2017-18 Academic Catalog

After Americans grasped the enormity of the Depression and World War II, the glossy fantasies of 1930s cinema seemed hollow indeed. During the 1940s, the movies, our true national pastime, took a nosedive into pessimism. The result? A collection of exceptional films chocked full of tough guys and bad women lurking in the shadows of nasty urban landscapes. This course focuses on classic as well as neo-noir from a variety of perspectives, including genre and mode, visual style and narrative structure, postwar culture and politics, and gender and race.