pulpFICTION (1994), Se7en (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), Fight Club (1999), and Memento (2001): these current films with their gritty plots, seedy characters, and dim lighting are products of a sixty-year-old film genre or, depending on whom you ask, film movement…or film style…or film mood. Beginning in 1941 with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and theoretically ending in 1958 with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, this psychologically disturbing, highly contested, inherently American brand of films is known as film noir. It is this genre/movement/style/mood that we will consider this semester as we continue to hone the critical reading, thinking, and writing skills that students worked on in ENGL 10803. Students will screen classic noir (e.g., The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity [1944], Sunset Boulevard [1950]) as well as recent noir films, or neo-noir, such as those mentioned above. With a critical eye, they will approach the films as texts, analyzing narrative construction, character types, themes, and aesthetic styles. Moreover, so that students will understand that these films--as all films--are products of the time period in which they are created, we will place film noir (as well as neo-noir) in its historical and cultural context. Finally, students will be introduced to several critical and theoretical approaches to film so that they may situate their personal reactions, both formal and ideological, in a more meaningful context. Basic film terminology will be introduced, and writing-as-a-process will be emphasized.

Trailer for The Maltese Falcon