Marianne Macdonald wrote:
....Noir seems to me to be neither character- nor
plot-dependent, but a matter of the setting. It's the shadow
moving beyond the campfire light, the darkness down the back
alley, in the unlit doorway (Third Man, right?), between the
street lights, OR in the woods. Or for that matter in the
unconscious mind, the dark mind of the Other, the killer....
Death's home, really or symbolically.
********* I think that you have pointed out a difference
between film and fiction noir. Film noir is heavily into
style. Turn on the smoke machines and turn off the lights
that don't cast dramatic shadow and, like you said, you don't
even need characters or a plot. But noir fiction is
different. It's all about atmosphere, and this atmosphere is
very dependent upon the characters. There's gotta be that
heady blend of sweat, fear, and desperation.
Take Williams's DEAD CALM. I don't think that anybody would
argue that the book is juicy noir. But what about the movie?
The movie content is dark and wicked, and I would personally
call it noir because of this. But I think that a lot of
people would hesitate to call the movie noir simply because
it's missing a lot of the classic noir props. It would get
the "thriller" tag instead.
Thanks to everyone who posted.
miker
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Feb 2003 EST