Mark Jancovich, Genre and the Audience: Genre Classifications and Cultural Distinctions in the Mediation of

In a recent article on film noir, James Naremore has commented on the difficulty of defining

the term. This difficulty, he argues, arises because the definition ‘has less to do with a group

of artefacts than with a discourse – a loose evolving system of arguments and readings,

helping to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies’.1 Not only have under-

standings of film noir changed, but in the process specific films and filmmakers have acquired

different meanings in relation to the term. The Lost Weekend, once regarded as a central

reference point in early discussions of film noir, has been completely excluded from later

constructions of the field.