Cities in shade: Urban geography and the uses of noir

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 95-118

  Farish, Matthew ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH; MEDIA ROLE; POST-WAR; URBAN GEOGRAPHY;

NORTH AMERICA; WESTERN HEMISPHERE; WORLD;

EID: 14044260484     PISSN: 02637758     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1068/d185     Document Type: Review

References (124)

1. In this paper, I use America' and 'American' to refer to the United States, and am aware of the complications inherent in doing so.
2. I am indebted to Dan Gibbons for this point.
3. This very club scene is strikingly inverted and parodied in Walter Mosley's Chandlerian Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), when the black protagonist Easy Rawlins observes the entry of a white gangster into a similar bar. The inversion, as Arthur (1996b, page 26) notes, also works at larger scales in Mosley's fiction (see also Willett, 1996).
4. In Blade Runner, the scientific technologization of the image is made explicit in a scene where the police detective Deckard digitizes a photograph and searches it for clues (see also Bruno, 1987).
5. Dassin, also director of such noirs as Brute Force (1947), Thieves' Highway (1949), and Night and the City (1950), distanced himself from The Naked City after he saw the finished product. Blacklisted by the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, Dassin was incriminated by fellow noir Edward Dmytryk, who had also been targeted, as a communist. Forced into exile, Dassin made Night and the City in London (see Christopher, 1997, page 76; Naremore, 1998; Wilson, 2000).
6. Nicholas Christopher (1997, page 73) notes the similarities between this film and Carol Reed's Vienna noir The Third Man (1949).
7. The limits and failure of vision-as well as an extreme dependence on visual aids-are also very apparent in Chinatown.
8. For studies of additional 'nuclear noirs, from The Big Heat (1953) to Kiss Me Deadly (1955), see Metz (1997) and Osteen (1994).
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