodrama" was Naremore's phrase, borrowed from Graham Greene, which relies on his three-pronged contribution to noir (THIS GUN FOR HIRE, BRIGHTON ROCK, THE THIRD MAN) as a kind of cherry-picked approach that allows for references to poetic realism, Jacobean revenge tragedy, and the pulp fiction burgeoning out of the ferment of modernism and popular culture.

The term is flexible enough to cover 90-95% of what we think of as noir, and it works well for French poetic realism, which is but the privileged sub-type of the 30s film noir that evolved there...which is drawn from a welding together of exotic adventure tales and the collision of colonialism in conjunction with the charismatic villain (paging Jean Gabin).

Crime, corruption, guilty knowledge, alienation, marital/sexual discord--all ingredients in a semi-improvised recipe that allows for self-consciousness (a pervasive feature of modernism) that adds irony to sordid tales involving one or more of the "deadly sins." It all comes together in 1931-32, when sound has been added into film, permitting tone of voice to be embodied in an actor's performance, allowing us to become radically skeptical about what we see even as we are tracking the action. It pops for the first time in Renoir's LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR, which shows the murky, chained world of criminal conspirators with an interest in hiding their activities--in contrast with American gangsters of the same time frame, who project a megalomaniacal glee in self-advertisement. Noir doesn't need a classical mystery at its center to lean strongly towards the clandestine. And the gothic noirs are often the most scrupulous in terms of undetectable manipulation and emotional violence.

But here, on the hard-boiled edge, we have mostly id-like behavior patterns that create a repressive atmosphere and a level of amorality that demands a body count...