...as apple pie?

[MikeBSG]

I just read a very thought-provoking book about film noir.

A few years ago, I read "Film Noir" by Andrew Spicer, which is a terrific introduction to the topic. The last two chapters of his book covered British film noir, which seemed like a new undiscovered world.

So this year, I bought "European Film Noir" edited by Andrew Spicer. It is a series of essays by different scholars looking at noir/neo-noir films in France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy.

What interested me was that once you got to Germany, Spain and Italy (countries with a dictatorship in their past), the authors began to argue that true noir was hard to find. The whole idea of dark secrets in the past that trap people in the future was either too painful (as in the German case) or officially off limits (the Spanish case) or seen as a hot button issue that didn't lend itself readily to the noir format (Italy.) Also, the issue of the femme fatale differed because of culture. Spain and Italy seemed culturally opposed to such characters as giving women too much power, while in the German situation, in the postwar decade (the classic noir decade) women were depicted as heroic rebuilders, the "rubble women" not castrating monsters.

The essays made me think about the cultural preconditions of film noir, and what beyond shadows and camera angles is needed to produce a genre.