Many aspects of Zaillian’s series, both thematic and visual, make it an almost perfect example of neo-noir. Yet, in other ways, Ripley goes beyond the original noir cycle in ways that are reminiscent of the best revisionary noir films.
In my new book American Noir Film: From The Maltese Falcon to Gone Girl I suggest a model of noir history that includes three basic types of noir films. I use the standard term “film noir” to indicate the original cycle of noir films that appeared roughly between 1941 and the beginning of the 1960s. I use the term “neo-noir” to indicate the new cyle of noir films that began to appear in the early 1960s, that reached full force with Chinatown in 1973, and that is still very much with us today. I understand neo-noir much in the way it was understood by the late, great Fredric Jameson, who famously saw it as an example of postmodern “pastiche,” drawing upon film noir in nostalgic ways that do not critically engage with the premises of film noir and that does not, therefore, encourage us to re-consider the ways we view the original noir cycle. Finally, I introduce the term “revisionary noir” to indicate recent films (mostly in the twenty-first century but with some earlier examples) that go beyond the “blank” pastiche of neo-noir, engaging in critical dialogues with the original noir films in ways that actively encourage us to re-examine those films from a fresh critical perspective. I might note, however, that I still regard revisionary noir as postmodern—but as perhaps marking the beginnings of the emergence of the more active “political form of postmodernism” that Jameson also imagined might someday appear (Jameson 54)….
Read the full article at Film International.
M. Keith Booker is the author or editor of over sixty books including Mad Men: A Cultural History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), Tony Soprano’s America: Gangsters, Guns, and Money (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Star Trek: A Cultural History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and The Coen Brothers’ America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). He is professor of English at the University of Arkansas.
Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon 