Fergenaprido wrote: ↑October 27th, 2021, 10:07 pm
One of the film clubs in KL had a month of noirs a few years ago, including a full week of programming of Latin noirs, and another of French ones, I think. I went almost every night for the Latin ones, sometimes they had two screenings a night. Some great Mexican and Argentinian films were shown, and there are some good Japanese noirs out there as well. It still perplexes me how a film genre can be considered to have ended at a certain point, unless they prefer to view film noir as a film movement and not a genre.
I have sadly seen very, very little noir - let alone foreign noir - on the big screen; there was a regular noir program at one totally out-of-the-way theater in Chicago when I lived there in the 90s, but I never went, and I don't recall specific noir programming at any of the other arthouses. Obviously some Hitchcock films played, and Welles and Kubrick, and a few others, over the dozen years that I lived there and was serious about film, but plenty of stuff like
Out of the Past I never got to see, and no Japanese or Mexican noir, and probably very little British or French stuff. Sigh.
I personally am less bothered with date cut-offs than with some of the other restrictions some critics and academics put on noir; I mean, there are real stylistic differences between the films of the late 30s through the end of the 50s or early 60s (I find a cut-off for "classic" noir more useful around 1964-6 myself) and those that came out later - starting with widescreen and color, though those aren't totally missing from the classic era. More violence and sex also obviously, but the main difference to me is self-consciousness. Noir from the 60s on is aware of what it is and how it is separate from other kinds of crime/mystery stories, I think. I personally do still consider, say,
Alphaville or
Blade Runner or
Blood Simple to be noir, but I kind of get why some people don't. In any case I prefer to think of the modern and classic versions as two distinct but similar sides of the same coin.
But in the end everybody has their own definitions; even for genres that are more clear, like musicals, people will argue definitions, and noir has never been totally clear. Which is why I have such a bug about the "America-only" attitude of some who can admit that the primary cinematic influences on the movement are European, can admit that the Great Depression and WWII - worldwide phenomena - have significant importance to the pessimism and dark side of capitalism that noir evokes, and yet somehow believe that only in America can "real" noir exist.
Which film did TCM show?
La bestia debe morir AKA The Beast Must Die (1952, based on a novel by Daniel Day Lewis' father Cecil Day Lewis, and later filmed by Claude Chabrol. A solid film though IMO not one of the greatest;
Los tallos amargos (1956) which they showed in July on the other hand really is pretty terrific.
) any of these big 1000-or-so greatest-films-of-all-time lists for too much American/English-language bias, I think you have to throw them all out.
Nice to see I'm not the only one who can hardly wait for November 
), which is why I felt more familiar with a cinematic spectrum beyond "comfort zones". 
)
