Type of Posting

Panel

Panel/Workshop Title:

Il Bandito/a: Class, Crime and International Film Noir

First Name

Dennis

Last Name

Broe

Organization

Long Island University

Email Address

dennis.broe@liu.edu

Summary

Critics have often hinted at and of late become more vocal in their discovery of the relationship between class tensions and that permutation of the crime film called film noir. This panel will explore how those tensions have either gone global or were always that way in eruptions of what has too long been thought of as only Hollywood’s shadowy style in all corners of the globe both in the present and in the classical period of film noir. British and French film noir have for a long time been explored by critics but here too much is left unsaid including the pre-history of noir inscribed in French poetic realism and the defeat of the Popular Front (La Bete Humaine), and the social thrillers (It Always Rains on Sunday) of British studios like Ealing known primarily for social comedies. Asian noir has consisted not only of Kurosawa’s classic period explorations of class tensions (Stray Dog, High and Low) in the period of Japanese militant union activism but also of the Korean corrupt police film which indicts the entire judicial system (The Unjust) and the use of the crime film to explore intra-Asian immigration and migrant issues (Yellow Sea), to say nothing of the existential turn that has recently inflected the Turkish gangster film (Cakal). Potential topics for discussion include: the relationship between noir and the social problem film; noir as a locally resistant adaptation of a Hollywood genre which keeps that form’s classic period critique of the power structure intact or noir as Hollywood form that commercializes socially inflected cinema; noir, corruption and class conflict in global post-recessionary cinema (ala France’s Rapt); noir as site of female contestation or as masculinized form sustaining unequal class and gender politics; and regional noir and its relationship to regional class formations (i.e. Scandinavian and Mediterranean noir). Deadline for submissions: Sunday, August 15. Send 250 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Dennis Broe (dennis.broe@liu.edu). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 22, 2011. Dr. Dennis Broe Media Arts Department 1 University Plaza Brooklyn, NY 11201 Tel.: 718-488-1345