Film Noir

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course will offer a detailed historical, stylistic, and cultural study of film noir. It will explore the thematic, visual, and narrative forms that characterize both the original cycle of films in the aftermath of World War Two, its roots in German Expressionism and hard-boiled detective fiction, and its numerous revivals from the 1970s to the present. It will look at how figures such as femme fatale, the city, and criminality are represented across the historical span of film noir. The course will be especially attentive to the ways in which these films represent social realities of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation. We will consider films by directors such as: Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, Robert Altman, and Nicolas Refn.