https://glasstire.com/events/2026/03/23/chase-a-crooked-shadow-film-noir/

As described in the article, it's an exploration of noir via a series of current viewpoints: whether that actually works from a curatorial standpoint, however, is something that remains to be seen.

From the article:

The exhibition organizes artworks into thematic groupings that echo noir’s recurring archetypes and undercurrents: the detective and antihero; the fatal and shifting power dynamic; criminals and the scene of the crime; noir landscapes and environments; violence and the abject body; and psychological states shaped by duplicity, ambiguity, obsession, and entrapment. Throughout The Warehouse’s 14 galleries, the works on view echo noir’s concerns—not by imitation, but by reactivating its questions. How do we navigate systems we cannot control? Where do ethics fracture under pressure? And what does it mean to live with clarity when the world itself is fundamentally unstable?

Mention is also made of an Italian documentary by Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Boccassini called RAGTAG (2022), Portuguese critic Luis Miguel Oliveira provides us with an intriguing review of this ambitious film, which seems to be making its American debut at the Chase A Crooked Shadow exhibition:

It's eighty-four minutes entirely composed of fragments of films extracted from what we call "classic American cinema" (although there are a few excerpts from non-American films): the list of films "cannibalized" by RAGTAG appears in the end credits (and is also readily available online, for the benefit of viewers who don't have a photographic memory to retain all the titles mentioned in those end credits: the list is eight pages long...), it's absolutely impressively long, and roughly covers the classic period--from 1912 (Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley) to 1959, which is a possible closing date for that period.

Within this “corpus,” Boccassini essentially works with “film noir,” both in its most canonical sense and in its immense derivations, variations, and border zones with other genres. In the notes written by the director, as a declaration of intent, he states that “film noir is essentially a way of looking at the world, a perspective on human life and existence that transcends genres (...), an aesthetic trait, tout court.” Consequently, it allows for the creation of “an extensive historical portrait of the human psyche of the 20th century,” and that is the ambition of RAGTAG.

But that is, let's say, the theory. Because the practice is much less “closed,” and there isn't even any kind of commentary or marking that guides the viewer's gaze in a particular direction. We are perfectly free in RAGTAG, which has nothing didactic about it, and there are certainly a thousand ways to appreciate it, a thousand “meanings” to extract from it (or, which amounts to almost the same thing, no “meaning”).

As a film about cinema, and one that originates from cinema, it's an exercise that shares many similarities but finds its own very idiosyncratic way of interpreting this "genre"--and indeed, it gives the impression of revitalizing it. It's like a labyrinth, where all corridors can lead to all other corridors but in no case will they lead to an "exit."

Boccassini's way of connecting the films he cites (one could also say that, here, all films lead to all other films) is incredibly creative, following a principle of free "raccord," where the reverse shot of a particular film can be a shot from another film, which in turn communicates with another film, and so on and (almost) infinitely (not to mention how the sound editing, the sound that is cut or the sound that is prolonged, can intensify this "communication").

If each shot, stripped of its natural flow, constitutes a narrative unit, a kind of concentration of meaning, the sequential organization reinvents both its “narrative” and its “meaning,” or passes this responsibility (or this temptation, or propensity, to have, precisely, a “narrative” or a “meaning”) to the viewer. But it is not only the “raccord,” the connection between shots, that Ragtag works with: frequently, it is the very interior (the very integrity) of each shot that is reinvented, violated, threatened with destruction or ridicule precisely in what is most organic and, one might say, inextricable: its temporality, its rhythm, its order – the repetitions, which often function through movements of retreat, advance, retreat again, and advance again, resemble the gestures of a DJ who creates a new sound from the direct manipulation of the record (of an object, therefore) on the turntable in front of him...

Perhaps RAGTAG will make it to a theater or streaming service near vou, and we get a sense of whether it indeed manages to fold all these notions of noir into one another...