Courses

This course will consider Hollywood’s noir films of the 1940s and 1950s as urban narratives that simultaneously resisted and enabled the U.S.’s post-WWII superpower status and its internal ethnic and gender norms; examples of French film noir and film criticism will be used as a comparative model. Readings will include original documents, histories, and urban, gender, and film theory; films will include Double Indemnity, Gilda, The Big Heat, Cause of Alarm, The Sweet Smell of Success, In a Lonely Place, Pickup on Main Street, Panique, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), and On the Waterfront.