Description: Provides the student with a critical introduction to film noir, taking into account the complexity of the term and the difficulties of a straightforward definition.
Brief description: Ian Brookes teaches in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he has taught film noir courses for several years. He is also the editor of Howard Hawks: New Perspectives (2016).
Review Quotes: Film Noir has long been a fascinating, complex cinematic period style. For students interested in the problematic conception of noir as a genre, Ian Brookes surveys critical, theoretical, and historiographic scholarly discourse on noir and its multifaceted nature. Brookes traces conceptions of noir from early pre-noir antecedents to wartime and postwar incarnations of the classic noir cycle, and examines the anxieties of returning veterans.
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Author of Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir