Exploring film noir from its 'golden age' to contemporary neo-noirs

The history and development of the film noir style since the 1940s. Our main focus will be the American film noir which we will consider as the ‘classical’ noir style and from which other ‘national’ cinemas take their lead, but we will also consider the way in which British, French and East Asian cinemas offers a differentiated form of the noir style. We will also consider the origins of the noir style in the pre-war American gangster film, the German expressionist cinema of the 1920s and the poetic realist French cinema of the 1930s. We will note that while the noir style is predominantly a feature of the crime film its presence can be found across a range of genres in American cinema of the 1940s and 1950s.