ABSTRACT
Because film noir is not any one thing, it has no stylistic signature that persists across time, no abiding formal unity, no aesthetic core. As a global phenomenon, noir style is a kind of ghost – a phantom of ideas that film critics and spectators have about the now-vanished past of film technique (and of cinema itself) that uncannily returns in times and places far removed from its imagined American origin. For this reason, film noir is a Frankenstein’s monster of technique, a heterogeneous assemblage of formal strategies killed off with the obsolescence of certain media technologies,only to be nostalgically brought back to life, revivified in surprising new media environments. Because noir style has no coherent, stable set of parameters, it tends to circulate instead as “a nexus of fashions in hair, fashions in lighting, fashions in motivation, fashions in repartee.”1 Linked with the temporal cycles of fashion,noir style is bound to commodification, fatally reified.But, by the same logic, noir style never really dies, but is ever reanimated in local acts of cinephilia, where spectators, critics, and filmmakers world-wide have always found something new to love about noir’s death-bound plots.
