Liminal Noir in Classical World Cinema

While few can deny its incalculable influence on popular filmmaking during and after World War II, film noir has been and remains one of the most contentious categories of cinema, involving more debates than consensus about what constitutes a noir. This collection explores the amorphous parameters of this dark cinematic phenomenon by utilising an expanded, nuanced definition of film noir, which reaches beyond traditional conceptions of genre, style, and cycle to examine its complex international origins and emphasis on issues of liminality. Through illuminating case studies of single films from nations including Argentina, the former Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Poland, Spain, and the US, authors consider elements of genre hybridity, border crossing, boundary breaching, and other signifiers of liminality to reassess classical-era films that defy conventional generic and stylistic categorisation.

The anthology is a welcome addition to the ongoing discourse on the liminal variations on noir and its myriad incarnations.

--Sheri Chinen Biesen, author, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir, Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films

What if noir is not just a category and corpus, but a sensibility, an attitude, a resonance? How might that change our understanding of Varda and Wajda? Of films made in exile or under dictatorship? Of transnational stories? Of minor works? Helford and Weedman have gathered some startling answers to their remarkable proposition.

--Mark Bould, University of the West of England

Elyce Rae Helford is Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Dr Christopher Weedman is Assistant Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. He is co-editor of Adult Themes: British Cinema and the X Certificate in the Long 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Liminal Noir in Classical World Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

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