Neo-Noir Nights
4 Tuesdays, November 10 to December 1, 6:30 pm to 10:00 pm
Instructor: Paul Wright, Ph.D., Main Line Classical Academy
As difficult to define as its film noir progenitor, American neo-noir emerges from the 1960s onward. While generally breaking with the black-and-white cinematography of their predecessors, neo-noirs retain many other aesthetic and archetypal reference points from the ’40s and ’50s. Thematically, neo-noir does not merely “update” but more accurately “translates” the angst and alienation of classic noir films to a postmodern idiom, with new, post-1960s concerns about American life.
In four exemplary films, we will see how different the various incarnations of American neo-noir can be. The Long Goodbye (1973) features Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe caught in the wake of the ’70s counterculture. Body Heat (1981) launched the career of a dazzling Kathleen Turner in a self-aware riff on Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). We then move on to the directorial debut of the Coen Brothers with the bracingly grim Texas noir that is Blood Simple (1984). Finally, L.A. Confidential (1997) adapts James Ellroy’s novel, setting its sights not only on noir traditions, but also television police procedurals and the paper-thin veneer of “California dreamin”.
$120 for members, $160 for non-members
Schedule